thefrogman:

sirfrogsworth:

Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn’t even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun’s light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).

Additional Observations

So, I woke up about 4 minutes before the eclipse. I was very unprepared to photograph it in the normal quality you’d expect from a photographer. However, I did capture some interesting details that I thought I’d share beyond the lack of polarized light.

First up… the shadows.

The shadows were very sharp. In photography there is this concept of light going from a spectrum of hard to soft. Hard light has very high contrast and sharp shadows. Soft light is more flattering and diffused with softer shadows.

To get hard light and sharp shadows you need a small “point” light source. A point light can either be very small or it can be very far away or a combination thereof.

In the studio you could use a bare bulb flash to get a point source.

Or you can attach a modifier like a softbox to create a large light source. The bigger, the softer.

The sun is massive, but it is also super duper far away. So it ends up being the smallest point light source available. However, the atmosphere can scatter and diffuse that light, essentially “enlarging” the light source.

To get perfect hard light shadows you need to go to… the moon.

But the eclipse blocked out about 99% of the sun and it reduced the amount of scattered light. And it greatly reduced the size of the light source causing some very defined sharp shadows.

But not *all* of the shadow was sharp. My left shoulder is very defined but my right shoulder is a bit fuzzy.

You can see it on my fingers too.

Sharp on one side, soft on the other.

This is essentially because the sun has been split into two different light sources in two different directions.

In one direction you have a larger light source causing softer shadows.

And in the other direction you have a smaller light source causing sharper shadows.

In photography we have these strip softboxes that we usually place behind a subject to create an edge light.

Only a narrow, small band of light is hitting the body. If we were to use a strip box to light a face, it would be a small light source creating sharp shadows.

But one trick we can do is to turn the strip light horizontal.

Now the light source hitting the face is large as it wraps around the head.

So a long and narrow light source is essentially large and small simultaneously. And depending on the direction the light is coming from it is either hard or soft light.

Destin from Smarter Every Day explained this phenomenon briefly in his eclipse video.

I also think this large and small light source phenomenon affected my lens flares when I photographed the sun.

In this photo it literally looks like I’m getting starburst flares from two light sources.

And in this photo the flares have a sharp bright edge as well as a dimmer more diffused area.

Normally these starburst flares (caused by light leaking through the metal aperture blades in the lens) have more homogenous tines without that feathering effect.

And then I noticed a different kind of flare in my photos—with all the colors of the rainbow.

And each band of color matched the crescent shape of my partial eclipse.

Like a camera obscura, these flares were in reverse orientation to the crescent sun. And while I wasn’t able to get the sun in sharp focus, the purple section of the flare is very defined. I think that represents approximately how much of the sun was covered by the moon at my location—about 130 miles from totality.

I am a student of light. That is essentially what photography is. And I found this to be a fascinating lesson on how bonkers light can be. I was a little bummed I couldn’t road trip to southern Missouri to see totality, but I am grateful to still have a cool eclipse experience.

I wanted to add some quick corrections to this post.

In trying to understand this phenomenon better and also discussing it with another person on tumblr (check notes if you want to read the discussion) I thought it best to clarify a few things for the sake of accuracy.

First, I probably should have said the light during an eclipse is significantly *differently* polarized.

And while that change in polarization is responsible for the sky being much more saturated, the ground colors being more saturated turns out to be more of a coincidence.

Even though the greens look exactly the same as through a circular polarizer on a normal sunny day as they did during the eclipse, they are more saturated due to our eyes seeing things that way in dim environments.

So the sky was more purple-blue due to the change in light polarization.

And the decrease in overall luminance caused the change in saturation on the ground.

I also said starbursts are caused by light “leaking” through aperture blades in the lens and I should have said “bending around.”

For the vast majority of camera lenses, when the aperture gets smaller it does not create a perfect circle. There are little corners where light can diffract around and cause the pointy spikes. Lenses with an odd number of aperture blades will give twice as many spikes as the number of said blades.

The second and third examples below are typical apertures in modern lenses.

I do try to be as accurate as possible and I did double and triple check a lot of the information in this post, but I guess I missed those things.

My apologies.

Thanks to @misanthropic-mollusc and @tedkaczynskiofficial to spotting these errors.

sirfrogsworth:

Now these are the neighborhood updates I was hoping for.

