I'm still trying to figure out how the program works.  I've got 7.0.

 

My question is:

 

When one of my photos suffers from the "one leg shorter than the other" syndrome and I need to straighten it, I know how to rotate it and crop it and stuff.  But then how do I know that I've cropped it to the proper dimensions (4:3 ratio)?  Is there a way to see what the dimensions of your photo (pixel-wise) will be when you're...um, I almost said, "Working the box".  :-D

 

In other words, you rotate an image and that means that you'll have to lose some of the image on the edges.  I crop them off until I now have a rectangular photo again.  I will want to resize to 1600 x 1200 at that point, but say my photo is something like 2400 x 1720 or something.

 

I hope I made sense.  Your help will be appreciated.

 

Image --> Canvas Size...or use the crop tool.  If you change units to percentage then you can maintain a crop ratio or you can just do the math.  Use Image --> Image Size to adjust the dpi.  Use 72 for the web, 300 for printing.

I have always had this problem myself.  That is why I tend to use Picasa for simple photo editing.  It seems to be more efficient than PhotoShop in that regard.  Give it a try and tell me what you think.

 

http://www.picasa.com

 

Grasscat, here is what I would do:

 

Open you photo in PS.

 

Open a new project window and set your desired dimensions. (2400 x 1720, 72 dpi, etc...)

 

"Drag" your photo over to the blank page.

 

Control, "T".

 

While holding the "shift key" shrink your image to the palette size. Start off with your mouse in one of the corners (I use the lower-right)

 

Crop the original palette size, and press the enter key. You're done.

 

 

 

Sounds like a lot, but this only takes 30 seconds.

The way I'd do it with your example (getting from 2400 x 1720 to 1600 x 1200):

 

Resize it to a height of 1200, which gives you 1674 x 1200.

Then, either resize the canvas to 1600 x 1200, or paste the image to a new one of that size.

Adjust the lateral position as desired, since there's a bit of room to decide which parts get cut off.

 

Looks like everyone's got their own slightly different way of doing it.

Grasscat, here is what I would do:

 

Open you photo in PS.

 

Open a new project window and set your desired dimensions. (2400 x 1720, 72 dpi, etc...)

 

"Drag" your photo over to the blank page.

 

Control, "T".

 

While holding the "shift key" shrink your image to the palette size. Start off with your mouse in one of the corners (I use the lower-right)

 

Crop the original palette size, and press the enter key. You're done.

 

 

 

Sounds like a lot, but this only takes 30 seconds.

 

Makes perfect sense now that you break it down and that is how a graphic designer would do it.  Check out how Picasa does it, I wish more editing software did it that way.  It makes so much sense when printing out 5x7's or 8x10's.

Disclaimer: Sometimes I'm full of crap, and I don't always admit it. :wink: I do appreciate being shown the error of my ways, so long as it's done kindly.

 

Although I have good intentions  :-), I haven't worked very hard at mastering the intricacies of Photoshop. I've picked up some things from magazine articles, experimenting and word-of-mouth. This seems to work for me, so far. The same workflow applies to scanned negatives and slides.

 

Nominally, I go for 800 x 600 @ 150 ppi for web posting, but I don't really adhere to a specific aspect ratio. I generally work toward a long dimension of 800 whether horizontal or vertical, and may crop out extraneous sky or foreground if I think it helps the overall picture.

 

Here's what I do:

 

First I adjust the tonal values of the camera RAW image (shadow, highlight, contrast, color balance).

 

Next, resize to 800 x 600 @ 150 ppi. Actually, this comes out more like 800 x 532 for D70 RAW files.

 

Open a new RGB window at 150 ppi and drag the photo onto it.

 

Use CTRL + ' to overlay a grid on the image.

 

Use Edit > Transform > Rotate to rotate the image and correct the horizontal/vertical orientation.

 

Use CTRL + ' again to turn off the grid.

 

Use Layer > Flatten Image

 

Use the crop tool to square up the image.

 

If sharpening is needed (this method purports to avoid the shifts in color and contrast that Unsharp Mask can introduce):

 

Use Image > Mode > LAB and select the "lightness" layer

 

Use Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask as needed to sharpen the image.

 

Use Image > Mode > RGB to return the image to RGB mode.

 

Use the Text tool to apply caption & copyright notice, and then flatten image

 

Save as JPG.

