Everyone has different ways of dealing with this. For some it’s a matter of exposing properly, and then bringing up the shadows in post process, either with something like the Fill Light tool in ACR, or Shadow/Highlight in Photoshop. Using these tools have their problems, as bringing up shadows also brings up image noise. It can also look unnatural if used improperly.

Another method is to expose for the face of the subject, letting the chips fall where they may on the rest of the exposure. Caveats here include nuclearizing your subject’s white uniform, or radiating the entire field if it’s a bright color. Fun fun.

Over the weekend I was shooting the Arizona USSSA Independence Day Classic, a fastpitch softball tournament held over in Pinetop, AZ. With start times of noon, though, getting the entire range of an image captured was difficult. Read on to find out what I did to combat this, from steps I took in the camera, to an action I made in Photoshop that helped with post process. Oh and it’s a downloadable action. =)

Depending on what camera you use, you’ll have a variety of options available to you in order to squeeze the most dynamic range out of your camera. The first and most obvious thing you can do is to shoot RAW. Lots of advantages here, mainly the ability to adjust white balance in post, and having between 12-14 bits of image data to work with. But shooting RAW also means a huge file increase. While most 10mp jpegs are 3-4mb, RAW files can easily be 10-12mb. This increase adds up quickly. I typically shoot 500 or more images per game for youth sports, and that would be 2gb in jpegs, but 6gb in RAW files. Multiply that by the 20 or so games covered over the weekend, and we now are looking at 120gb of storage. While this isn’t a big deal to some, for others, that added overhead can be an encumbrance.

So, what if you just shoot Jpeg, what then? For one, I would reccomend shooting Adobe RGB, but only if you understand now that you must convert to sRGB later, and know what that entails. Viewing an Adobe RGB image on a web browser is a hit or miss proposition and you may get color errors and overall flat color. But using Adobe RGB gives you a wider color gamut. That means that colors that might fall out of the range of what sRGB can “see” may still fall into Adobe RGB. By keeping that information, you can later edit that image with more accuracy. BTW, if you shoot RAW, colorspace isn’t important, as you can do this after the fact.

Newer cameras offer in camera adjustments to help with dynamic range. Nikon offers D-Lighting, which is an adjustable setting that fills in shadows in camera for every image. Not only can you do that as part of the image setting, but you can also edit images after you’ve taken them, and add D-Lighting to them. Nifty.

Canon offers Highlight Tone Priority. It basically shoots an image at a lower ISO than stated, but renders out the image processed properly, keeping the highlights from blowing out. By doing so, you can shoot a little brighter than usual, without blowing out highlights as easily.

Cameras offer different color looks, such as neutral, vivid, portrait, landscape, etc. These images adjust colors and tonality. Since this is all a formula for adjusting certain colors, the adjustment may end up hurting your image. Go with a setting like Neutral, that offers little to no adjustment.

Now you’ve got a pretty basic baseline image to edit, but how to process them?

It may sound crazy, but using noise reduction on your image can be really beneficial, even on low ISO images. This is because, as you edit your image, you will be bringing up your shadows, and doing brightness adjustments, and those effects will be most prevalent in your shadows, which also contains the noise in any image. Here’s a common trick: First change your image to 16-bit mode in photoshop, then use noise reduction. Because you’re working with a larger bit space, any formulas (such as noise reduction) applied to the pixels (which are just number values for colors) will have a larger range of numbers to fall on (after they’re adjusted). Remember, you need that lattitude as you make all your adjustments.

As I stated before, you could use the Shadow/Highlight tool to adjust your images, and it’s pretty effective, but it has it’s issues. For one, it’s not an adjustment layer, so once you save the image, you can’t really undo it. Sure, you can duplicate your layer, but if you don’t like the effect it has on certain parts of the image, you’ll have to use a mask to edit that out.

So, in playing around with a few images, I tried to find a simpler, more automated way to do all this. As I’ve stated before, I’m a huge fan of actions, and have a few articles on the topic. Anytime I can automate a process, I save time, and ultimately that means I can either get my work done faster, or get more work done in the same time. Either way, it’s a win win. In this case, I took 11 steps, and turned it into one shortcut (F4)

You may notice that it says crop, 16 bit, and Noise Ninja in the history pallete. These are not part of my action, as cropping and your noise reduction of choice are all personal preferences. As for 16 bit, just make sure you try that before whatever noise reduction you choose. There are plenty of choices for noise reduction. A few popular ones include Noiseware, Neat Image, Noise Ninja, and others. Some offer free trials, or even free editions that have feature limitations (the killer here is that most of the free versions often limit themselves to 8-bit images only).

