Image Info

For this HDR “making of”, 5 exposures were taken with a Nikon D700 + Nikkor AF-S 16-35mm f/4 G ED VR with the following settings:

exposure time: 0.6s (0EV), 1/6s (-2EV), 0.3s (-1EV), 1.3s (+1EV), 2.5s (+2EV)
focal length: 16.0 mm
aperture: F10.0
ISO: 200

Before taking the shot (see location), I waited for a bus to come into the frame for the longest exposure. Fortunately, the Lexus was parked and wasn’t moving in any of the frames, making the contrast between the car/bus trails and the motionless car more striking.

RAW exposures

HDR Exposure (realistic version) processed in Oloneo PhotoEngine

HDR Exposure (extreme version) processed in Oloneo PhotoEngine

The Final Result (full HD wallpaper)

Workshop Announcement

There are still a few places available for Paris HDR workshop on May 21-22nd. If you wish to learn what you’ll see on this video, make sure to make your reservation now!

A workshop will take place on May 28-29 in Nice, France. Official announcement of the workshop in Montreal will be done in June 2011.

The Making Of

The Video

The steps

For this making of, the following steps were undertaken.

1. Image alignment: it so happens from time to time that the tripod is moved slightly in between exposures. To fix this, I used the “load files into stack” script in Photoshop and repasted the corrected TIF into its original file.
2. dual HDR processing in Oloneo PhotoEngine (if you haven’t checked the review, it’s here): The first tonemapping was fairly realistic and would be used as a basis for the image, then a second tonemapping was applied and would be used for certain parts of the image.
3. manual blending of the two HDR generated
4. semi-automatic blending of the sky of one of the exposures using selections composites.
5. manual blending of the bus/car trails and hot spots
6. local contrast adjustments using blending modes such as soft light and normal blending modes
7. sharpening and edge sharpening using low and high radius high pass sharpening
8. special effects

The mini PSD

Want to see how it’s done in Photoshop, email me and I will send you a mini PSD containing all the layers.

Full length video

This full length video of 35+ minutes will be available with text commentary and explanations on the DVD of the HDR workshop. It may be available for individuals, message me for more information and prices.

Creating  a striking portrait is teamwork. It’s about mastering the lighting, having a talent who’s able to convey your vision and the ability to put the talent in the right mind state.Finally, using the right editing techniques is key to achieve the result that you want in the end.

1. Light Setup

This light setup is pretty straightforward. It combines traditional butterfly lighting with the beauty dish just overhead of the model and two back lights very close for more contrast that will be used as hair light and to highlight the jaw line symmetrically. Having the main light around 1 feet from the model makes for a more contrast yet a very soft look. The diffusion sock on the  beauty dish makes it like a round softbox.

If you are curious about this lighting, please go and check Joel Grimes tutorial here. Joel is an amazing commercial photographer from  Arizona who creates stunning portraits using cutting edge techniques.

2. the shoot

Once the lighting is ready, time to bring the model. In that particular example, it wasn’t really a planned portrait session. Brent happened to drop by the studio. We chatted a little bit and I asked him if he’d like me to take a few shots of him. Brent is a unique character and I wanted to bring the intensity he had in him in the photo. As it happens sometimes, the first photo taken was the best one and the photoshoot lasted barely 5min! Having rapport with the model and making him/her extremely comfortable quickly is a key aspect of a successful portrait.

3. the editing

For that particular photo, I wanted to create an edgy look with contrast that matched the lighting.

So before going into details, here is the accelerated video of how I did this portrait in Photoshop. In real-time, getting this result took 37 minutes.

Just before I explain more into depth, I’d like to mention that all my editing is done using a Wacom Tablet (Intuos 3 – 9×12″ around 500$ or Intuos 4 – 4×6″ around 200$). If you think you’ll spend a lot of time editing, get one. Some models from Wacom are really cheap. Tthe tablet gives you the ability to map the opacity or thickness of the brush depending on the pressure and/or the angle of the pen. It’s really really powerful!

Now, the workflow I use is pretty straightforward

Step 1 – Removal of skin blemishes (done in Adobe Camera Raw – not shown here)

Step 2 -Removal of skin imperfections, small hair, red veins in the eyes. I use a lot the healing brush and the clone stamp (mostly in lighten mode to soften shadows).

Step 3 – Eye editing. I like to add a bit more light and contrast, the amount depending on the type of portrait done. It’s done using curves adjustment layers and using screen bending mode to lighten and soft light to add contrast.