 

You can use the grid to crop a photo to a specific size. Set the grid for 1-inch divisions, with 4 subidivisions, and each line will be 1/4 inch. When you overlay a photo, the origin of the grid will be in the upper left corner. If you go into View and turn on Snap, the crop tool margins will snap to the nearest grid lines. It's highly accurate.

Thanks everyone for your suggestions.  I've tried Photoshop on a couple of recent photos and it looks so much better.  Even though my photos are no longer brown, some still suffer from color issues.

 

I used to use Picasa.  The problem was that there were some elements of it I didn't like.  Then I realized I was using 4 different photo editing programs per photo.

 

Hopefully with this problem solved I can now do it all on one program.

 

(Sorry if this ought to go in the General Photos section, but I figured this one gets more traffic and might produce better results.)

 

There are many excellent photographers here on the UrbanOhio forum, and I wondered if everyone might share tips and tricks they have for photography in general or for Photoshop, the latter since obviously most photos here are digital and often have been tweaked in Photoshop or something similar.  Give us your secrets!

 

Although I'm sure many people are quite familiar with this if they have a new enough version of Photoshop, my little contribution to get the ball rolling is this:

 

Photoshop- The shadow/highlight tool is your new god! (Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight)

If you don't know, basically it can be used to brighten dark areas of a photo without messing with the light areas.  It really comes in handy for situations when there is a lot of contrast between bright and dark areas of the scene you're photographing.  I count on this tool for pictures of shady things on bright, sunny days.

 

For example, I exposed for the sky, not for the buildings, knowing that they will turn out dark.  Exposing for the buildings would have washed out the sky, probably making it white.

 

Then, after the shadow/highlight Photoshop magic: Yay!

 

And then some fiddling with colors and stuff is often required, but the awesomeness is done.

Just one word of warning: it does cause some graininess which increases the more you brighten it, so don't put your life entirely in its hands.

 

Now it's everyone else's turn.  Share your wisdom, even the simplest tips!

i really need to get the new photoshop.....

Obviously, buildings are one of the most common subjects on our forum. However, architectural photos taken with most point-and-shoot cameras end up with serious "keystoning", where the buildings appear wide at the bottom and narrow at the top to the point they look ready to topple over.

 

Here's a good example of keystoning:

 

Here's one of the easiest and most accurate fixes in Photoshop. You could use the Perspective tool under the Transform sub-menu but it's less accurate than this process:

 

For this demonstration, I'll use a photo of what else - the Pinnacle!

 

Select the Crop tool, and be sure to click "Front Image":

 

Start from the top left, click and drag to the bottom right of your pic:

 

Grab the left toggle and bring it towards the center - do the same with the right toggle. This takes practice to get a feel for how much is just right. Double-click and click "yes" when prompted to crop the image:

 

Be careful or you end up with "trumpeting" - the opposite of keystoning:

 

Now - the only thing is, the buildings are straighter but the image is a bit too "squat" from being cropped. Fix that by going to "Image Size" - click off the "Constrain Proportions". Add a little to the vertical measurement (another thing that takes practice) until you get the desired result:

 

And voila! :-)

 

 

Photoshop- The shadow/highlight tool is your new god! (Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight)

I second that.

 

There are a lot of situations where exposure can't be controlled for optimum results when taking a photo, especially on sunny winter days and in early mornings and late afternoons on clear summer days.

 

Shadow/Highlight is amazingly capable. Its abilities go beyond opening up over-dense shadow areas; it can pull down washed-out highlights, too, without over-darkening normal or shadow areas.

 

Be sure to click the "show more options" box. Then you can adjust the range of density ("tonal width") over which the exposure correction ("amount") takes effect. The halo or fringe that sometimes occurs along a boundary between a dark area and a lighter area can be managed with the "radius" setting.

 

Worshiping Shadow/Highlight is the real reason the knees wear out on my jeans :-D

Thanks for the replies so far!

 

Rob, perhaps we should start a church? :-D

 

MayDay, thanks for that tutorial; I hadn't discovered that method.  Sometimes I have used the Lens Correction filter to adjust things like that, although it often seems to require further adjustment with transform tools to get it right.