Finally this app is paying off.

We haven’t had this much excitement in our area since the Mad Pooper of 2013.

I think I will dub this dubious defecator The Duece Dropper.

I have summited the top of the alliteration mountain. This is my masterpiece. It’s all downhill from here.

The Vanish

sirfrogsworth:

There is a trope in movies where a character disappears after a vehicle, object, or people move in front of them. It’s a cool move. Very ninja-like. 

Unfortunately, I think my brain has ruined all of those scenes for me. 

A while back I was watching this trope unfold in a movie and my brain was like, “I wonder what that would have looked like from behind.” 

My imagination spooled up and the only possibility was that the character do a goofy sprint alongside a bus. 

Turns out, any of these scenes would look ridiculous from the other direction. And now almost as a reflex, my brain imagines the reverse angle every time it happens and I can’t help but giggle.   

It’s been several years since I made this post. I don’t even remember making it and had no idea how popular it became.

And after all this time, I’m still imagining the other side…

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:

Photo Restoration Project - Part 1

A long time ago, Katrina sent me some old photos of her family I could restore. Her parents have been helping me from afar for years and I really wanted to do something nice for them. Unfortunately my dad got much worse and I pretty much forgot about this project for quite some time.

But then I decided to visit Katrina in Orlando and we discussed having dinner with her parents and I remembered these photos. So I thought I would fix them up so I could present them as a gift in person.

The first and most important photo was from her parents wedding.

Old photo prints can fade over time due to UV light exposure. From what I understand, different colors fade at different rates and red/orange tones tend to be the least susceptible to this fading. Thankfully all of the color information is still there, it’s just that the darks are not as dark and the lights are not as light. The dynamic range got squeezed like an accordion. However, if you do a levels adjustment on the red, blue, and green channels individually, you can unsqueeze the accordion and balance everything back to the way it was.

But you can’t always save everything and there may be other damage that needs fixing. If something becomes pure white, there is no way to restore that detail. Thankfully I was able to use the new generative fill feature to bring back detail in the dress, the flowers, and the tuxedo shirt.

And because I hate front facing flash and how it makes colors look ugly and sterile, I may have also added a marble floor and pillars.

Next up was a photo of Anastasia, Katrina’s mom, protesting Henry Kissinger on behalf of her home country of Greece. This suffered from the same color fading issues.

What made this one a little more tricky was an uneven fading. The left side had to be adjusted independently and the top was even more faded. I had to isolate the trees to bring back their color. And the protest signs were difficult to read, so I enhanced those as well.

Next we have this lovely photo of Anastasia tending to some house plants.

This photo was actually in decent shape. It lost a little contrast, had a little bit of fading, and her top retained almost no detail I could recover. Recovering accurate skin tones is probably one of the most important skills I learned when restoring these photos. I wanted to keep that filmic look of the era while avoiding making people look jaundiced or pale. Lightroom’s new masking feature that let’s you isolate every aspect of the people it detects in a photo. This made fixing skin tones much easier. I could isolate just her face or her lips or her hair or her eyes and make precise individual adjustments. This process could have taken a great deal longer without this feature. But, I brought back proper contrast and color, added a little bit of detail to her top with gen fill, and hopefully got fairly accurate skin tones as well.

Next up, forward facing flash strikes again in a photo of Mike and Anastasia during Christmas.

Film did not do well in low light. If it was indoors and nighttime, you pretty much had no choice but to use flash. But a flash is a very small, bright light source and this causes a very unflattering result on humans. Today we have much more powerful flashes with rotating heads. We can bounce the light into the ceiling or off a wall and increase the size of the light source to get a more flattering result.

In this photo I wasn’t able to do much, so I just balanced the skin tones and brought out some hidden detail and called it a day. It’s still a lovely memory and thankfully film has such character that it negates a lot of the unflattering aspects of direct flash.

Next up is some cuteness…

A big priority when editing photos is to make sure the subjects are the star of the photo. And in this one their faces were a bit obscured in shadow. There was also a lot of haze in the background hiding the beautiful vista. Not to mention when I cleared that haze, there was this super faint hint of something in the sky. I can’t tell if it was a rainbow, but I decided to believe it was a rainbow. The only thing that I am still struggling with, and this seems to be common with a lot of old photos, is green. Getting a good, saturated, natural green to look right has been very difficult. Everything I try ends up looking toxic or fake. The only thing that ends up looking right with the rest of the photo is more of a yellow-y brown. It’s something I’ll have to work on as I learn, but as long as the overall photo looks balanced and natural, I’m okay with not perfectly nailing the greens.