On the left here, you’ll see the result of the action. It will maintain your original image as is, but create a separate shadow layer with its own adjustment layer, as well as an adjustment layer for the original, and a hue/saturation adjustment for the entire composition. Since it’s all adjustment layers, you can double click on them and change the settings. If you hide all the layers, you can see the original as is. One thing I noticed after all the adjustments and layers was a bump in saturation. I added a simple hue/saturation adjustment in order to tone it down. You can adjust this to taste as well.

Instructions are simple. Download the action, and install. Hit F4 to invoke the action. Preferably do this on images that are shot in daylight, and try to do this on images that are 16 bit.

If you need further assistance with the action, please feel free to email me (the link is on the sidebar on the right).

The action can be downloaded by clicking on the link below. The name is addon, because it’s only a single action, and I intend to add it onto my PShizzy Action Set 2:

PShizzy Addon

Oh, and I have a small gallery of images from the tournament. All in all, it was a great time. One last tip: If clouds do show up (which they almost never do in Arizona), shoot as much as possible! Cloud cover is like a big softbox for the sun. Use it to your advantage.

The gallery may be seen at:

Independence Day Classic

I’ve received quite a few comments on my black and white conversion, and I finally decided it would be best to post my own personal workflow on the process. My method by no means tries to be scientific nor accurate, only pleasing to my own eyes. I did not invent anything here, I picked up some info from various books and over time, found the following method to give me the most pleasing results. Hopefully you will find some use in the following.

First, we need a test file, so please download the following raw file (Note: this is a 1D tif file, and I renamed it to all lowercase, so if Photoshop tries to open as TIF, rename it to .crw or something). I’m also including a link to my PShizzy 2 Action Set, since I won’t go into exact detail how it converts to B/W

Ortega (1D RAW file, please use save link as)
PShizzy Action Set 2

Open up ortega.tif in ACR, and use the follow settings (which you might want to save for future reference, I call it “flat”): 0 everything out, from exposure to saturation, and make sure in the next tab, that sharpness and color noise is also set to 0. White balance is on a per picture basis, but for this example, please use ACR’s Tungsten setting, which is temp 2850, tint 0. Go ahead and and hit ok to get the file into Photoshop. If you haven’t loaded a 1D raw file before, please make sure that you have your file set to 16 bit and Adobe RGB

Looks pretty flat huh. That’s on purpose. Good B/W photography is about tonality, which is the range from black to white. Good tonality often means overcontrasted images, because it tends to seperate the subject from the background, and adds a heavy feel to the image. This in turn lends itself best to certain dramatic subjects and events. This is why boxing photography, photojournalistic features, and film noir tend to use b/w. This lets us focus on things other than color. Form and contrast end up becoming more important. If we process the image into B/W by using ACR, or by using an in camera B/W converter (such as in the 20D), then we lose control over our image. The computer, who has no idea of what is and isn’t important, does all the work. It cannot bias its conversion (as we will do) to favor the subject. We can manipulate the work that our camera gives us after it has already converted, but we are then working with an incomplete deck, as we are only receiving a fraction of the photographic information taken in by our camera.

Anyhow, the file looks flat. At this point, I usually use noise reduction softwate to take away some of the color noise. The bad news is that these plugins cost money. The good news is that black and white conversion doesn’t really need this. The grain in the noise tends to look “interesting” and “gritty” so it’s not necessarily bad. So let’s move on.

So far, we’ve open the image in ACR, processed it flatly, and noise reduced. Feel free to crop a little (I did, just on the top and right). From there, the next step is pretty easy: Use the PAS2 B/W converter to get your image into grayscale. Explanations on that are in the PAS2 thread, complete with instructions for it.

