preparation checklist

• tripod
• camera that can burst shots at a decent rate (this shot was at 3fps)
• remote release (not essential but it helps)
• girlfriend’s reckless brother
• most importantly: a cape

first thing to do is to set up your tripod and camera in an area where your subject isn’t going to fall out of frame. just try to imagine how high and far your subject will jump and just to be safe go a little bit wider cause you can always crop later.

Next set focus so that your subject remains in focus throughout the entire series of frames. this isn’t really hard if your sensor is parallel to the trajectory, but if your subject is jumping towards or away from the camera a bit then you’ll have to set a wider depth of field. lock the focus of the camera so that when you start snapping the shots your camera doesn’t try to refocus cause that would be a huge waste of everyone’s time.

be sure to have a fast enough shutter speed to freeze the motion. if it’s not fast enough amp up the iso or open your aperture wider. in this shot i don’t think i used a fast enough shutter speed, but at the same time i like that there’s a bit of motion in each frame. so it’s up to you really.

at this point you’re pretty much ready to give the signal. i like to use a remote so that there’s no camera shake introduced by holding down the shutter on the camera body, but in this particular case it’s not really a big deal cause any minimal camera shake will be hidden in post processing.

yell out an a-ok and hold down the shutter release. you’ll end up with the following:

frame 1	frame 2
frame 3	frame 4
frame 5	Animated

notice how in the animation there’s all sorts of movement in the water and tree. that sucks. we’ve gotta do something about that.

post processing
open your files in your raw processor and ensure that all the settings are the same in each frame. same white balance, crop, saturation, exposure, etc. open each image in photoshop and stack each frame on top of each other like so:

each frame save frame 1 has to be masked so that all that’s revealed is the subject that’s moving. add a layer mask to frames 2 through 5 and paint each layer mask black so that the frames are completely hidden and frame 1 is visible.

now starting with frame 2 take a soft brush with white ink and start revealing your subject.

the masking doesn’t have to be really precise because for the most part each frame is very similar. just try to stay relatively close except in the cases where there is overlap such as where the cape in frame 2 overlaps frame 1. those areas require a tight mask so take your time with those spots.

repeat this process for each frame and then apply whatever other post processing you want to do, but remember that when you sharpen you have to flatten the layers otherwise you’ll have to apply the same sharpening to each layer separately and that’s just inefficient.

view the final image at thinsite

also check out mute’s and bluehour’s explanations of the same technique.

sharpening with the smart sharpen filter
i’ve ditched the unsharp mask in favour of the smart sharpen filter. if you’re currently sharpening with unsharp mask i’d suggest you ditch it too. with the smart sharpen filter you can save your settings and you can selectively sharpen highlights and shadows independantly thereby enabling you to apply more sharpening without producing crazy amounts of haloing.

that said, with some images you simply can’t avoid a bit of halo around those high contrast edges. i find that it’s not much of a bother except for where the sky meets the foreground.

so, in those cases where i can anticipate that halos will be a byproduct of sharpening i’ll duplicate my image layer and make sure that my duplicate layer is selected before opening the smart sharpen filter. you’ll see why later.

above are the typical sharpen settings i’ll use for 99% of the images i’ll post to thinsite. set the Remove method to Lens Blur cause i think it does the best job of minimizing halos and tick the More Accurate checkbox because why would you want to be less accurate? the real power of the smart sharpen filter is in its ability to control shadow and highlight sharpening independantly so click that Advanced radio button cause you’re no n00b… you’re a photoshop champ. here are the two tabs as i set them for this particular image:

this is where a bit of experimenting comes in. increasing the fade amount and tonal width reduces the amount of sharpening applied so slide around until you get the look you’re after. it’s easy to lose perspective so i click the preview checkbox on and off all the time and see what effect the sharpening is having on the workspace. in this case i was looking for a somewhat sharp effect to emphasize the grit and rust of the tank so i’m mostly unconcerned with the amount of haloing introduced at this point. go nuts.