Up next we have a lovely scene on a Greek dock…

As far as editing goes, this was pretty basic. I just undid the fading, adjusted the skin tones, replaced the blown-out sky, and made the colors pop. But I think this is actually one of my favorite before and after shots. I just love how such a simple fix brought this scene to life.

A new car is a big deal and Anastasia looks so proud here…

This image has another common issue in addition to the typical fading of colors. It has a yellowish orange color cast. This could have been an issue with the film used or the development process or a chemical reaction on the print. A color cast is a lot like looking through colored glasses. It’s like a translucent color material was put on top of the image. This can be a little trickier to deal with, but if you know your color theory, you might already know the solution. Blue is the opposite of yellow/orange on the color wheel, so if you introduce blue to the image it should balance out. Also, add a sky if it was missing.

Next up we have a landscaping project…

This one wasn’t too tricky, but there was one interesting issue I had to address. All light has a color temperature. Daylight has a temperature of around 5500K. But the inside of the garage was being lit by reflected light and so that light took on the color temperature of the things it was bouncing off of. So I had to mask out the people and the car and address the color temperature inside the garage to make everything look balanced. Also, the green fought me hard on this one. And with the theme of this picture being plants, I felt I really needed to find a tone that worked. I think I finally got there, but I spent way too much time in the color picker doing trial and error of green tones. Also, new sky.

With this next one I actually did a pretty thorough explanation of how I edited it. But this was probably my favorite puzzle to solve from this collection of photos.

I’ll do the abridged explanation…

The physical photograph was printed on a paper with a very heavy texture. And when it was scanned, the light from the scanner bounced off that texture and created a pattern of unwanted highlights.

I was worried this was impossible to fix and I almost gave up on this photo. But after one final Google search I discovered something called “Fast Fourier Transform.” It’s a mathematical formula that can be used to detect patterns. And the image editing software Affinity Photo, just so happens to have a filter called FFT denoise that helps you remove unwanted patterns from scanned photos.

And thanks to that filter, I was able to remove a substantial amount of that pattern…

Then I did my standard clean up techniques…

Oh, and I decided to try learning how to colorize.

Photoshop has a new set of experimental filters and a colorization tool is one of them. It is not great yet, but it is a great starting place. Instead of having to hand paint every single thing in the photo, Photoshop gave me a base to work with and I could take it from there with traditional techniques.

That’s all I have the energy for today, but there are a bunch of cool restorations to talk about. Hopefully you all find this interesting. It was such a great gift to give to Katrina’s parents. And spending that time with them and making them happy felt like I was with my own parents again. So we all got a gift in that wonderful evening.

Part 2 coming as soon as I have the energy!

Part 2: The Grand Peaks of Boca Raton

Next up we have these two very serious youngins who are now less young.

I loved the tone of this photo. Not quite sepia, not quite black and white. This is a really well done photo, even for modern times. The lighting is wonderful and I love the posing and environment. I would be proud to have taken this photo even today. The eyes are so beautiful and haunting.

This mostly needed clean up work. I had to fix some physical damage and I spent a long time with the remove tool getting rid of specks. You would not believe how much of restoration is just zapping specks. I had to convert it to black and white and then manually add that cool tone back but I’m pretty sure I got it to where it was without all of that… speckitude.

This is Katrina’s grandpa sporting a mustache he didn’t know would be regrettable later in life. For his sake, we’ll call it “The Chaplin.”

I wanted to preserve the look of this being a physical photograph with edges, so I didn’t crop. I kept the sepia-like tonality as well. But when I fixed the contrast and exposure, there was a very rough and uneven texture.

None of my normal techniques could eliminate this texture without sacrificing a lot of detail and blurring the image. Since the image was already soft, I was having trouble figuring out what to do.

Then I thought about Imagenomic Portraiture, which is a high end skin retouching filter. While it can be used to obliterate pores and create unrealistically smooth skin, its actual intended use is to reduce detail caused by modern optics and high megapixel sensors.