 

C-Dawg, I was hoping you'd pop in here since you're the main resident film guy.  (Although I'm sure Rob has plenty of experience with his scanned Archives.)  I think the importance of getting the picture right in the first place is much greater with film than digital; I find Photoshop adjustments much less effective on scanned photos, but then that might have to do with the scanning technology I have.  Not that terrible digital photos can be saved, but there seems to be more room to improve them after the fact.

-----------------------

 

Is there anyone here who has mastered the art of blending layers for a kind of composite shot?  It's something I've messed with, and I'll show you what I have done, but I don't really know what I'm doing and was wondering if anybody could teach this subject.

 

What may be my only example is this.  A picture of Madison's "skyline" across the lake at night.  The capitol dome is bright white and extremely well-lit, while the rest of the buildings... not so much.  (Another good example would probably be including the moon in a night picture.)

 

So, a picture with the buildings decently exposed makes the capitol way too bright and without detail.

 

Without moving the camera, I take a picture in which the capitol is all right but everything else is too dark.  (Shadow/Highlight does not seem very good for fixing a night shot like this.)

 

So I open both images in Photoshop, put the dark on one top of the bright one as a new layer and position in properly, then go to the blending options in the layer properties of this new layer.

 

Here's where I don't understand what I'm doing.  The configuration shown seemed to give good results, but I don't really know what it means!  Can anyone explain?  I know that it made my "dark" layer blend with only the brightest parts of the other layer, but I don't quite understand those sliders.

 

Anyway, after doing that and making a couple routine adjustments, my result is this.

thanks for the tip mayday. Honestly its something i don't pay much attention to, but now that i know how to fix it.......

These are great.  I'm learning a lot.

 

I have a more basic question.  Is there a way to apply something to multiple photos all at once?  For example, giving a contrast of "10" to multiple selected photos?

 

That's called "batch processing" - I can give you an example tomorrow.

Is there anything that can be done for electric lines in photos? Can they only be covered in the sky?

You can always zoom in at 1600% and edit things pixel by pixel (and yes, I've done that before).

MayDay, it's time to update your OS.

Since I mainly shoot on shitty old cameras that were designed for 1.35 volt mercury batteries, I mostly shoot negatives. I have to use 1.5 volt alkaline batteries, and this can result in exposure errors of about 1/2 stop.

 

C-Dawg, I think you can still get 1.35 volt replacement batteries from Porter's. The mercury batteries are illegal, but there's a zinc-air battery that supposedly delivers identical performance.

Is there anything that can be done for electric lines in photos? Can they only be covered in the sky?

 

If you are using Photoshop you can use the stamp function and cover them up with nearby pixels.

And pigboy, the way it works with film is like this:

 

-with negatives, you only have to be within 1 or 2 stops of perfect to get a good quality image

-with slides, you have to be perfect. Any exposure error beyond 1/2 stop will result in blown highlights or shadows.

Good to  know!  I don't take a whole lot of pictures on film these days, but I do have a bunch of slide film to use up, so I'll have to make sure I'm careful.

 

Is there anything that can be done for electric lines in photos? Can they only be covered in the sky?

It's a pain!  (Clone stamp, bit by bit.)

 

Here's the best I've done in removing power lines.  Imagine three wires running right across the skyline.

 

 

Or on this picture I took

You might be able to see my edit job concerning some of the wires.

Something that I've started playing with on Photoshop 6 is the word art features.

I found myself easily amused by the colors I was able to put on the words in this latest piece I finished tonight.

"MayDay, it's time to update your OS."

 

Tell me about it - the sad thing is, that's from WORK. At home, I'm happily on OS X  :-)

Action Scripts

 

These are some of the most helpful tools that I'ved used in my design career. They're great for quickly processing a bunch of pics, and have a bunch of other uses. Here is the basic premise behind Action Scripts - you can record each step that you make while editing a photo. Let's say you tweak the contrast by 10, add a sharpen filter, and then hike the saturation by 10. Action scripts make it possible to record those three steps and bundle it into an "action" which you can then "play" on whatever image you'd like.

 

1. Go to the Action palette.

2. Using the drop-down menu, select "New Action".

3. The pop-up menu will ask you to name your new action (aka set of steps). You can also make it usable via the function keys (including shift or command if you'd like). Hit "Record".

