I’ve read chap­ter after chap­ter in book after book, and arti­cle after arti­cle online, all to no avail…until TODAY. I recently pur­chased a new sup­ply of pig­ments and the sup­plier included a free pack­age of 20 sheets of fine art paper with my order. One rea­son I’ve been hes­i­tant to do a series of exper­i­ments is because I would have to use the papers that I will use in my fin­ished prints and it is EXPENSIVE! Exper­i­men­ta­tion would entail the use of SEVERAL sheets, most of which would likely be unus­able. Today how­ever, with my handy dandy pack­age of 20 FREE sheets of paper, I was able to find the resolve to begin the exper­i­ments and nail this thing down, once and for all.

Over the course of 2 hours, I cre­ated a total of just 7 prints before FINALLY hit­ting upon the win­ning recipe with print #8! And YES, I did care­fully record metic­u­lous notes, includ­ing screen shots of dia­log boxes, for each and every print so I can now accu­rately REPRODUCE my suc­cess! YAY me!

If there hap­pens to be any­one else out there who stum­bles upon this post, and you too have strug­gled as I have in attempt­ing to nav­i­gate the treach­er­ous and murky waters of color cal­i­bra­tion, here is the arti­cle that pushed me over to the other side…THIS ARTICLE by Tom P. Ashe was the key com­po­nent that I had some­how missed in all the other things I’ve read.

NOW, if I can get the shop­ping carts fig­ured out next, I’ll be IN BUSINESS…I’ll be “cookin’ with GAS!”

Have you ever been at a place in your life where you felt you were stand­ing on the edge of a great precipice of deci­sion? You know that where you are is just run down and worn out and aban­doned. It’s time to move to a new place…a dif­fer­ent place. The door is before you and all the expanse of the unknown chal­lenges and rewards that it holds, but to step off that famil­iar ground…the drop is so steep.

I guess that’s sort of how the baby bird feels when it’s time to leave his nest for his first flight. He sees other birds fly. He sees his par­ents fly and they tell him that he too, can fly now. Even his broth­ers and sis­ters have taken the leap. But what if it’s too soon for ME? What if I fly in the wrong direc­tion? What if the wind car­ries me off course? What if? What if I don’t?

“Twenty years from now, you will be more dis­ap­pointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bow­lines, sail away from the safe har­bor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Dis­cover.”   ~Mark Twain

Eas­ier said than done.

A few years ago, some­one made a post on a blog­ging site about how excit­ing was the whole con­cept of RSS feeds. The gen­eral overview of that post pre­sented it in such a way that it sounded easy and excit­ing so I down­loaded a feed reader and pre­pared myself to be wowed. Trou­ble was, that gen­er­al­ized pre­sen­ta­tion of RSS feeds didn’t tell me how to USE the darn thing once I got it. I installed it in my browser, but WHERE IS IT? How do I USE it? I have over the years since, asked a cou­ple of peo­ple suc­cess­fully using RSS feeds how it worked but the way they tried to explain it was not clear to my befud­dled brain. It seemed they had trou­ble with the whole con­cept that I actu­ally NEEDED an expla­na­tion of some­thing that to them, was absurdly sim­ple. I came to the con­clu­sion that I was sim­ply too dumb to com­pre­hend it, much less use it. I was unable to fig­ure all this out in a mat­ter of min­utes, so as with most things that might require the read­ing of direc­tions and some patience, I quickly became dis­in­ter­ested and moved on to things less chal­leng­ing. The world of Inter­net con­tent syn­di­ca­tion went on with­out me, though I’ve con­tin­ued to be secretly jeal­ous that I could not a part of it.

