The Revisit and Retouch project has finally come to a close. The participation was stellar, and I couldn’t be happier with the results of CaeraPorn’s first blog project. We had 17 solid entries and around 40 voters to decide who the overall winner would be.

The votes have been collected and counted and the winner is (insert drum roll)…

Tim Grimshaw

Tim went for a darker, more ominous feel, and though he ‘cheated’ using photomatix HDR software, the voters have spoken. One thing I’d like to note about Tim’s image is that despite using HDR software, he stayed away from that hyper-real dreamy look that is so often mis-used in HDRs. After his work in photomatix, he brought the image back into Lightroom, and completed his retouching there. Read his write-up here.

What Does He Win?

Well, because Tim lives in the UK, I’ve had to switch up my plans a bit, but he will receive a $50 Gift Card to a photography vendor of his choice as well as the opportunity if he chooses to accept it, to write a guest post on a topic of his choosing on CameraPorn.net. Congrats Tim!

Final Voting Results

1. 11

   Ryan Dlugosz

    
2. 0

   Arnoldas Ramonas

    
3. 15

   Tim Grimshaw

    
4. 7

   Ryan Harvey

    
5. 2

   Phill Price

    
6. 5

   Brian Auer

    
7. 5

   Scott Gardiner

    
8. 7

   Eugene Lim

    
9. 3

   Bill Hurlburt

    
10. 5

    Kelly Pierce

     
11. 10

    Escapista

     
12. 3

    Sebastian Schroeder

     
13. 2

    Tyler Hicks-Wright

     
14. 4

    Rex Maximilian

     
15. 0

    Justin Berman

     
16. 6

    Kim Brown

     
17. 19

    Ryan Goodman
    Too bad I can’t win my own contest huh? Thank you guys for all your votes and continued support of cameraporn.net

     

Here’s what everyone started with:

After the jump we have 17 different interpretations and the best part, everyone gets to vote for their favorite image…

What Am I Voting For?

With each entry, I was continually amazed that each photographer came up with markedly different interpretations. Not a single entry looked like any of the others and each of them had their own unique style and approach. Below are the entries from 16 talented retouchers and yours truly. You should vote for the images that you feel not only best reflect the scene, but are the most interesting visually to you. Vote by writing the entry number in the comments. You can choose up to three. When you’re done voting, don’t forget to click through to the amazing writeups to learn how each entrant came to their final result.

1. Ryan Dlugosz

Ryan’s Write-up

2. Arnoldas Ramonas

Arnoldas Write-up.

3. Tim Grimshaw

Tim’s Write-up.

4. Ryan Harvey

Ryan’s Write-up.

5. Phill Price

Phil’s Write-up.

6. Brian Auer

Brian’s write-up

7. Scott Gardiner

Scott’s write-up

8. Eugene Lim

Eugene’s Write-up

9. Bill Hurlburt

Bill’s write-up

10. Kelly Pierce

Kelly’s write-up

11. Escapista

Escapista’s website

12. Sebastian Schroeder

Sebastian’s Write-up and his website (in german)

13. Tyler Hicks-Wright

Tyler’s Write-up

14. Rex Maximilian

Rex’s Write-up

15. Justin Berman

Justins’s Write-up

16. Kim Brown

Kim provided no write-up.

17. Ryan Goodman

Last but not least, yours truly. Here’s my write-up.

In Conclusion

Firstly, I’d like to give big thanks to all the participants and supporters of the project. You all did amazing work, that greatly exceeded what I expected. I’d also like to thank Brian Auer for inspiring the project.

It’s Voting Time!

Now comes the fun part! Vote for up to three of your favorites by putting the entry numbers into the comments. The entry that gets the most votes will receive a special treat from the CameraPorn crew. Happy Voting.

For those of you that are familiar with our recent blog project “Revisit and Retouch” you’ll recognize this image. I provided CameraPorn readers with a set of three bracketed exposures to have a go at creating their own unique version by any means necessary. The image above is not only my entry to the project, but also an exercise in retouching that focuses on the common practice of compositing multiple, bracketed exposures to create a final image that better represents the scene as viewed by the human eye… In more ‘technical’ terms, an image with a higher dynamic range.

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how I came to this final image, it’s important to understand what I mean by “higher dynamic range.” Many of you are probably thinking, oh yeah, he means ‘HDR’ imagery like what you create with a program such as Photomatix and see plastered all over flickr, but you’re wrong. As neato as those images can look, they are rarely executed in a way that brings the final image to appear as the scene actually looked to the human eye, which in my opinion, is where the true value lies in creating higher dynamic range images. Creating a tone-mapped HDR image in an HDR program usually leads to oversaturated, dream-like and haloed images which look pretty cool but can be created by almost anybody with Photomatix and some bracketed images with little to no skill involved in most cases. Now don’t get me wrong there are some incredibly talented HDR ‘artists’ out there whose work amazes me, but the general image you see on flickr looks too fake for my tastes, and besides today we’re talking about using good old Photoshop and Lightroom. To see how I did it and learn a bit more about dynamic range, read on…

What is Dynamic Range?

