These are from my last trip to Barcelona a couple of years back. It’s a beautiful city, so rich in culture, lots of life and history – when we got back and I looked at the photos, although they were ‘okay’, I didn’t bother processing them ‘to show’ because to me they didn’t really merit a fair representation of the city.
As mentioned over on my photography blog (link’s on the right) recently, I just picked up a book that’s been teaching me a few photoshop tricks; stuff on how to process your digital photographs to bring them to life. Just things like fixing exposure, colours, shadows and highlights, etc. to bring out the best in a photo. I thought I’d try out some of the stuff I’d learned on the old Barcelona photos, and I’m very pleased with the results. Some of the pics now look just like I’d imagined the scene in my head when originally taking the photographs.
Before and after shots, click to view large:
I especially like the last two. I’m very excited with these – I have a bazillion unprocessed photos on my hard drive that I’ve just lost interest in because the perfectionist in me didn’t think they were good enough. Time to dig them out and ‘make them pop’, heh.
I’ve been wanting to dip my toes into the pretty HDR seas for a while now, but not having a tripod made that a little difficult. HDR, or High Dynamic Range, images are a series of photographs taken across exposure brackets and then merged to create a single image that better represents what the eye can see in terms of colour and light detail. It’s often the case when taking a photograph of, say, generic scenery, that if you’ve got the white balance right for the terrain, the sky will be overexposed – or if you’ve got the sky just right, the terrain will be too dark. HDR circumnavigates this problem. Some might say that HDR images look fake, but they’re a better portrayal of what the human eye can see when looking at a scene; it’s just that we’re used to looking at less detailed photographs and they have become the ‘norm’.
After merging your images, you ‘tone map’ them – from Wiki;
Tone mapping reduces the dynamic range, or contrast ratio, of the entire image, while retaining localized contrast (between neighboring pixels), tapping into research on how the human eye and visual cortex perceive a scene, trying to represent the whole dynamic range while retaining realistic color and contrast.
Anyway, enough of the boring preamble. We went out to grab food today, had the tripod and the camera in the car and the late afternoon light was kinda nice so we quickly found a somewhat appropriate place and I jumped out of the car to take some snaps. It was very windy, so even with the tripod the shots weren’t perfectly still, and there’s even some angle of rotation difference between some of the photos so they’re not the crispest, heh. But for my first attempt, knowing what to shoot and getting used to what the HDR processing software can do, I’m pleased.
First attempt. Details are very fuzzy in this one, but the light balance is right; the tree in the foreground, the trees in the background and the sky are all reasonably properly exposed. That white floofy cloud on the right was moving at a fair pace, hehe, hence the weird outline it has here.
Foreground’s better in this but again the clouds were moving very fast, hehe.
This is the same shot as the previous one, rendered with a different HDR algorithm for a slightly different result.
My second most favouritest one. The clouds were behaving more. Trees are a bit blurry because of the wind, but the colours came out well.
My mostest favouritest one. Great colours, exposure’s good, sky is nice. ^.^
These were all done with between five and nine photographs with the shutter speed ranging from around 200 to 1000, at f8.6. It’s possible to accomplish the same effect with one RAW photograph since a RAW image contains all of the camera’s data without the camera doing any processing of it, so I’ll try that next time too.
The software I used is called qtpfsgui (or Cutie Puffs Gui as I call it, hehe) on Linux. Very simple to use; you ‘load’ your series of photographs, it shows you a nice mask layer of each one and lets you move the photographs to align them, then loads it as a HDR image. Then you click the ‘tone mapping’ button and it loads some seven algorithms with various settings for you to play around with, preview and save.
A couple of tools for creative design on the puter. Difficult to explain what alchemy is but it can be used very well as a catalyst for inspiration.
http://al.chemy.org/
From their website;
Alchemy is an open drawing project aimed at exploring how we can sketch, draw, and create on computers in new ways. Alchemy isn’t software for creating finished artwork, but rather a sketching environment that focuses on the absolute initial stage of the creation process. Experimental in nature, Alchemy lets you brainstorm visually to explore an expanded range of ideas and possibilities in a serendipitous way.
And then for colouring, there’s MyPaint -
http://mypaint.intilinux.com/
A simple but powerful painting program with a bazillion brushes and a very minimalistic environment. Works fantastic with a graphics tablet.
Both are open source, free, and available for Windows as well as Linux.
Some works in progress (I know my artistic skill is questionable 
):
I’ve included a ‘before and after’ of one of the sketches to demonstrate where it came from in Alchemy (random shapes drawn over a very roughly sketched figure and then ‘tidied’ to keep and refine the shapes I wanted, then coloured quickly in GIMP to get the hues down, and then imported into MyPaint where I’ve started detailing with the skin on the face).
Jaco called me today from work;
“I found a kitten on the highway on the way to work. I stopped and picked it up but now it’s vanished under the dashboard.”
Eek!
Long story short, took the car to the garage, they removed some paneling (for free), got the tikken out, he’s fine. Took him to the vets – they didn’t have anybody free to see him but gave us some free kitten food and one of the helpers had a quick look over the little guy. He’s fine – got a couple of fleas and a bit of car grease on his fur but otherwise he’s in good health.
We haven’t named him yet. So far we’ve thought of Taz (the model of the car) or Toyo (the car’s a Toyota) because he got stuck in the car, or Scamp, or Freebie (since we got the garage to get him out for free and the free stuff from the vets) or Thrall (the Warchief, from WoW).
We’ll have to ponder on this!
We took the car in to CT to the Toyota place to be serviced. It had to be in by 7:30 so we had a lot of time to kill between then and when it was ready. Fortunately there was a mall across the street. We had breakfast, saw The Princess and the Frog at 9:30, got a coffee, then started looking for something more interesting to do…
1) Find toy shop, look for silly toys:
“Vibrate / Give You Infinite Pleasure / Special Design / High Quality Toy / As Good As A Play”. Yeah, that one’s going on Engrish.
2) Buy supplies.
Colouring book, colouring pencils, a make-a-glider kit thingy and some modeling clay.
3) Find a nice spot (a quiet table in the food court) and start playing!
Jaco couldn’t make the butterfly-glider-thing without glue, so we played with the clay instead.
Click to view big with narration:
These are from my last trip to Barcelona a couple of years back. It’s a beautiful city, so rich in culture, lots of life and history – when we got back and I looked at the photos, although they were ‘okay’, I didn’t bother processing them ‘to show’ because to me they didn’t really merit a fair representation of the city.
WelshPixie