Step 4 – Contouring. Contouring is a form of dodging and burning to create shape and highlight face features in a portrait. It’s done using curves adjustments layers and switching blending modes to screen (to lighten) and multiply (to darken).

Step 5 – General curves adjustments. I use levels and curves adjustment layers and a mask based on channels luminosities to affect mostly shadows and midtones and not highlights.

Step 6 – Tonal contrast adjustment. In this example, it’s done using a black and white adjustment layer and using the soft light blending mode. Using high pass sharpening helps also bring more contrast.

Step 7 – Sharpening. In this example, high pass sharpening was used.

The core of the workflow does not change. It’s pretty straightforward.

4. the final result

Here is the final image, with a few corrections compared to the end image of the video.

Thanks for viewing!

Now first,what is the BLUE HOUR??? Well according to wikipedia:

The blue hour comes from a French expression, l’heure bleue, which refers to the period of twilight each morning and evening where there is neither full daylight nor complete darkness. The time is considered special because of the quality of the light at this time of day. The blue hour is considered especially flattering for people with blond hair in photography and is often also when the smell of the flowers is at its strongest during the summertime.

Pretty simple, though if you want a more precise and technical definition, the blue hour happens usually starts 30 minutes after sunset and 30 minutes before sunrise. The duration of the blue hour is generally around 30 minutes. For a better experience, it’s best to go shooting just after it has stopped raining. Also, the quality of light at the blue hour is usually at its best during fall season. At this time of the year, it looks almost like the sky is glowing.

Blue Hour on Old Montreal Skyline - Fall 2007

• SCOUT: Because you don’t have much time to shoot at the blue hour, you MUST plan for it and the first step is finding locations where you’ll be able to shoot different angles in 30-45min! Scouting will also help you frame the photos in your head when the sun is up and get a good feeling of distances. Squares and waterfronts or look-outs are usually the best places to achieve this rather easily. Oh one more thing, the blue hour starts to the east and progresses to the west, plan accordingly.

• USE GOOGLE MAPS and FLICKR: Well, if you can’t scout because you’re only be going there on vacation, use Google Maps to view the orientation of the locations photographed and check flickr for the best shooting locations (not doing so would be idiotic, finding new locations of places you don’t know is pretty challenging and remember that the clock is ticking… 30 minutes of good shooting!)

Blue Hour on Portland Skyline, Oregon, USA - FALL 2009

• WEATHER: If you want to get the best results, pick a day without smog. Shoot a day after it has stopped raining, The sky will be clean of most particles and impurities.

• PREPARE YOUR GEAR:

• Take your tripod: Exposures at ISO 100 and F/8.0 usually go between 4-30 seconds
• Take your remote trigger release to avoid vibrations
• Clean your lenses and put the hood to avoid flare
• Mount the lens you will most likely use ( I use a Sigma 10-20mm for architecture shoots and 17-50mm for landscapes or cityscapes)
• Set the camera to Aperture priority mode or Manual mode, ISO 200 or below (you really don’t want noise in the blue sky because of high ISO).
• Use a circular polarizer if you shoot on the shore of a river or lake (remove it once it lengthen exposures besides 30s).
• Take a bubble level

Blue Hour on Notre Dame de Paris, France

• BE ON LOCATION EARLY: I always try to be on location early (30 minutes) for two simple reasons:
  1. If I couldn’t scout, it leaves me time to check for alternate locations
  2. I’m totally relaxed. I usually bring a book with me and read while the sun is going down.

• USE A LEVEL: I always have a bubble level on my flash hotshoe to make sure the camera is levelled.

Blue Hour on Monpazier, Dordogne, Perigord, France

• BRACKET: even if you don’t plan on blending exposures in Photoshop or doing HDRs, bracketing make sure you won’t miss any exposure. Take as many possible as possible.

• EXPOSE CORRECTLY: If you use matrix metering, in aperture priority, compensate between 0.7 and 1.5ev. Otherwise shoot in manual mode and check the result at the back at the camera so that you don’t have too many dark shadows. The histogram should have a clear dome at its left (which means you haven’t clipped the shadows too much and that the image is not too dark!

Blue Hour on Seattle Skyline, Washington, USA

• INCREASE YOUR AWARENESS: You want to make great photos, relax, breathe and feel the smell in the air, the wind on your skin, the flow of water and let your intuition guide you.