Put simply and in relation to photography, its the range of values between light and dark areas of a scene. To make this a bit more clear, its first important to understand that the human eye can pick up a much wider dynamic range than a digital camera. If you’ve ever been shooting a sunset into the sun while it is still above the horizon for example, and to your eye the scene looks perfect so you take the shot, more than likely one of two things will happen. Either the clouds will look amazing while the foreground looks dark, or the foreground will be exposed correctly and the sky will be completely overexposed. To put this into context take a look at these two unretouched shots taken in the Florida Keys.

Notice that the shot on the left, though overexposed as a whole, retains detail in the trees and lighthouse, yet the cloud detail in the sky is completely blown out, then the image on the right shows great cloud detail, but the tree and lighthouse detail is lost.

To my eye at the time, it looked like a gorgeous shot, but the camera did not pickup the scene as I saw it because it cannot capture the same dynamic range my eye sees in a single capture.

How Can I Create Higher Dynamic Range?

Aside from having absolute perfect light, which we all know is rare, to produce a shot that appears even close to the dynamic range as seen by your eye, you need some help. A shot like this should contain detail not only in midtones, but also in highlights and shadows, and in most cases, especially high-contrast scenes, it won’t happen without the right tools.

Working With Graduated ND Filters

The traditional method for keeping shadow detail without totally blowing out the sky is to use filters, and more specifically, graduated neutral density filters. Back in the film days before Photoshop and Lightroom, if you didn’t get the shot on the film, salvaging it in post-processing was not the possibility it is today, so graduated ND filters were a necessity for landscape photographers. Think about them as partial sunglasses for your camera, and check out the picture on the left (photo credit: Dave77459 via flickr {cc}) and you should get a pretty good idea. I’m not going to go into further detail about using Graduated ND’s as using them is not the point of this article, but I won’t leave you hanging. Check out these articles on Digital Photography School and Wikipedia for a more detailed explanation.
Getting back on topic, in the digital age of today, these filters are not the necessity they once were, because we can now use bracketed exposures and a little post processing magic to gain similar and even better results.

Working With Bracketed Images

First, for those of you who don’t know, I should explain what a bracketed image is. Most of today’s DSLRs have a function called Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB). AEB in conjunction with high-speed shooting mode, takes three, five, or more images in quick succession at different exposure intervals. AEB is useful in tricky exposure situations where speed is key, to take multiple exposures of the same frame and be sure you got the right shot. In this case, we are using it to capture the same high-contrast scene in order to expose for highlights, shadows and midtones with the plan of compositing these shots together later to create an image with a higher dynamic range that better represents what your eyes saw when the shot was taken. Many of you are probably familiar with this concept after reading one of the many HDR tutorials floating around the web, and its the same method you would use when capturing an image you plan to drop into Photomatix, but in this case we are using Lightroom, Photoshop, and our retouching ability to build the best final image we can.

Revisit and Retouch: Grand Cayman Fuel Depot – How I Did It

The challenge posed to CameraPorn readers was to take the three bracketed exposures above and create the best final image they could. For me, the goal was to create something that not only represented the scene as I saw it, but to utilize the retouching skills I’ve learned in the year and half or so since I took the shot. Here are the steps I took:

1. RAW Processing in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom

I began with basic adjustments within Lightroom, my workflow tool of choice. The adjustments made here could also be completed withing Adobe Camera RAW (ACR). The adjustments consisted of:

A. Straightening the horizon, cropping and matching the white balance of each image.
This was accomplished quickly by adjusting just one of the images and using the ‘copy settings’ tool to apply the same changes to the 2 other images.

B. Adjusting Exposure and Contrast of Each image to reflect what I want out of each.
This step was a bit more time consuming. I first looked at the 0EV image, and adjusted it so the histogram showed as little clipping as possible. This way, when I brought it into Photoshop, I would have as much pixel data to work with as possible. I did this by making slight exposure and recovery adjustments. Notice that the histogram doesn’t touch the left or right side, meaning no black or white clipping.As you can see, the image isn’t looking that great yet, but thats ok. Read on….

For the -2EV and +2EV images, I wanted to adjust each only for the part of the image I expected to use when I composited the images together in Photoshop. For the -2EV image, this meant the sky and tanks. I adjusted exposure, blacks, and contrast until they looked as i wanted, ignoring how dark the water was looking because I knew the water would be coming from the other images after compositing. For the +2EV image, I adjusted so the water and rock shadows until they looked as I would want them to after compositing. I used the same methods, along with a bit of highlights and shadows to make the churning water pop a bit more.