Hav­ing recently suc­cess­fully tack­led the build­ing of 2 web­sites and hav­ing effec­tively learned all man­ner of tech­ni­cal magic tricks that I was once con­vinced was well beyond my capa­bil­i­ties to absorb, I’ve gained some sem­blance of raw courage in tack­ling intim­i­dat­ing tech­nol­ogy. So I revis­ited the whole idea of RSS feeds. In my own crawl­ing of the Inter­net search­ing out infor­ma­tion to add to my newly acquired genius, I’ve found count­less web­sites that I’d LOVE to keep up with. I knew just enough about the con­cept of RSS feeds to under­stand that this is pre­cisely what feeds are for. It’s like hav­ing your own reg­u­larly updated online “news­pa­per” if you will, con­tain­ing all the newest con­tent from your favorite web­sites that you have sub­scribed to, all col­lected in one list on one page. It has come to the point that I can no longer afford to cave under the pres­sure of my own impa­tience and dumb­ness. I sim­ply MUST get a work­ing knowl­edge of how to avail myself of the ben­e­fits of web syndication.

Enter my beloved Google. To me, Google is an Inter­net GOD, the Holy Father of the Inter­net Trin­ity, the Inter­net Ancient of Days. Google makes every­thing absurdly easy for the dumb­est of the dumb.

So I revis­ited the pages I wanted to keep up with. I scoured each page for the feed “sub­scribe” but­ton, then clicked it (almost EVERY web­site that knows even the slight­est thing about what they are doing now has a “sub­scribe” button…if they don’t, shame on them). Here’s what they might look like:

When you click on most of these but­tons, you are then given a choice of feed reader pref­er­ences, often pre­sented in the form of var­i­ous brightly col­ored but­tons. Since Google is my own per­sonal Inter­net Sav­ior, I chose the Google feed reader but­ton, which took me to a page that invited me to install the Google reader. If given the choice between sub­scrib­ing to Posts or Replies, click either you would be inter­ested in keep­ing up with. For me, I just usu­ally stick to postings.

Then I go back to my favorite pages, hit the lit­tle orange but­ton again, select the Google reader icon again. I’m taken now to my very own Google page con­tain­ing my feeds. At the top of the page is a but­ton to click that will add a ’sub­scrip­tion’ to the selected website’s updates to my Google feeds, which now show up in a lit­tle side­bar box on the left hand side of my page. I high­light the address of this feed page in my browser’s address bar, drag it to my browser’s menu bar and now I have only to hit a but­ton at the top of my browser bar to go instantly to my feed page to see what’s new on all my favorite web­sites and blogs!  I can click on one of the feeds I have sub­scribed to and I get a page of titles to their lat­est updates. HOW COOL IS THIS?!@!@#$%^&&^%!!!!!!!?!

Now I can quickly and eas­ily STAY well informed with timely infor­ma­tion and enter­tain­ment from all my favorite sources. Once again, I have PROVEN the valid­ity of the claim that you can INDEED suc­cess­fully teach an old dog new tricks. Arf arf…I’ve earned a treat. CLICK HERE FOR FEED 101 and learn more about RSS feeds from Google, the Holy Father of all things Inter­net, and you TOO can learn a handy dandy new trick that will make you smart like me. Heh.

By the way, don’t you DARE leave here with­out hit­ting MY sub­scribe but­ton. You know darn well your life will be greatly improved and so much more worth liv­ing with a steady stream of my non­sense deliv­ered to your own per­sonal feed page. My own ‘sub­scribe’ but­ton resides at the bot­tom right hand cor­ner of every page. OR you can hit the link imme­di­ately fol­low­ing this post that invites you to “sub­scribe.” Just DO it.