• RUN!!!: Damn it does not last long so if you can, train yourself at being able to run like a crazy monkey with a big tripod looking for your next shot! LOL

Blue hour at Union Square, San Francisco, USA

Now this is not over. Taking the photos is a good thing, but processing them is key to get the best results… stay tuned for part 2!!!

Book me for:

• a portrait session or a portfolio, or
  
• an assignment (architecture/urban landscape), or
  
• a Photoshop training lesson (english and french)

View my portfolio and contact me now!

Photos and videos are all rights reserved – David Giral 2010.

• Snowy backyard somewhere on the Plateau Mont-Royal

• Snowy alley of the Plateau Mont-Royal

I’ve always loved those lonely photo walks, listening to audio books, while trying to find secret places and different angles to what everybody has already photographed. I’ve had already come by that book store and taken a photo but never published it. On that night, it was really different, when I saw the bookstore again, with the yellow light coming from inside the store against the white snow and the blue sky, it really made an impression. It was the right moment to take a photo. After figuring out the perspective I wanted, I then set up my tripod in the middle of the road, took a look left and right to make sure no one would run me over and then took 3 different exposures (from 1.6 to 6s) with my Nikon D300 and a Sigma 10-20mm zoomed at 16mm and F/10.0.

I knew that this photo had something more than the others I took that night. When I get that feeling,  I usually like to wait a few days or months to process the photos, because I want it to reflect exactly the impressions I had that night. Like I say to my friends, it’s not about the technique, it’s about using the technique to reflect what your feelings were and just go with your intuition. Like demonstrated below, I don’t see HDR as a technique, my photomatix processing is really basic and the core of what I do is micro-contrast management using curves until I get the result that I want, without any second thoughts. This particular example mixed HDR and DRI and a bit of Photoshop. Enjoy!

• Final result:

• Baseline exposure:

• Making Of:

Book me for:

• a portrait session or a portfolio, or
  
• an assignment (architecture/urban landscape), or
  
• a Photoshop training lesson (english and french)

View my portfolio and contact me now!

Photos and videos are all rights reserved – David Giral 2010.

Photoshop portrait retouching is everywhere: in blogs, newspapers, magazines. With the development of online tutorials, plug-ins and actions, access to the skill has become easier than ever.

However, like all skills, learning how to balance each adjustment is not that as easy as it may seem and experience is key. It can also depends on the context in which the portrait has been taken (one just has to look at some of these editing disasters to see that trying to cut on the quality can really hurt you) .  Each client has his/her own opinion on how the editing should be done which can make it hard for the photographer to do his/her job properly. It is the photographer’s responsibility to find the right balance in editing. A good example being that an older woman might not like to have all her wrinkles edited or smoothed out, as it creates an unrealistic and unrecognizable version of herself.

In my opinion, retouching has to look effortless and not photoshopped. Attention to details is a must-have too. As beginners, we all made the mistakes of over-whitening the teeths and eyes, overs-moothing the skin or just remove all traces of imperfections. But little things that we might removed like birthmarks are what makes an indiividual in the first place.

Now let’s come back to this portrait. The model is Robyn, independant model/makeup artist/designer and owner of the blog fashionista514.com. She will also be featuring this makeover over on her blog so go check what she has to say on the subject.  It was our first time meeting each other and we only had 10 minutes for a quick headshot session. The very classic lighting setup consisted of a Alien Bees AB800+ Beauty dish on a boom above camera (butterfly lighting). Fill was provided by a 5in1 gold reflector held at the waist level by Robyn.  Robyn makeup was close to being perfect especially with a red lipstick (MAC Ruby Woo) featuring an amazing texture.

Now, before you watch the video and the final result on bigger scale, here is the breakdown of the retouching steps:

1. Blemishes removal and exposure adjustment (Adobe Camera Raw): 7min
2. Skin repair : 11min
3. Small hair removal: 8min
4. eyes cleanup: 5min
5. Difficult small hair removal part 2: 9 min
6. Wrinkles/shadows softening: 8 min
7. Necklace removal: 3 min
8. Eyes brightening: 8 min
9. Lips contouring: 3 min
10. Face contouring: 4 min
11. Contrast adjustments: 1 min
12. Skin softening: 4 min
13. Sharpening: 6 min
14. Digital makeup: 1 min

Total time:  67 minutes

Video duration: 9min33 (short version is available here) – music by Jansen: Staring At The Sun Feat Percy-Duke Dbn Remix.