But PAS2 is half the battle. Really all it does is use the LAB mode to extract the luminosity. I won’t say this is the best way to convert to B/W for accuracy, but I will say it’s better than desaturating. Try desaturating a solid green blue or red, and you’ll see it gets taken to 128 across the board, which means that fire engine red or nuclear chroma green somehow becomes neutral gray. . . seriously, that makes no sense. With LAB, it tends to max out at about 220 across the board, which makes sense… as those colors, no matter how nuclear, would never be true white, but they should definitely never be neutral gray. Those of you who swear by using color mixer, I’m not saying you’re wrong. Color mixer is a great way to convert, but it is a biased conversion, where LAB is based only on lightness. Also, I just couldn’t make an action for color mixer, since a good conversion requires user input. So there.

PAS2 leaves you with 2 layers, the background (original) color layer, and a new b/w layer over it. Go ahead and delete that color layer if you like. I sometimes mess with it and use it to create old print looks (muting it and overlaying it over the b/w), but for this, it can go.

Curves: Learn it, live it, love it. Levels is nice, but it’s very underpowered. You can only control the ends, and pinch your contrast, then bias your midtone. Curves lets you set multiple points in order to determine the distribution of the values. This means you could use your midtones as your highlights, or your shadows as midtones (seriously). Now, this doesn’t mean you can under or overexpose your shots and miraculously save it with curves. It just won’t work. Curves doesn’t make a picture, it makes a picture better.

My method uses between 2 and 4 points (sometimes more, but rarely). It’s best to do it in a certain order, because figuring out your first point usually makes the second and subsequent points easier to determine. First, we start by opening curves, and we’ll notice the line thru the box. This just shows the basic representation between input and output. Say we take a value of 128 input and set it to 192 output. This basically takes our midtone (128) and sets it to 3/4 tone, more of a highlight. Everything between 0 and 128 now is redistributed to go between 0 and 192, and everything from 128 to 255 gets pushed to go between 192 and 255. Don’t worry about posterization too much if you shot raw. 12 bit data means you have 4096 levels of red green and blue within the image, despite only showing you a range of 255. Think of those extra values as fractions that get rounded later. They definitely come in handy. Oh, ya, another thing… shoot raw when you can for B/W. It’s just better.

BTW: Do not hit OK after each point is set. You need to set all the points in one curves to work this right.

First Point: Go ahead and open up curves and move it out of the way of your image, so you can see it well, because curves lets you live preview what you’re doing, and this is necessary to feel your way to the right tonality. go ahead and click a point in the midtone area, then drag it up. You may get some nuclearness going, but this is just fine. In fact, it’s reccomended. Often, people get scared to go over the edge. This is true for curves, for sharpness, for a lot of things. Just do it. Heres what I chose, btw: input 128, output 220. I got this by grabbing my midtone (128), and pushing it up until our fighter Ortega looks pretty bright. Remember, this is about him, not anything else, so if we blow out the ring ropes, or black out the background, who cares. HE IS THE FOCUS. Heres a pic of the curves dialog box and my image, so you can follow along visually.

Notice the top right of the curves, it just flatlines at the top. That means all those flatlined values will become 255, which you can see leads to blowouts.(such as Ortega’s chest and speculars on the face). This is called crushing your white. When you flatline at the bottom, that’s called crushing your black. This is usually bad. This will get fixed. We just needed to set that first point, and we’ll uncrush later. But for now, we got our highlight area figured out.

Second point: Let’s get our shadows. Make a new point around the first quarter area (use the lines to guide you… first line is first quarter, second line is mid, third is third quarter, end is fourth) and drag it down til you get some good contrast on our pal Ortega. I got something like input 64, output 34, which now makes the image look like this: Looks pretty good to me. Now let’s uncrush.

Third point: This one, and other points past the second are sometimes optional. Sometimes, the first two points lead to no flatlines. In those cases, don’t bother with this, as it’s pointless. But most times, especially in B/W, you will need to uncrush. First lets uncrush our highlights, as they’re much more noticable. Make a new point somewhere between the first point (our highlight point), and the end. Drag it down til you have no more flatlines, but be careful to not pull down too much. If it is not possible, you may need 2 points in here. Usually 1 point is enough. A note of caution: Never set a point to create a dip in the highlights or a bump in the shadows. This is like value switching and creates funky effects. Just make sure that as you go to the right, your curve always goes up, and as you go left, your curve always goes down. You can make it almost straight, but never have a curve go away from the grain, this is bad. Anyhow, make the third point, and have it kill your flatline. I used input 166 output 247, which looks like:

Fourth point: Same concept as third point, but for shadows. Grab a point between the leftmost line (the beggining) and your shadow point. Pull it up to curve the lower flatline. I used input 38, output 7, which looks like:

And there you have it. Obviously, this is to taste, so you could go ahead and edit your first point to lower the contrast, or raise it even more. You can do the same for the shadows. And uncrush points work off those, so those can be moved around too. It’s all in the eye. After I finished that curves, I went ahead and used the PAS2 Web Long action to get the final product, as seen below.