Cre­ative peo­ple gen­er­ally need a lot of per­sonal “space.” When oth­ers try to crowd them, cling to them, or put exces­sive emo­tional or mate­r­ial demands on them (whether these be real or per­ceived), their strongest incli­na­tion is to rebel…even bolt and run. They sim­ply MUST have the free­dom to be who they are, to explore, to med­i­tate, to rumi­nate, to exper­i­ment and to change…CONTINUALLY. Friends and fam­ily mem­bers who do not share the same cre­ative ten­den­cies often take offense at these pecu­liar needs of cre­ative peo­ple. They may feel that the cre­ative per­son does not like them, doesn’t love them or appre­ci­ate them when they are pushed away or avoided. They take such things per­son­ally and begin to expe­ri­ence feel­ings of rejec­tion, when truly it is not rejec­tion at all. It is sim­ply a mis­un­der­stand­ing between what 2 dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent peo­ple need from one another, and what each is equipped to give. This could explain why many cre­ative peo­ple seem to have much dif­fi­culty main­tain­ing inti­mate rela­tion­ships, par­tic­u­larly with oth­ers who do not share their own cre­ative tendencies.

Are YOU in rela­tion­ship with a cre­ative per­son? Your poor soul. Good luck with that. We can’t change. And if we could, you wouldn’t really want us to. Just pray for grace.

So I’ve built a Sitemap page that gives vis­i­tors (and web crawlers and spi­ders) quick and easy access to all my con­tent. I’ve sub­mit­ted it to search engines, tweaked and uploaded a robots file to my root direc­tory and other sim­i­lar put­ter­ing around with SEO stuff. Truth is, I’m not quite sure what the heck I’m doing, or if I’m doing it right or wrong. I’m not so sure it is par­tic­u­larly wise to be post­ing this con­fes­sion on the world­wide web either…especially now that I have all this tech­nol­ogy in place to actu­ally DIRECT every­one TO this confession…or DO I? But I am.

If you know even less about all this stuff I’m talk­ing about than I do, I bet I STILL sound smart. Heh. If I keep my own prac­tice of “crawl­ing” the web for tid­bits of infor­ma­tion that may improve my own web-savvy and keep exper­i­ment­ing with stuff I’m learn­ing (or THINK I’m learn­ing), I’m BOUND to ACTUALLY learn some­thing sooner or later. Or not. But I will most cer­tainly SOUND as though I’ve learned some­thing. And after­all, appear­ances are everything…

Prob­lems with this image are numer­ous, the most glar­ing being the white bal­ance, soft focus and lack of detail in too-dark shad­ows. For­tu­nately it was a Cam­era RAW file and there were no large areas of blown out high­lights so I thought it might be a good can­di­date for my first exper­i­ment in improv­ing an infe­rior shot with HDR and tone map­ping. This is the orig­i­nal RAW image as it came out of the camera:

Step 1
I dragged the file’s icon into Pho­to­shop, which opened the cam­era RAW con­ver­sion dia­log. I adjusted the white bal­ance, man­u­ally drag­ging the slider towards the cooler range of hues to get rid of the over­whelm­ing yel­low color cast. I then opened a COPY of the file. I repeated the process again with the same orig­i­nal raw file–removing the color cast with the same set­tings as the pre­vi­ous file, but this time, I also adjusted the expo­sure lev­els by rais­ing them about 2 stops. Opened a copy of THIS file, which was auto­mat­i­cally opened with a suf­fix of −2. I repeated the process twice more–one shot opened with expo­sure altered by low­er­ing about 2 stops, and the other with some slight light­en­ing of the shadow areas while still in the raw state. This gave me 4 copies of this photo, each at a dif­fer­ent expo­sure level.

Steps 2-3
I saved all 4 expo­sures, opened them in Pho­toma­trix and cre­ated an HDR file, which was then saved before any fur­ther alter­ations. Next I tone mapped the HDR image by adjust­ing the con­trols in the tone map­ping Detail Enhancer tab. This is my result:

I can’t com­plain about the detail, but to me it just looks flat and unin­ter­est­ing. Why I added some sharp­en­ing to this I can’t say, as it just made the fore­ground too light and the scene lost even more depth. Nor did it have that dreamy feel I had expe­ri­enced when I first came upon this scene.