removing the halos
so now that the duplicate layer is crispy sharp we’ve gotta remove those jaggy halo bits. simply grab your eraser tool and with a small radius and medium edge erase the halos on the duplicate layer thereby allowing the unsharpened original layer underneath to peak through. that’s it. there’s nothing more to it. here are the individual steps from this particular image to illustrate the process. the differences are subtle so you might have to look closely at where the coil meets the sky. in my opinion it’s these little details that you can easily incorporate into your workflow that make a world of difference.

original without sharpening	sharpened duplicate layer
sharpened duplicate with halos erased	original and duplicate combined

a note on why sharpening comes last and only last
sharpening is an essential final step in the workflow of any image regardless of whether it’s going for print or web. this is especially true if you shoot in RAW where the camera will not apply any in-camera sharpening. however, when you process your RAW file your convertor will likely have a default sharpening setting. i’m a bit of a control freak so i don’t let my RAW processor apply sharpening. also, i’ll be resizing the image to fit for web so whatever sharpening applied at full resolution will likely be lost in resizing.

typically the way this effect is achieved in photoshop is by adding a curves adjustment layer and drawing a reverse s-curve on the blue channel, but when i’m looking to add a modest cross processing look i’ll just use a blue colour fill layer with its opacity method set to exclusion.

let’s compare

image prior to either effect
reverse s-curve
lazy way

now, it’s not an exact match, but in this case i prefer the lazy way cause it’s less vibrant and i wanted the photo to look somewhat dull. also, i find that the lazy way is more condusive to experimenting cause it’s easier to adjust the hue of the blue and the opacity of the layer cause both settings are on your layers palette whereas if you’re using the curves method you have to close the curves adjustment palette each time you want to adjust opacity.

before any film guys jump down my throat, i realize that neither of the shown methods are a true match to what one could expect from say C-41 as E-6 or E-6 as C-41, but that’s not the point. if that’s what you’re after then there are other tutorials out there that’ll show you how to do just that. this is simply for adding a touch of the effect and making experimentation a bit faster.

view the lazy way full sized

capturing hdr shots
technically, a tripod will make any hdr shot better, but i really hate using a tripod so i’ll often just machine gun it if there’s enough light to handhold three quick shots. in a situation like this there’s no way i could get away with handholding it so out came the tripod and remote. i set my bracket as wide as my camera will go and manually underexposed by a 1 1/3 stops cause in this shot there was only about a half hour left of light and wanted to capture the fact that it was sunset.

overexposed by 1/3 stop

underexposed by 1 1/3 stops

underexposed by 3 stops

some tips: focus lock. don’t trust your camera to focus the exact same between exposures. if you don’t use focus locking then focus once and set your lens to manual focus until you’re done taking all 3 shots shoot in aperture priority. if the depth of field changes from shot to shot then it’s gonna look like bunk. amp that iso. if your underexposed shot is slower than your shutter’s maximum shutter length, then up that iso until it’ll fit within your shutter’s capabilities.

it’s important to remember that if you capture the original bracketted shots as raw then when converting your raw file you gotta make sure that your raw processor doesn’t go willy nilly adjusting stuff for you. the only thing that should be consistent from shot to shot is the white balance and the sharpening and by sharpening i mean don’t sharpen it. that’s the last step.

merging your bracketted shots into a single hdr exposure
everytime that i’ve tried photoshop’s merge to hdr feature i’ve been underwhelmed by the results so i wouldn’t bother with it. go ahead and load up photomatix and open your three exposures. press ctrl-g to merge to hdr. let photomatix do it’s thing and you’ll end up with a terrible looking exposure. don’t panic. go to the hdri menu and choose tone mapping.

there are a whack of settings you can adjust and truth be told i usually just fiddle until the exposure looks the way i want it to. typically i’ll set smoothing to high which is what i think a lot of the flickr hdr group forget to do. when the smoothing is medium or low it creates terrible halos usually… well, at least in my experience. typically i think hdr shots end up with too much colour saturation so i’ll pull back on the strength and colour saturation sliders to make the shot look less like a candy wonderland.