 

At this point - ANYTHING you do will be recorded as a step in the action. If you do mess up, you can go into the action later and edit out the steps you screwed up. Once you're finished, hit the stop button (looks just like the stop button on a stereo).

 

As you can see, I simply hiked the contrast by 10. That's now an action that I can use on any image I load. I'm pretty sure there's no limit to the steps you can include in one action. Just hit the play button (or the function key you selected from step 3) and you're good to go.

 

 

But it doesn't stop there. Adobe bought out a service called Action Xchange and renamed it Adobe Studio Exchange. This basically serves as a treasure trove of actions developed by users. Some are nifty image filters, some are helpful for production, and some are just lame but it's amazing what you can find. I mean, people have uploaded actions that involve hundreds of steps - steps that you don't have to recreate :-) Go to http://share.studio.adobe.com/Default.asp

 

Go to download and select "actions":

 

As you can see, they've separated the actions into various categories:

 

Here is a sample of the Image Effects:

 

If you find something you like - go to "download" and select "Download link to disk". The action script will be saved on your drive as an ".atn" file. In Photoshop, go to the Action palette and select "Load Action". From there, locate the ".atn" file and it will be added to your list of actions. Want to use it? Select it and hit the play button. Enjoy!

-with negatives, you only have to be within 1 or 2 stops of perfect to get a good quality image

 

The characteristics of color versus negative film are quite different.  Color negative film cannot be underexposed by much at all, but can be overexposed up to 8 stops and still have a printable image.  When you start overexposing color neg, the colors start distorting so that you can have accurate grass but not sky, for instance.  Nevertheless it is printable.  Meanwhile older B&W like Tri-X  and Plus-X has a +/- exposure latitude of at least 1 stop, depending on the specific scene.  T-grain emulsions like Tmax and Illford Delta have a much narrower exposure latitude, similar to slide film.  They are also less forgiving than the older films in development.  I screwed up a lot of Tmax experimenting with developers before I finally figured out to not do very much aggitation.  Then right after I finally figured out what worked for what I was doing I quit shooting black & white so I've sort of forgotten what my secret formula even was.     

 

-with slides, you have to be perfect. Any exposure error beyond 1/2 stop will result in blown highlights or shadows.

 

No kidding, a lot of pros shoot in 1/3 stop bracketing which seems outrageous unless you haven't shot a lot of slide film.  Digital cameras are sort of the opposite of color neg in that you can underexpose by several stops but any overexposure at all with blow out the highlights. 

 

And for those high contrast scenes people have been bringing up, nothing matches the zone system, but the true zone system can only be done with black & white sheet film, and each negative exposed individually.  The concept itself is hard to understand unless you've done enough photography to know that blown out highlights and muddy shadows look bad and how to tell when using the camera how the scene is going to print.  It took me years to figure things out with film photography that I think can be learned much more quickly now with digital and photoshop.  I'd go so far as to say people should be taught with digital cameras and photoshop first and then move to film if they are interested in it, instead of vice verse, which will still be the case in a lot of art programs for a few more years.       

 

 

 

Thanks, MayDay.  I knew there had to be a way to do that and you spelled it out very clearly.

 

P.S> MayDay...I tried your fix for keystoning too and it works really great.  When upping the height after cropping, is there a general amount (percentage, range, etc.) that you find that you are generally using?

Honestly no - it's a lot of eyeballing, but I've found it helpful to keep an eye on things like cars or pedestrians in the pic. If they look too stretched (or too squat) you know you need to tweak a little more.

-with slides, you have to be perfect. Any exposure error beyond 1/2 stop will result in blown highlights or shadows.

 

Most of what I'm about to say is ancient history and irrelevant now (what's new?). Please indulge my rambling reminiscence. ("When I was your age, life was really hard")

 

[ :speech: ]When I got my first 35mm camera, back when most people were still using charred sticks to scratch designs on their cave walls, the slide film of choice was the Kodachrome later referred to as Kodachrome 10, for the ASA (ISO) number. As with any change, many photographers mourned Kodak's switch to Kodachrome II, or Kodachrome 25, in 1962. The old stuff had stronger red saturation, better resolution and finer grain, but, Oh, Man! The contrast! Hold it down to preserve bright highlights, and the shadows went to inky black. On blue-sky sunny days a polarizing filter helped by holding down the brightness of the sky and taming reflections, but that left you with an effective ASA rating of about 3. Still, people learned to work with it. Look at the superb National Geographic color photos from the fifties and early sixties; almost all of that work was done with Kodachrome 10.