C. Export To Photoshop CS3

I then used Lightroom’s integrated Photoshop editing launcher to send each of the images to Photoshop as 16-Bit Tiff files.

2. Stack in One File, Align Layers

So now I’m in Photoshop, with each of the three files open and I need to get them in one unified file. I drag the +2EV and -2EV images into the 0EV image and close the other two files. Next, I need to align the layers. The shots were not taken using a tripod so there is a slight variation in each image, but Photoshops’s CS3’s Align Layers tool makes it an nearly instant process.

3. Composite The Image

Here’s where the real work comes in. To begin, create layer masks for the +2EV and -2EV images.

Next, begin ‘painting’ with the layer mask active with a soft brush on each of the the masked layers to make them show what you want to see from each. For the -2EV layer, I paint over the sky and tanks with a white brush to make them visible. For the +2EV layer, I paint over parts of the water and rocks. Continue to do this until your image begins to look cohesive, and the different layers match. If necessarry, feel free to do some Levels or Curves adjustments to give everything a unified look.

4. Dodging and Burning

Before Dodging & Burning

Instead of using the typical built-in dodge and burn tools of Photoshop CS3, I used a non-destructive method that consists of creating a blank layer on the top of your layer stack. Set the blending mode to ’soft light.’ From there, you can use white and black soft brushes to do some non-destructive dodging and burning. I used this method to bring detail back to dark rocks, brighten the swirling water and tweak the cloud contrast slightly. My dodge and burn layer looked as follows:

And the result after dodging and burning:

5. Spot Removal

Yuck! First of all, to all of the participants in the project, I’m sorry!!!! I know this step must have been a big pain. There were big waves crashing up the seawall next to where I was shooting, and tons of sea spray got on the lens, but I have some good news for next time, there’s an easier way than atacking each spot with the healing brush! Next time, try using the Elliptical Selection tool to select each spot, feather your selection and use the Noise>Dust & Scratches Filter. All the spots, GONE!

6. LAB Color

This is a great method that I picked up from a variety of sources including Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System book as well as Brian Auer’s Epic Edits. For full details, click on Brian’s link, but basically goes like this:

• Flatten Image
• Convert your image to LAB (Image>Mode>LAB)
• Apply Image (Image>Apply Image)
• Play with the settings. I went with Soft Light Blending, Channel B, 70% Opacity.
  
• Once you get the result you want, convert your image back to RGB, and its time for some sharpening… the last step!

7. Sharpening

And we’ve hit the home stretch. You have your flattened image, now its time to sharpen. I used the Unsharp Mask, with the settings: Amount-70%, Radius-1px, Threshold-4 levels.But wait, not done yet. ANother nugget I picked up from the 7 Poitn System, sharpening can cause color halos and artifacts in color images, so directly after the sharpen, click Edit>Fade Unsharp Mask. Select the Luminosity option. This means the sharpening only occurs on the the Luminosity channel, leaving the color channels untouched.

And thats gonna do it.. we are finished and have completed an image with the appearance of higher dynamic range, without the use of HDR softwware cheating ! I hope this brief tutorial has been enough to help you bring more dynamic range and life into your images. If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments. For all you project participants! Expect to see the final results posted soon, and have your work voted on by the readers. Thanks again for participating and here again is the final image.

Brian’s write-up

Well, the entries keep pouring in, and I’m surprised and impressed that each entry has its own unique feel. More entries after the jump…

Scott Gardiner

Scott’s write-up

Eugene Lim

Eugene’s 2nd entry

Eugene’s tutorial

Bill Hurlburt

Bill’s write-up

Kelly Pierce

Kelly’s write-up

2 Days left! The deadline is January 25th so you still have time to get your entry in. Click here for entry details.

The fourth submitted entry for the “Retouch and Revisit” project by Ryan Harvey.

More on this entry, and #4 and #5 after the jump!

Here’s a brief summary on how it was done.

Ryan did great work here, to see more details on how his final image came to be, click here.

Phill Price

Entry #5 by Phill Price.

Phill went the route of working with a single RAW file completely within Lightroom. He accompanied an entry with an excellent write-up on his blog, located here.

Want to give it a go? You still have until January 25th to put your entry together. Click here for entry details.

The second entry for the “Retouch and Revisit” project by Arnoldas Ramonas.

Arnoldas went or a more saturated and colorful look. To view how he did it, click here.

Tim Grimshaw

The third entry for the “Retouch and Revisit” project by Tim Grimshaw.

Tim went in a different direction, creating a dark foreboding scene. To view how he did it, click here.

There’s still over a week before the deadline (January 25th), so you still have plenty of time to enter! Click here for entry details.