While skin isn’t supposed to be featureless porcelain, we typically don’t notice one another’s vellus hairs and pores. But the immense detail caused by modern cameras can make pores look like canyons and vellus hairs look like beards. So you use skin smoothing techniques (sometimes called frequency separation) to turn down the volume on that detail just in the spots where the camera picked up on detail that our eyes typically wouldn’t see. And selectively removing detail was exactly what I needed.

So… what if I used that skin smoothing filter on the entire photograph instead of just the skin? Perhaps that would keep the desired detail and get rid of that nasty texture.

Much better, but now the photo looks a bit too… smooth.

Let’s add some grain to give it proper looking texture. It will look much more uniform than that ugliness from before.

I think that looks about is good as it can. Let’s see the finished product.

Also, Katrina isn’t wild about her grandpa’s mustache. I guess she isn’t a fan of Charlie Chaplin or something. So I decided to fix that as well.

That is one handsome grandpa.

I’d also like to thank Imagenomic for helping me with this photo and several others with this same issue. Their filter is quite expensive and I couldn’t afford it. The deadline to finish these photos was coming quick and so I emailed them and asked if I could get the Black Friday discount despite missing the sale by a few days. I explained I was a disabled photographer and that I was working on a gift for my best friend’s parents who I was meeting for the first time. Ani, in customer service, asked if I could verify my disability. I thought maybe she was going to use that to convince her manager to give me the 30% discount.

I got a reply the very next day and it included a discount…

For 100% off.

It was like a proper Christmas miracle.

I legit cried.

I made sure to send her the finished before/after photos and thanked her for helping me with my gift.

Manfrotto could learn a thing or two from Imagenomic.

I don’t know how to thank Ani and Imagenomic, so I will give my honest review of their product to show my gratitude.

I truly believe Portraiture does nearly as good of a job at skin retouching in just a few seconds as manual retouching/frequency separation—which can take over an hour per photo. This isn’t some dinky Facetune app. You get professional results in just a few clicks. It is basically an accessibility tool for me due to how much energy it saves. It’s subtle but effective and as long as it is not abused, it creates beautiful natural realistically textured skin minus harsh detail. If you take high resolution photographs of people’s faces, I highly recommend it.

And it is also pretty great at removing gnarly texture from old photos too.

Thank you for being cool as heck, Imagenomic.

Next we have a photo of Katrina’s dad in a costume from a school play.

Apparently, Greek schools were fine handing out giant daggers to young children in those days.

This photo is actually in decent shape. All of the detail in the sky was lost though. It has a color cast and looks a bit underexposed.

This also looked like it might be a good candidate for colorization. Not every photo is and it can take some trial and error to figure out which photos are suitable for this process.

I’m afraid this is not a one click solution yet. Photoshop’s new neural filters are still a bit of a hot mess and colorize is no different. But if you can get past the quirky interface, it can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

And with a little cleanup, I am pretty happy with the results.

Funny story… I prepared a layered PSD of this color version. I thought it would be cool to correct the costume to the proper colors when I showed it to Katrina’s dad. I isolated the hat and the sleeves and could instantly turn them any color. It was going to be like a cool Photoshop magic trick right before his eyes.

When the time came, after being blown away by the restoration, I asked him what colors everything should be.

He sat and thought for a second.

“Hell, I don’t remember! Looks great how it is!”

So we stuck with blue. He was plenty impressed without my cool magic trick though.

I can’t remember who this was, so I’ve just been calling her “old lady with a stick.”

This photo was not just faded, it also had a very severe color cast. And once I removed all of the fading, it still felt like there was a layer of yellow on top of all the colors.

So, the opposite color of yellow is blue. Let’s open up the color balance tool and see if shifting yellow to blue helps.

Looks like there is something to that “color science” stuff after all.

Repeat that with the shadows and highlights and then do the typical adjustments as with any photo and you end up with this.

That’s a really good stick. I know several doggos who would be so jealous right now.

So, what do you do if the photo isn’t really in need of much but you still want to impress with the before and after?

A good rule of thumb is to remove any distractions and make sure the subjects are the star of the photo. In this case, that road is bugging me. And I don’t care for all of those people in the background.