here are the options i used for this particular shot. the options have been reorganized a bit to make it fit better in this tutorial.

and the result:

save it as a tiff and fire up photoshop.

post processing in photoshop
at this point i’m not at all happy with the image. it looks like bad flea market art that i wouldn’t spend a dime on so it’s time to touch it up a bit with photoshop to create the mood that i think is more in line with the shot.

i’ll outline the reason and result behind each adjustment layer, but for now here’s the final photoshop pallette:

and now the nitty gritty

	selective color adjustment layer: i often start with a selective colours adjustent layer to adjust the black level of each colour. most times i’ll only adjust the black levels of the black and white colours, but in this case i adjusted most colours cause i find that hdr shots can often look soupy and not have enough separation between the different colours of the spectrum. this isn’t an exact science so just play with it until you’re happy with the results. here’s what i used: reds +100%, yellows +30%, greens 0%, cyans +45%, blues +100%, magentas +100%, whites -50%, neutrals 0%, black +100%
	gradient map adjustment layer: this part might seem a bit counter productive because in the previous step i made the colours richer and now i’m about to take a bunch of colour out, but really the purpose of the previous step was to create better separation of colours not stronger hues.i like using a black to white gradient map to desaturate an image. it always does a better job than the actual desaturate command. i adjust the opacity of this layer to 60% so that there’s still lots of colour coming through. unfortunately this took more of the reds and yellows out than i wanted so set the opacity of my brush to 25% and painted some of the reflections on the water back in.
	levels adjustment layer: the levels adjustment layer was a bit of an afterthought cause i wasn’t satisfied with the depth of the black in the shot so i just pulled in the shadow input level to 20
	gradient fill adjustment layer: i think the downfall of a lot of hdr images is the terrible halo effect that often shows up between the highlight and the shadow. there wasn’t much of it in this shot and to be prefectly honest the sun was setting in the direction of the shot so there was a natural gradient to the sky when i photographed it, but still, i didn’t like the sky as it was and i wanted to darken it a bit.i created a linear gradient fill from black to transparent starting at the top of the frame. the scale is set to 50% cause there wasn’t that much sky showing and with the palette open i positioned the gradient towards the top of the frame. the overlay method is set to hard light but the effect is too strong so i turned down the opacity to 40%. because of the treeline a lot of the gradient spilled into the foreground which looks really odd so a layer mask is required to separate the foreground from the background.
	colour fill adjustment layer: the image is quite blue at this point which is not much like it was in real life where it was mostly lit by incandescent street lights so i wanted some warmth put back into the shot. the colour fill adjustment layer is a warm brown (r175 g82 b0) with opacity set to 40% and the overlay method set to soft light.

the final step was to create a touch of a vignette, but i’ll skip over that part cause it’s pretty simple and maybe i’ll cover it in another mini tutorial.

resizing / sharpening for posting to the web
after i’m satisfied with the outcome (sometimes doesn’t happen) i resize to whatever size is suitable for posting on the web. the image is resized to 900×600 using the bicubic method cause i don’t trust photoshop’s bicubic sharper method. i’ll handle the sharpening thank you very much photoshop.

this image looks susceptible to those nasty halos that often show up where the foreground meets the background so in cases like this i’ll duplicate the image and sharpen the duplicated layer.

using the smart sharpen tool i normally set the sharpening amount to 85% with a radius of 1px. i then tweak the shadow and highlight sharpening to create a subtle but sharp look. in this particular case shadow sharpening is set to 20% fade amount, 50% tonal width, and 1 px radius. the highlight sharpening as pictured below is set to 20% fade amount, 70% tonal width, and 1 px radius.

now we’ve got a sharpened image with halos on top of the unsharpened image. next, on the sharpened layer i use my eraser tool to trace along the edges of the halos that i want to remove thereby allowing the unsharpened edges of the original image come through. that’s it. now it’s saved and ready for the glory that is the thinsite photoblog.

click here for the final image