 

The alternative to Kodachrome 10 was the "faster" Ektachrome, rated at ASA 32. It was a decent film in regard to color rendition, but almost took contrast to the other extreme. It was comparatively grainy, too, and worked better in 120 format than in 35mm. It didn't have the permanence of Kodachrome, either, especially because it could be processed by independent labs that didn't always exercise tight control of processes and chemical expiration limits. Independent labs gave inconsistent results and the slides processed by them tended to shift after a few years. With proper storage, though, Kodak-processed Ektachrome could be expected to stay reasonably stable for 20-25 years and not shift completely out of reach even after that. [ / :speech: ]  :sleep:

excellent use of the professor/graduate smiley rob

By the way, with MayDay's Actions, you can do some batch processing and perform some chosen action on a whole folder of images, or all the images currently open, etc.  There's some kind of Automate option in the File menu or something... I dunno, I don't have Photoshop open at the moment.

Honestly no - it's a lot of eyeballing, but I've found it helpful to keep an eye on things like cars or pedestrians in the pic. If they look too stretched (or too squat) you know you need to tweak a little more.

 

LOL...I realized it was a stupid question about 2 minutes after I posted it, given all of the variables involved.

OMG!!! A 10 speed film with a polarizer! They must have had a damn good tripod and used it religiously.

 

Actually, it wasn't that bad in well-lighted outdoor situations. I just learned to be very steady, and I got a lot of very respectable slides from it. When I got caught without a tripod in less-than-optimal situations there were usually alternatives -- set the self-timer and put the camera on top of a trash can or fence post, or hold it against a wall or pole, or sometimes just sit on the ground and brace my elbows on my knees, etc.

 

There were other films, of course. Kodacolor was ASA 100 as far back as I can remember, but for the best pictures in its time, you couldn't do better than Kodachrome 10.

 

Sorry about wandering away from the thread topic. Now, where's my walker? I could find it easier if I could just remember what I did with my spectacles! :|

OMG!!! A 10 speed film with a polarizer! They must have had a damn good tripod and used it religiously.

 

Actually, it wasn't that bad in well-lighted outdoor situations. I just learned to be very steady, and I got a lot of very respectable slides from it. When I got caught without a tripod in less-than-optimal situations there were usually alternatives -- set the self-timer and put the camera on top of a trash can or fence post, or hold it against a wall or pole, or sometimes just sit on the ground and brace my elbows on my knees, etc.

 

How much control did you have over the shutter speed (one length fits all, or as variable as with cameras today)?  Well lit, fast shutter, no blurryness (and no depth :-()

How much control did you have over the shutter speed (one length fits all, or as variable as with cameras today)?  Well lit, fast shutter, no blurryness (and no depth :-()

 

I just dug the camera out of the back of the closet to see if it would help me remember. The built-in selenium meter no longer works, but the available shutter speeds range from 1 sec to 1/500 and the apertures go from f/2.8 to f/22. I wasn't shooting fast action or close-ups, so for a 50mm lens f/5.6 to f/8 gave good general coverage outdoors, and shutter speeds were probably in the range 1/125 down to 1/60, maybe sometimes to 1/30. I'm usually comfortable hand-holding down to 1/30 for casual photography, but below that I'll find something to lean against or something to steady the camera against.

 

I'm up to my ears in a project with a deadline that's hurtling toward me, but after I finish it, I'll dig up some of my 44-year-old K-10 slides and scan them and post them.

> for development. I think they are pulling out of film, so this will only be a option for a short while longer. If I want B&W, I just desaturate in photoshop. Color negative film is much cheaper to develop.

 

Desaturating isn't the same thing as actually shooting with black & white film.  B&W is silver-based whereas color film is dye-based.  The grain structure is fundamentally different for that reason.  Also, with different developers, dillusions, and aggitations, one has more control over the character of true b&w film.  This *will* show up on large digitally printed b&w prints, and of course you can't do the true zone system with color neg or digital.  You /can/ with layers make composites of variously exposed negatives taken from the same position (on a tripod), and in fact this has a long history in wet process photography.  Orthochromatic(I think?) film did not respond to the color blue, that is why b&w photos from the Civil War usually have a completely blown out white sky with no clouds.  Back then in the printing stage photographers would sandwhich a skyless negative with a negative of clouds.     

