Susan, I loved my trip! Thank you. 🙂 Except I’m not too sure exactly where I was – besides Australia, that is. Is there a way to add some captions? To someone like me, of course, each photo was perfect. Very nice.
Hi Susan
Thanks for sharing your lessons. I found it very useful to know. I think you have some wonderful photos in your collection. I especially like the waterfalls, tree and sky shots and various water movement shots.
beth
Thanks, Susan. That was really enjoyable.
I’m curious–how do you deal with purple fringing? I thnk the CS raw converter has CA correction in it (don’t use that one, though, so I’m not sure–I use a different plug-in), but I don’t have purple fringing troubles much with the minolta. I’ve got plenty on shots from the s400, though.
I thnk the CS raw converter has CA correction in it
Yes, it does. I haven’t tried it yet (haven’t had to), but a demo I saw on a PSCS training video looked pretty impressive.
Dan
Dan, you have an A1, too, don’t you? Just FYI I myself don’t like the way the current versions of the CS plug-in convert the A1/A2 RAW files. There’s a much better plug-in from Dalibor Jelinyk specifically for Minolta raw. You can get it here <
http://www.dalibor.cz/support/index.php>, It lets you choose between several different algorithms and doesn’t produce the nasty chroma noise that the CS plug-in does.
The only thing I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t respect/allow for rotation, which is a pain.
Thanks for sharing your lovely images Susan. First time I’ve seen a wild kookaburra. Actually I’ve never heard of them before.
Thanks Barbara! You’re a wealth of information about the A1. For some strange reason the filtering software here at work is blocking that site, but I’ll check it out when I get home.
I haven’t spent much time processing RAW images yet, but just subjectively, I think I prefer the Minolta Dimage Viewer that came with the camera to the CS plug-in. I hadn’t noticed the noise you mentioned, but the colors seem a little muted, and I haven’t had much success improving them with the Camera Raw controls.
Sorry, I’ll try to stay on topic now. 😉
Hi Susan, Fantastic pictures! Must of been a wonderful trip. We’ve always wanted to visit Australia, my brother in law just got home from a trip there, I cant wait to see his pictures, (they went to New Zealand too.)
Thank you for the link, we thouroughly enjoyed them.
Jane
Susan, seeing your images really makes me realize how much I need a trip away ( with my digitals my dear) and Your images are great inspiration go getters ! Thanks for sharing 🙂 Is it getting cold there down under yet ?
Susan, great pictures – am enjoying your vacation vicariously!
Interesting phenomenon here – about half the thumbnails don’t show, just an image name and blank space. When you click on the ones that are blank, nothing happens. However, when you click on one that shows and get the larger view, you can navigate to the hidden ones. Anyone else seeing that or is it something my lovely Norton Antivirus is doing for me?
Chuck
Hi, Chuck. No trouble here, I’m afraid.
Barbara, I’m just having all kinds of problems here today! Will try again with NAV sleeping…
🙂
Very interesting. I tried it with a different browser (Mozilla Firefox) and NAV and NIS turned off – still missing the same thumbnails. Any other Win XP’ers seeing this??
‘Tis a puzzlement….
Thank you for the kind words people – to get rid of purple fringing I usually use a HSB adjustment layer, set to desaturate the appropriate blues and purples (using the eyedroppers in the drop down colour menu to add or remove the shades of blue) – shifting the lighten slider to the left helps to darken the areas which at least on my camera tend to be too light after the blue or purple is removed.
If the image has the blue or purple elsewhere in it then I use the mask on the HSB adjustment layer to make sure only the particular areas are hit – I’ve got quite good at masking out tree branches against blue skies so only the fringe on the strees is affected and the blue sky remains unchanged! (selecting using the magic wand, or by using the blend mask technique from the hidden powers book is useful, depending on the image) This seems to be faster than using the sponge tool on desaturate.
The Kookaburras are just oversized kingfishers with attitude – they are easily tamed and have the characteristic laughing call heard in the background of cliched Australian bush sound tracks…it’s a great sound to wake up to. We get them here but they aren’t tame like this pair!
Susan, these pictures are truly wonderful! Some of them would make nice computer wallpaper!
Ray
Susan,
Those Kookaburras don’t look the least bit worried about you and your camera… you must have served them a good breakfast, indeed!
Byron
Sorry that the page is playing up for you Chuck – I’m not web savvy enough to troubleshoot, I’m afraid. I do need to go back and fix a few things – As beth said some labels would be nice and the EXIF info is giving the incorrect 35mm telephoto equivalent length (I need to plug in the right conversion factor into jalbum). After i get the kids to school… (that’s kids plural..the little one started yesterday – more time to play on the computer!)
Jodi this trip was an absolute life saver – despite involving about 1500km of driving to get there and back. The kids behaved themselves, the weather was perfect, and getting out into the fresh air and seeing things from a cleaner greener perspective was good for the soul and the photography!