I hope this helped, as I know B/W conversion can be a bit of a mystery, so I hope this post clears some of the mystery up

By reading the rest of this post!

In this video we build upon the first video. In fact, I reference the original action we created, because it could work as a batch folder action if we tweaked it a little.

Tweaking it isn’t nearly as hard as it may seem, and you don’t have to start another action from scratch, so get that idea out of your head, see the video, and jump on into photoshop and fix your action.

Oh and there will be more. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to actions.

Enjoy

Actions II: Making Your Action Batch Friendly

Keep the comments coming. I intend for this blog to cover a lot of territory, but I need to know what’s on your mind so I can concentrate on the important stuff first.

Lawrence Lightner recently offered me eternal gratitude for a walk through on actions. So I made a flash video. I figure he now owes me his eternal soul. The rest of you have no such burden. Well, not really. . .

So, rather than doing a simple images and step by step tutorial, I created a simple Flash presentation. I wanted to keep it simple, so I could actually accomplish this and turn it around quickly. I made this in about an hour or so, from first recording (and trust me, I edited it out a lot of bad audio. Mostly me cursing when I screwed up saying something).

It’s pretty simple, but I hope to make more of these, in multiple parts, and much more advanced than this. But I need to know that these videos will actually be effective as a training aid. And I’d like to know that they are a good reason to come to my blog. So here’s what I’m gonna ask everyone to do:

If you like the blog for the content, tell someone you know that doesn’t already know about it. If you like a specific post, please hit the new DIGG button and digg it. And if you like the video, and want to see more, then please leave a comment here, and let me know that you like it, and better yet, what you would like to see more of.

Remember, it worked for Lawrence.

Actions Flash Presentation

BTW, you may get a dialog box talking about security settings in Flash. Just click ok and move on.

Because the very next time I have to do a similar task, I can automate it! We all do this, though in different aspects of our lives, and for different reasons. A good example of this is Bill Pay. We all have the same bills to pay each month, so rather than sit down once or twice a month to write out checks, and plan a visit to the post office, we automate it through our bank accounts, saving us time. So why not apply this thinking to Photoshop?

When I open a file, I pretty much go through the same process, in the same order each time. Whether it’s applying levels or curves, or using noise reduction, cropping or resizing, we all have certain tasks that we repeat within Photoshop when dealing with a large majority of our photos.

Actions are Photoshop’s way of dealing with repetitive tasks. It’s basically a macro recorder, that can be set to record anything you do to an image. You can then run that macro of tasks on another photo, or even a batch of photos, automatically. You can also tweak it, deleting steps that you made in error, or setting something to open a dialog box giving you a choice (say to resize to x pixels by y pixels) rather than applying a hard setting. So what does this all mean to you?

Time saved, and lots of it. I have an action that creates a black and white image from a color image using the LAB mode method. This involves changing your image from RGB to LAB mode, selecting the Lightness channel, then creating a new layer and copying that Lightness channel data onto this new layer (so as not to destroy the original color image), and finally convert this all back into RGB. Sounds complicated? Would you believe that in the time it took me to write that, I could have actually processed dozens of photos?

It’s true. In fact, I have that action available for download. It’s part of a set of actions I created years ago, called PShizzy Action Set 2 (or PAS2 for short). In fact, I used that B/W action so much, I gave it a shortcut (did I forget to mention, actions can have shortcuts, like anything else in Photoshop), which is Shift + F10. Feel free to download it here and kick the tires on it. But that’s actually not the point of this post.

PAS2 is dated, and I’d like to come out with PAS3, not just because my own processes have changed over time, but because now, I’d like to actually involve you all in the process. So this is your chance to voice your opinion. Leave a comment, let me know what you’d like to see in PAS3. I won’t be able to please everyone, but if there’s a big demand for certain actions, I’d be glad to make one. And remember, actions can be edited very easily, so even if my actions don’t work just right for you, you can always tweak them to your hearts content. See why I love Photoshop Actions?