 

>Slides are great for still landscapes or those shots where you take the extra time to use a tripod and really evaluate the light, since you can't risk exposure errors.

 

I am not a fan of National Geographic Magazine but many of their shooters were and still are experts at getting spot-on slide exposures on the fly.  I saw Steve McCurry speak ("I just got back from Afghanistan last night and I'm heading to Rio in two days") this week, he was the person who took the famous photo of the Afghan girl with yellow eyes, the Iraq oil well fires, etc.  The youngsters in the crowd who have never shot film were startled by the beauty of his slides and I think realized for a second they aren't the macho little photographers they thought they were.  It will certainly be awhile before digital is able to match the richness of yesteryear's slide films, although today's pro zooms are matching yesterday's primes and new primes aren't being designed.  I'd like to know if a single one of those clowns in Viscom has ever trudged around with nothing but a 50 for years on end as I did.   

 

>OMG!!! A 10 speed film with a polarizer! They must have had a damn good tripod and used it religiously.

 

Get yourself a good tripod before you buy other stuff.  Also I recommend getting a geared head, I have a Bogen 410 which costs about $150.  The geared head allows incredibly precise control and this one is strong enough to support any camera except maybe an 8X10. 

 

If you are interested in much better quality you can get Mimiya RB kits (camera, lens, back) for incredibly cheap these days, as little as $320 on KEH.com presently.  10 years ago this same combo was about $3K new and $2K used.  You will need a handheld meter and you need to put this camera on a tripod.  I have bought a lot from KEH, even their "bargain" quality equipment is good, EX is usually mint.   

 

If you want medium format portability skip the 645 format and get a Mamiya 6 or 7.  There will be a bit of a learning curve with the rangefinder but the image quality is outstanding.       

I have done very little digital printing myself, I have gotten about 75 drum scans and 16 prints done by a place called West Coast Imaging, I have never used anywhere else for scans.  They are excellent but they'll break the bank.  To save money I tried to get some prints made by OU Printing Services, which is in a small building behind the Ridges, but I had some problems with them.  I'm not going to name names but with West Coast I was on the phone with some dude 2,000 miles away, communicating perfectly with their guy on custom work, but I talked to the guys at OU printing face to face and he made numerous mistakes that cost me weeks and some money.     

 

There are definitely some talented people in Viscom, a guy named Robert Kaplan graduated from there last spring and went to work immediately with the NY Times.  He is an incredible sports and events photographer, he will probably get famous pretty soon.  I just get frustrated when I see all those 19 year-olds with identical Canon 20D's and 5D's and $4k worth of lenses, where the hell does this money come from?  Standing witness to an inter-viscom Nikon vs. Canon squabble is one of the more sordid sights Athens has to offer.   

 

... printing digital scans of film?

 

C-Dawg, take a look at the Epson R2400. It's pricey, but probably the cream of the crop. It can deliver archival quality up to 13" x 19" on a wide variety of very good paper surfaces.

 

I use its predecessor, the 2200, and have always been pleased with its ability to deliver fine detail and good tone separation in the shadow areas. A couple of pro photographers have thought that one of my black & white 11 x 14 prints from a scan of a 35mm T-Max 100 neg was a darkroom silver print.

 

A year or two back, I read a very favorable review of the HP 7960 in Photo Techniques, too

 

My biggest regret being here in Baton Rouge is that there are NO, NONE, ZIP, camera stores.  How bad is it down here?  Wal-mart is the only place I trust for film developing down here.

 

I defenitely got spoiled by the camera/film options in Columbus.  :oops:

The CPU in my head is a lot slower than the one in my computer; consequently a lot of its processing is done in background, and sometimes it surprises me with stuff I had forgotten I was even thinking about. Or maybe it's my slow memory, or fragmented file storage...

 

Anyway, this just popped up on my mental screen:

 

Orthochromatic(I think?) film did not respond to the color blue, that is why b&w photos from the Civil War usually have a completely blown out white sky with no clouds.  Back then in the printing stage photographers would sandwich a skyless negative with a negative of clouds.