The cliffs and waves photos are taken on the the site of the death of my favorite camera (an Olympus OM10) about 15 years ago. "Oh look that’s a big wave …oops" I stood well back from the surf this time!
No problems here Chuck using XP, NAV an IE 6.
—
Have A Nice Day, 🙂
James Hutchinson
http://www.pbase.com/myeyesview http://www.myeyesviewstudio.com/ wrote in message
Very interesting. I tried it with a different browser (Mozilla
Firefox) and
NAV and NIS turned off – still missing the same thumbnails. Any other
Win
XP’ers seeing this??
‘Tis a puzzlement….
James, it’s some bad setting on my XP Home desktop; I’m on my XP Pro laptop now (wireless connection to same cable modem) and all the beautiful thumbnails are now visible.
Susan, thanks for the tips on getting rid of the purple fringing! Your environment is stunning.
Anyone remember the song "Laugh, Kookaburra"…?
Chuck
Chuck – I spent a lot of time on the trip thinking "how could we rearrange our lives so we could live in a spot like this.." Where I live (600 odd km away from the waterfalls and 250km away from the cliffs) is pretty much plain flat boring suburbia . Sadly my husband is a dyed-in the wool urbanite and I could never persuade him to go bush (even if I could think of a way of financing a permanent stay!). And thanks all for the nice words about the photos.
I found photgraphing the Australian landscape very difficult – the bush colours in the trees are fairly grey-green and tend to photograph very bland unless you try to add the effect of the sunlight and shadow – and that tends to stretch the digital medium which deosn’t have the contrast range to cope And the canyons and gorges are difficult in the sunshine because of the dense shadows and look blah (colourwise) under cloud… I had some much better composed shots of MacKenzie falls, which included the trees at the top and the ferns on either side, and gave a better idea of the scale – but because they were straight into the sun, the lens glare just ruined them. And I wasn’t going to climb up and down the 264 rock steps to get back there later in the day when the sun had moved around a bit!
My children were sing "laugh kookaburra" quite a lot (endlessly….) on the car trip. (when it wan’t "147 green bottles" or "I like traffic lights")
Susan, is "147 green bottles" like our "99 bottles of beer on the wall"? I don’t think I could ever sing a song called "I like traffic lights"….
🙂
p.s. Grey-green is difficult, but it’s reality in a lot of areas; later in the summer here, that spring green fades away as the effects of heat and lack of rainfall do their thing. I’m guessing you’re seeing some of the same effects.
Yes, Susan, what are the words and tune to "I like traffic lights"? Kookabura I suppose is the same the world over? We used to sing that at camp when I was very very much younger than I am.
Dick
"I like traffic lights" is an old Monty Python ditty (I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights, I like traffic lights, that is what I mean, I like traffic lights I like traffic lights I like traffic lights, but only when they’re green….", with matching verses for red and amber, repeated as nauseum to a droning tune. I’m afraid I taught it to them…
Chuck I presume the song is similar. Start with n green bottles, sitting on a wall; proceed to n-1 , until 0 is reached. Size of n varies inversely to the tolerance of your parents and directly with the annoyance value that child wishes to cause.
oops…I thought the kookabura was the mammal. A species of kagaroo/wallaby. Was that a wallaby I saw? Very tame.
Susan, yes – 99 bottles follows the same ‘protocol’….
🙂
Mark – the small(ish) marsupial was a swamp wallaby – that one wasn’t wild – it was in a wildlife park. I have met some equally friendly ones in the wild though, in tourist areas where the offer of a free feed becomes irresistable
Really nice photographs Susan, looks like a great spot you visited. I don’t think you your shots are ‘over processed’ you seem to have done a good job, in fact there is one shot I believe could do with some extra ‘help’.
On 3819 I would be tempted to put a gray gradient layer as the top layer and change the blend mode to overlay, that should darken the sky and lighten the foreground. You can play with the transition point of the gradient and the layer opacity til it looks better. Being a new layer if doesn’t work out, just throw it away.
JP
JP – thanks for the idea – I hadn’t thought of using a gradient layer in overlay mode (although I use a fifty percent grey layer overpainted with black or white to dodge or burn) I’ll try it on some other files – but not on this one!
While I agree with your assessment of the image 100 per cent, in this case this is one of the images that has had the most post processsing to get anything useable at all. It was very underexposed for the foreground. I was shooting straight into the sun and had a -1 and 1/3 exposure compensation to stop the sky from blowing out – I took it as a cloud shot for the challenge but when I came to look at it I liked the shape of the little cairn that someone had built, so I masked out the sky, graduating the mask across the hills, and used some very heroic curves layer adjustment to make visible what was almost totally black in the foreground. I had to add a HSB layer with the saturation greatly increased to get any colour in there at all. At this size it’s not so apparent, but at full size the increase in noise and and lack of colour in the trees in the middle distance make bringing up the foreground anymore impractical – at least with a jpeg. I bet a decent converter starting with a RAW file could do better…
But of course it was shot as a jpeg rather than RAW – although I couldn’t at the moment do anything with such a RAW file – there isn’t an affordable third party RAW converter for the Mac that I can find that will talk to G3 RAW files and the Canon’s File viewer utility for the G3 does not do exposure correction. I’m hoping that they will release the new one that comes with the Pro1 to work with the older cameras as this is reported to be much better.