Well folks, we’ve received our first entry into the “Retouch and Revisit” Project and wow I’m impressed. To accompany this wonderful image, Ryan did a VERY thorough blog post on his blog, blog.rrdphoto.com. Great work Ryan D. and awesome blog post explaining how you did it. I’m most impressed with the level of detail in general and especially with what he was able to get out of the rocks as well as the dreamy feel of the whole scene. Awesome work. To check out how he did it and see this image larger, click here.

Remember, the deadline for entries isn’t until January 25th, so there’s still plenty of time to take a stab at it. Click here for entry details.

Recently, I’ve found myself looking at older photos I’ve taken, and giving another stab at retouching them. Why retouch again? Well over the last year, I’ve dedicated a lot of my time educating myself in different methods of retouching and with new tricks up my sleeve I can go back and look at older photos with a more critical eye, to make a better final image. One of my favorite retouching methods is using a series of exposure bracketed images to composite a final image.

The image above happened to be one of my favorites from this process, and I thought to myself, why not include the CameraPorn readership and see what your eyes see to make this image the best it can be. After the great fun I had with the Epic Edits Project, “Editing Brian’s Photo,” I realized that everyone looks at any image differently. Throw in 3 bracketed exposures, and the possibilities could be endless.

Full project details, RAW files, and entry information after the jump…

About The Image

The photo I’ve chosen for this project was taken in late 2006 on a visit to Grand Cayman. This happens to be the entire islands supply and entry point for fuel. It was a gorgeous day, right around sunset time, so the light was perfect. It began as three exposure bracketed images shot with a Canon 30D and EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 lens at f/22 for a super-wide depth of field. You may notice some dust spots when you start playing with the RAW images, but actually its bits of sea spray on the filter kicked up from the crashing waves. Keep that in mind when you are retouching As the entries start to come in, I’ll do my own, explaining how I got to the result you see above.

These images are supplied for reference only, drop me a line and I’ll send you the full res RAW images

The Project

The challenge is simple: Download the zip file containing the 3 bracketed RAW files, and create what you think is the perfect final image for the shot. Thats it.

Submitting Your Entry

1. Contact me for the RAW file download link – subject should be “Retouch and Revisit” Tell me a bit about yourself – full name, what you shoot with and anything else you’d like to include.
2. When I get your email, I’ll send you the link to download the RAW files
3. Build your perfect image.
   I’m including the 3 bracketed RAW files for compositing purposes, though this is not required, only recommended. Also, because this is three bracketed exposures, you might be tempted to do a little HDR magic. I’m not going to prohibit this, but as cool as HDR is, its too easy. I’ve done it with this image here back when I was first experimenting. Point is, anybody can throw some raw files into photomatix so if you are gonna bring the hdr, it better be special
4. Publish Your Results – and tell us how you did it.
   Publish to your own blog or site if you have one, or to a photo sharing site like Flickr with a link back to this project page. If thats not possible, let me know and I’ll post your entry here.
5. Once you’re satisfied with your entry, contact me again and I’ll link it up here on CameraPorn
6. Deadline for submission is January 25th, 2008 I’ll be posting everyones results as the project goes, and at the end, we’ll all vote for our favorite.

I guess thats about it. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me. Happy Editing!

As an entry to Jim Goldstein’s most recent blog project, I’ve gone through the painstaking process of trying to pick my 10 Best photos from 2007. Let me tell ya, this was not easy. I am submitting just a bit past the deadline but I hope Jim will still accept my entry. It’s funny how happy hour after work on a friday can make a plan to post by midnight a bit foggy. Anyways, I’d love to hear what you guys think of my picks. All the photos after the jump!

Tobago Sunset
Nikon D300 : 1/200th : f/8 : 52mm : ISO400 : Nikkor 28-70mm f/2.8

Colombian Dancer
Canon 30D : 1/60th : f/2.8 : 24mm : ISO400 : Canon 24mm f/1.4 L

Chris
Nikon D300 : 1/30th : f/2.8 : 70mm : ISO800 : Nikkor 28-70mm f/2.8

Chihuly
Canon 30D : 1/160th : f/3.2 : 50mm : ISO800 : Canon 50mm f/1.4 L

Smiling Eel
Canon 30D : 1/60th : f/2.8 : 70mm : ISO800 : Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L

Chilean Flamingo Parents
Canon 30D : 1/200th : f/4 : 70mm : ISO800 : Canon 300mm f/4 L IS

Lunar Eclipse
Canon 30D : Varied Shutter : f/11 : 70mm : ISO100 : Canon 75-300mm f/4-5.6

Eric McFadden
Canon 30D : 1/125th : f/2.8 : 200mm : ISO800 : Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS

Trini Street Vendor
Canon 30D : 1/250th : f/4 : 70mm : ISO640 : Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 L