 

< :type: > Jake, isn't it just the opposite on Orthochromatic film? I think it's because it's highly sensitive to blue light, just as sensitive as it is to white light, that the skies blow out. I think it doesn't respond to red light, which is why reds render as black in the old photos, and why photographers could process the film or plates under a red safelight.

 

Panchromatic film, which I think became commonly available in the mid- to late-thirties, overcame the insensitivity to red light and renders reds in tones of gray, but for the most part is still highly sensitive to blue and will usually render blue skies as white and fail to show clouds, if shot unfiltered. A yellow filter blocks part of the blue light and darkens the rendering of the sky, making the clouds stand out without much adverse effect on foliage or skin tones. An orange filter produces a stronger effect, and a red filter, especially when combined with a polarizer, can yield almost-black skies.

 

Because panchromatic film is sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light, and even goes a little bit beyond the visible spectrum on the blue end, reflected UV makes atmospheric haze more bothersome in a photograph than it is to the naked eye, and a haze filter can be optically-clear glass, often with a coating to increase its UV absorbtion.

 

Panchromatic black-and-white film has to be developed in total darkness because its sensitivity encompasses the entire visible spectrum. </ :type: >

Kodachrome

They give us those nice bright colors

They give us the greens of summers

Makes you think all the world’s

A sunny day

I got a Nikon camera

I love to a photograph

So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

 

 

:-D

I found this large scan of a b&w negative I made a few years ago, this will hopefully illustrate my point about scanning real b&w film versus desaturating.  The texture of the grain is quite obvious, as is the characteristic blowing out of highlights. I think this was Illford HP5, probably developed at 800, and the exposures was around 1/60 and f/2.0 with a 50mm lens.   

 

 

Also, here is an illustration of what you can do with RAW files.  I took these this past week for some trade magazine.  The different tinting of these two images was done in Photoshop CS2's RAW file editor, which pops up automatically when you open a RAW file.  The "tint" is a combination of color temperture adjustments, exposure, and all the other fun stuff that you can do with RAW files.  You can't get these effects, or at least not nearly as easily, by playing around with a normal jpeg with photoshop's normal tools.   

 

 

 

These pictures of the suspension bridge were taken with a D70 and a 20mm lens.  I think the exposure was somwhere around 8 seconds and f/11.  With the on-camera LCD you can screw around all night until you get it pretty much right and then if you are taking RAW files you don't even have to be right-on with the exposure, color temp, any of that.  This kind of shot was a NIGHTMARE with slide film, it was doable with negative but extremely tricky, and you'd have to count on reshooting.  And of course printing this would have taken at least an hour, it took under 10 minutes each on Photoshop.   

 

 

 

 

 

^ Beautiful bridge shots!

 

I prefer to do the RAW files for night shots pretty much for reasons you stated.  But of course there's the file size trade-off, so often I have to give up on RAW in order to not run out of space on my memory card.  With daytime pictures I don't bother because the normal jpegs usually look just fine.

Question:

 

How do you make panoramas, or "stitch" images together?

 

I've tried using other image editors, but I'm working with a lot of images and the file eventually ends up getting so large that it crashes them.

 

Post deleted.

Thought I was responding to a Pig Boy request.

Sorry.

Question:

 

How do you make panoramas, or "stitch" images together?

 

I've tried using other image editors, but I'm working with a lot of images and the file eventually ends up getting so large that it crashes them.

 

This is my best friend for panoramas: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

(Praise be to richNcincy for posting about that way back when.)

 

I only attempt to do it manually in Photoshop if that program doesn't do it right, which is rare.  In that case I paste each image in as a layer, add a layer mask to it, and then use that to make a gradient from 0 to 100% transparency in the overlap area, thus making a blend from one image to the next.  But that doesn't account for any distortions so it doesn't always turn out well.  And of course none of that solves a large file problem.

^ Thanks.  I'll try that program.

 

I pretty much just have to stitch the images together, as they are all from the same source and require no "blending".  (They are maps.)

 

What I'm looking at is about 64 images about 100 KB each.  That's why it's crashing the programs.

Hmm...this program isn't working right.  I get "no image matches found" when I try to open mulitple images.

 

Make sure when opening the pictures they are in proper order, left to right or whatever.  Also, you generally have to change the size of the final product.  The default is 25%, I change it to 100% and when stitching 10-15 pictures...........it takes around 10 minutes to complete.