As illustrated here, creating high quality photos takes time (30min to the very least for really high quality editing) and justifies the fees most photographers charge. Next time you book a photoshoot, make sure you ask what kind of retouching is provided.

Here is the final image:

Thanks for viewing!

The following photowas actually the first one taken that night afternoon using a Nikon D300 and a Sigma 10-20mm all zoomed out at 10mm. My main concern when I took this photo was to make sure I had the all shed on the right of the image along with the perspective of the alley.

• Photo after retouching

• Photo before retouching

Processing involved accentuating the lack of colors through a partial black and white conversion except for the rusted scene and make the scene feel more real and textured through contrast enhancement.

• Unedited video of the whole processing (Music by Guitar Flute and String, Moby) – real time 15 min:

Book me for:

• a portrait session or a portfolio, or
  
• an assignment (architecture/urban landscape), or
  
• a Photoshop training lesson (english and french)

View my portfolio and contact me now!

Photos and videos are all rights reserved – David Giral 2010.

The problem with HDR photos and panoramas is that editing strip the resulting files of their EXIF data.

Here is a simple video detailing the different steps to keep the EXIF data in your files.

The format that you use for saving does not influence the end result. I hope it helped.

Thank you for watching!

Happy new Year 2010!!

Before I start to explain the process used to create the above photograph, I wanted to thank Krista (an actress from Toronto whom I met during a Lighting Essentials workshop, visit her website here) for being such a good sport having endured the cold temperature of Montreal at the end of November with such grace. She is a fun and dynamic person fun to work with.

This specific photo was taken at the end of the shooting and as we were about to walk back to the coffee shop for a well deserved rest and a hot coffee, I was struck by the beauty of the stairs and the different textures of the side of this building located in the Ghetto McGill in Montreal.

I had bring my tripod and after taking a few photos, I decided to setup my Nikon D200 with a Tamron 17-50mm F/2.8. Before putting Krista into the frame, I took a few photos to make sure I was underexposed from 1.5 stops then I asked Krista to sit at the bottom at the stairs and act a little worried as if she was looking at someone upstairs, I then positionned my SB-900 with Speedlight Pro Kit diffuser and took this shot.

then, I asked her to go up the stairs and look down as if she was spying on a person downstairs and I adjusted the flash so it would lighten her a dialed it up a little in power.

For the last part, I wanted her to act as if she was intrigued by the whole scene. This time I had to move the flash.

I had to use a fourth image to cover the location where the flash was in Photoshop.

Then when all was packed and that everybody was warm at home, I started by putting each photo on a different layer and started masking so that the flash and lightstand would disappear. The lighting looks a bit surreal, but that was what I was aiming for.

Once it was done, I started adjusting contrast, tones and colours using adjustment layers (curves and black and white) and blending modes (color dodge for the door). I then went on adding some tonal contrast using high pass sharpening with a high radius. I added a few more effects after web resizing.

Here is a video showing the different steps involved:

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to check my portfolio and my stock photos at http://www.davidgiralphoto.com

This specific photo was taken on Christmas Eve 2009 on a fairly overcast weather. I used a Nikon D300 and a Sigma 10-20mm all zoomed out at 10mm to make sure I captured the whole scene. I used a tripod to be able to stay at low ISO. The exposure lasted 2.5 seconds at F/10.0 and ISO 200.

Retouching involved mainly curves and levels adjustments in order to increase contrast on the whole image as well as locally.

• Photo after retouching

• Photo before retouching

• Video showing the adjustments done on each adjustment layer in Photoshop.

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to check my portfolio and my stock photos at http://www.davidgiralphoto.com

During my last trip to San Francisco, I had the opportunity to take a few photos at the blue hour in San Francisco before heading out on a road trip to Seattle, Wa.

The photo above was taken at Union Square and pictures the amazing facade of Macy’s store along Geary Street.

The three photos used were taken at 13mm with a Sigma 10-20mm lens mounted on a D300 and a Gitzo tripod. Exposures ranged from 1.6, 0.8 and 6s.

The particular challenge with this pĥoto was to correct
1- Level the photo accurately,
2- Correct the perspective using the lens distortion filter,
3- Blend the photos together via layers.
4- make various corrections.

Here is the making of of this photo – 3min 10s  (22 min in realtime) :

Enjoy!

Don’t forget to check my portfolio and my stock photos at http://www.davidgiralphoto.com