Step 4
I reopened and saved the orig­i­nal raw file with the color cast cor­rected. Then dupli­cated the layer and brought out some detail in the shad­ows by adjust­ing lev­els and curves. This made the rest of the pic­ture too light so I erased the top por­tion of the lighter layer so that the only real change I saw was in the lighter fore­ground. Then I merged the adjusted lay­ers into one. With­out Photomatrix’s tone map­ping, my beam of sun­light through the trees was preserved.

Steps 5–Orton Effect
I took the com­pos­ite file I just cre­ated and applied the Orton effect. I dupli­cated the back­ground layer and changed the Blend Mode to Screen and named the layer ‘Sharp.’ Then cre­ated another back­ground copy just under it before I merged it down to the new back­ground layer I just cre­ated. Next I cre­ated another back­ground layer and named it Blur. I applied a Gauss­ian Blur at a strength of about 20 and changed the Blend Mode to Multiply.

This gave me the dream-like effect I’d been look­ing for, but I still wanted more con­trast and color sat­u­ra­tion, so I trashed the 2 lay­ers I’d just cre­ated and started over. I made a copy of the back­ground layer and changed the Blend Mode to Over­lay, then low­ered the opac­ity until I got the sat­u­ra­tion and con­trast I wanted. Then I merged this layer down to the last back­ground layer I had cre­ated, then repeated the above process with this newer layer.

Fin­ish­ing Touches
Much closer to what I felt I was look­ing for, I still felt the fore­ground was too sat­u­rated and the tree trunk in the fore­ground too dark. I selected the tree trunk from one of my ear­lier tone mapped files, pasted it over the exist­ing tree trunk and did some selec­tive eras­ing back to the layer beneath until I got the detail I wanted. I also did some eras­ing on the layer beneath on the back­ground scenery to give a lit­tle more con­trast between the fore­ground tree trunk and the back­ground. And now…I’m now happy! THIS is what I saw (and EXPERIENCED) when I first saw this scene…

(I’ll even­tu­ally get this whole thumb­nail thing fig­ured out for this theme, but until then, for a larger view of this image, click on the pre­view on the home page.)

I’ve never been a cre­ative purist. In life, per­haps HOW you get to a place is as–if not MORE–important than where you get to. Imagery how­ever, is an alto­gether dif­fer­ent story. I’m all about push­ing all the envelopes with any basic image, no mat­ter how good the orig­i­nal. And since it is safe to say I was really an ARTIST long before I was a PHOTOGRAPHER, I have a very strong bent toward more painterly ren­der­ings and effects. Enter HDR imaging.

Being too lazy to com­pose a brief but rel­a­tively clear def­i­n­i­tion of HDR in my OWN words, here’s the short of it in an excerpt from an arti­cle from naturescapes.net/:

“Dynamic range (DR) is the range of lumi­nance val­ues from the dark­est to the light­est. Our eyes can per­ceive a sub­set of the scene’s DR (about 10,000:1), while your cam­era can record a smaller sub­set than your eyes can see – per­haps 400:1 for a DSLR. The DR of a mon­i­tor or a printed pho­to­graph is smaller yet.

High dynamic range (HDR) in pho­tog­ra­phy means rep­re­sent­ing the full range of tonal­ity present in the scene. Most HDR tech­niques use soft­ware to com­bine sev­eral dif­fer­ent expo­sures into a sin­gle file that maps the full range of lumi­nance at every pixel. The HDR image is then processed through tone map­ping (adjust­ing the tonal val­ues) the HDR image into a 16-bit or 8-bit dig­i­tal file such as a JPEG or TIFF image.”

Now, on to my own invalu­able mut­ter­ings on the sub­ject. Though this tech­nique has actu­ally been around for a while now, it seems much more pop­u­lar and widely used now, as it has become more read­ily acces­si­ble through rea­son­ably priced soft­ware such as Pho­toma­trix (which cre­ates your HDR files and has exten­sive con­trols for cus­tomized tonemap­ping) and fil­ters such as Topaz Adjust which ren­ders sim­i­lar effects. There are actu­ally a num­ber of var­i­ous meth­ods of cre­at­ing an HDR, even a “fake” HDR, and tonemapped effect, in even the most afford­able entry level soft­ware pro­grams such as Pho­to­shop Ele­ments. (A “fake” HDR is a file that has been cre­ated from just one expo­sure, saved sev­eral times at dif­fer­ent expo­sure lev­els as changed in your image edit­ing software.)