Susan S.
I just tried it on that image – it really does improve the sky, but as I expected there isn’t enough information in the dark areas to get anything that doesn’t look uniformly flat and grey in the fore and midground. But it looks like a really useful quick and easy way to improve the overexposed sky/underexposed foreground on images which are less extreme.
Susan S
Glad the tip will be of use to you. I had no idea the image was already photoshoped extensively, must have been very underexposed. If the camera didn’t capture detail there is not a lot that can be done.
An overlay gradient is useful for deepening sky color in a fairly natural graduated way. I use it whenever a sky isn’t a deep blue as I’d like. The only problem is the really deep blues don’t print well as they go out of gamut, but for web photos it’s a very effective technique.
JP
Susan: Re your 3819, it responded very well to a duplicate layer in screen blending mode followed by contrast masking. There was plenty of detail in the trees. A little hue/sat adjustment layer or channel-by-channel levels adjustment layer would also take out the excess blue in the ‘greenery’.
Chuck
Chuck – while it looks OK at the web size, I didn’t like it when working at it full size. If I had been working on a web size image I might have made a different call (and there’s another question – I guess before I decide I don’t like something beacuse of noise/loss of detail I should resize down for web use and see if does actually look OK) While there is some detail in the trees, there isn’t much contrast and I preferred the effect of it a bit darker…it’s one of those "how far do you go with image in Elements" questions. I like fairly contrasty rather than flat images as will be obvious from the web gallery I think. I’m starting to ask myself the question more often "just because I can get some more detail out of the shadow does it actually help the picture?" Now in this case I think it would, but I don’t like the quality of the shadow detail I’m getting.
(of course your computer screens may be different to mine – but I know mine is faulty in that it doesn’t show up the full range of dark tones very well so i’m wary of reducing contrast too much. It’s callibrated to a gamma of 2.2)
The pronounced blueish colouration in the trees in the middle distance is how they look – comes of having Eucalypt trees! I would pull back the blue a little though if I lightened up the image.
Thanks for the comments and playing with the image. It’s really interesting to see something through other eyes – particularly when you’ve been looking at something for too long yourself.
Susan, I interpreted the blue cast as a combination of the natural bluish cast of the trees plus the almost inevitable blue haze that plagues long distance shots in most places in the US. That may have been a faulty assumption, of course. Detail in the trees comes from some degree of contrast; that can be manipulated with curves, but as you said, just how far should one go?
Chuck
<
http://www.users.on.net/sestewart//IMG_3819copy.jpg> Better? Different? too far? not enough?
I used the gradient set to overlay (softlight works quite well too, but I want more contrast here) Levels adjustment to drop the blue a bit (perhaps too far I think – the blue haze was visible to the naked eye not just through the camera lens as it often seems to be here over Eucalpyt forest in the mountains)) and a large radius/low amount USM to dehaze further. The clouds have come up spectaculalry – if I ‘d used any less exposure compensation they would be nowhere near as good. RAW might well have helped.
The full size version is noisy…
Susan, it’s looking good! Lots of tree detail now…
I’ve noticed that noise is a feature of my purposely underexposed images (to preserve highlight detail) when the dark areas are ‘uplifted’ with levels or curves. Tradeoffs…..
Chuck – glad you like it – I’m still not sure (I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t print well) I’ll try Noise ninja on it and see what happens – but as the foreground is a bit soft (I was using a tripod so I’m not sure why) I’m not sure how well it will work. Mac users – the Noise Ninja beta is now available for free trial download and it works really well- worth a look. If I had had time I should have done a double exposure with different EVs, but I’ve had a lot of trouble stitiching those together when you’ve got trees against the sky like this one as the slightest breeze makes them not match.
Susan S.
Vast improvement for sure. The foreground is soooo much better. The sky is nice and bright. The dark areas of the clouds make it a little surreal looking, a little taming of those dark spots and I’d say you performed a spectacular rescue of an image in need of help.
Great work Susan.
JP
Susan,
What a transformation.
Now just imagine pre-digital where your original photo would have ended up.
Can anyone suggest a technique to avoid the results that Susan got with her original photo? I talking photographic technique/settings here.
Graduated neutral density filter (I don’t have one)
Shooting two shots at different exposures, and then blending (it was windy and the trees were flapping too mutch to blend)
Shooting RAW and processing one for the shadows, one for the highlights and combining (I didn’t because I can’t find a RAW processor that will talk to my g3 files and allow exposure adjustments and will work on a mac – the Canon one doesn’t)
Any others?
Well the clouds do look surreal in the original, so I take back most of what I said. You have performed miracles for sure on this image.
JP