Visit vir­tu­ally any photo host­ing site and you will find HDR tonemapped images…many of which will be on the front page of con­test win­ners. This ren­der­ing tech­nique is con­sid­ered by many to be some­thing of a mixed medium pho­to­graphic art because of the exten­sive dig­i­tal pro­cess­ing involved to pro­duce the final image. Many peo­ple love the effect when done properly…some don’t. Each to his own. It’s prob­a­bly not dif­fi­cult to fig­ure out which cat­e­gory I would all in.

As with ANY recipe, the qual­ity of your final mas­ter­piece is con­tin­gent upon the qual­ity of the ingre­di­ents that go into its cre­ation. It doesn’t take long to see that HDR imag­ing is no dif­fer­ent. Though it is pos­si­ble to take a mediocre or even some­what POOR image and improve it tremen­dously with var­i­ous edit­ing meth­ods and fil­ters, the HDR tonemapped images that win the con­tests and elicit gasps of awe from view­ers are undoubt­edly the ones cre­ated from a min­i­mum of 3 brack­eted expo­sures, one being a near PERFECT exposure.

Since I have far more infe­rior qual­ity shots than really GOOD shots (there is a rumor that this is true even of pro­fes­sional pho­tog­ra­phers, though I’m not sure I believe it), my first exper­i­ments in toy­ing with this tech­nique are with try­ing to sal­vage what­ever I can from some of my favorite sub­ject mat­ter in these per­sonal col­lec­tions of infe­rior pho­tos. I started with an image I shot while on an out­ing last fall. Most of my shots from that day were pretty sorry, as I was so excited about the breath­tak­ing views every­where we went that day that I was hav­ing great dif­fi­culty ‘focus­ing’ (no pun intended) on expo­sures and cam­era set­tings and all those details that pho­tog­ra­phers need to pay atten­tion to but that artists hate to fool with. This shot was no exception…here is the orig­i­nal RAW file, straight out of the camera:

One could com­pose an entire pho­tog­ra­phy class on every­thing that’s wrong with this photo–the white bal­ance is wrong and the focus is way too soft to men­tion just a cou­ple of the most obvi­ous. Yet I still saw poten­tial here and really wanted to repro­duce an image that accu­rately por­trayed how I orig­i­nally viewed that scene. It almost felt surreal–the lit­tle bridge over the creek lead­ing into the woods with sun­light stream­ing through the brightly col­ored autumn leaves…so much so it gave me goose­bumps and made me gasp in awe. Though sadly, as is so often the case with my pic­tures, once I got home and down­loaded the shot, I was painfully dis­ap­pointed. Not to be daunted how­ever, I knew that some­day, some­how, I would fig­ure out how to sal­vage this very spe­cial moment.

The final image is a prod­uct of using vir­tu­ally every tool in my tricks box–camera RAW adjust­ments, Photomatrix’s HDR and tonemap­ping, Photoshop’s blend­ing and lay­er­ing, not to men­tion a myr­iad of tweeks in curves and lev­els, opac­ity adjust­ments and selec­tive eras­ing. I FINALLY hit that sweet spot. I now feel that my final image is a very accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion of what I saw, not only with my EYES that morn­ing, but with my SOUL–which is after­all, our keen­est source of vision.

Fully illus­trated details of the murky jour­ney from the piti­ful orig­i­nal to the final glory will fol­low in an upcom­ing post. For now, I must tear myself away from my pas­sion and get back to the daily atten­dance of the need­ful things that com­prise every­day life in a car­nal exis­tence. Pleh.