That is some rad 80s fashion. Though I’m pretty sure this is the 90s. Sometimes fashion takes a bit to saturate into a new decade I guess.

This photo was probably the most faded of the bunch.

But we know that is a simple fix with a levels adjustment of each color channel. However, this might be a good opportunity to show a super fast way to almost instantly remove this kind of fading. If you have an old photo that has turned red and you don’t feel like dialing it in manually, you can open up the curves tool and hit the options button.

Hit the “Enhance Per Channel Contrast” and it will automatically fix most of the fading. Not adjusting each channel manually can cause you to lose some detail in the brightest and darkest areas, but if you have a bunch of old photos to get through and “good enough” is good enough, you can create this as an action and fix fading at hyperspeed. With one click I was able to do this.

This is an acceptable result.

But if you take the time and care and do it the old fashioned way, you can get something more like this.

Requires more than one click, but I think it is worth it if you aren’t in a huge hurry.

This next photo confused me at first. I thought there was a lake behind them. And when I started to restore the photo something was bothering me about that damned lake.

It finally dawned on me they were actually in front of a giant waterfall. Niagara, to be exact. There was one spot in the waterfall that wasn’t completely blown out and I was able to bring back detail in that section of the waterfall.

And based on that tiny section, I was able to use that as a reference to rebuild the entire waterfall using various techniques. I did generative fill and cloning and dodging and burning and anything else I could think of.

And eventually, Niagara revealed itself.

This one might be my favorite of the bunch. When I really get to flex my artistic muscles and I get a decent result, you can’t beat that sense of accomplishment.

Katrina’s grandmother came for a visit.

Nothing too special with this one. Fixed the colors and added back in a sky. It seemed like it was near sunset, so I chose an orangy sunset sky.

What I didn’t realize is the sky I added included mountains in the distance. And when Katrina saw this she asked why Boca Raton suddenly had a mountain range.

I was embarrassed for missing that detail, but she actually thought it was funny and insisted the mountains stay. Her parents both laughed and concurred.

I couldn’t help but be reminded of this tweet…

And I couldn’t help myself…

I am become God, creator of Floridian mountains.

That is all the photos Tumblr will allow me to add to this post. But there are still a handful of cool restorations left.

So…

To Be Concluded in Part 3!

Photo Restoration Part 3: Dealing with Dongs

I think a major theme of Part 3 is going to be “direct flash is my arch nemesis” with a touch of “you can’t save every photo.”

Here we have a group shot taken with direct flash… my arch nemesis.

The flash got nearly everyone but there was a drastic falloff of light for the girl on the left. Beyond that, everyone’s skin tones were wildly inconsistent because they were either closer or farther from the light source. And in these situations, you just have to dig in and and start fixing faces one by one.

With the new people selection tool, Lightroom will detect every single person in this photograph and let me adjust them individually. It can separate hair, face, lips, skin, and clothing. And if the photo is zoomed enough, you can even adjust the whites of the eyes and the iris individually.

That facial sunburn you see is Lightroom detecting her face and letting me adjust it in isolation.

—————————–

There is an expression “God is in the details.”

Due to being a heathen, I’ve been meaning to find a new expression that means roughly the same thing. Let me workshop a few ideas right quick…

• Micromanaging pixels delivers a superior cumulative result.
• Your deity of choice resides in the numerous small adjustments that deliver a superior end product.
• Obsessing over things people may not notice makes things more gooder.

I’m sure I’ll figure it out.

Basically it means if you do a bunch of tiny things they will add up to create a big overall effect.

So, you may not even notice the sunlight is bouncing off the green grass and turning all the metal on the swingset green. But when I take that reflected green light away from the metal it just makes a little more sense to the brain.

And you may not have noticed that the detail in the flower on Katrina’s head was completely gone, but your brain just feels a little more satisfied when it is restored.

Okay, how about this…

“Attention to detail makes the brain go tingle.”

It almost rhymes and everything!

Alright, fine. God can stay in the details.

—————————–

Sometimes the best thing you can do for a photo is make sure that people can see the thing. If there is a thing that really needs to be seen, you have to crank up whatever dials you have at your disposal to make it the star of the photo. And in this case, the star is Grandma’s giant hand-made doily…

That’s a fine looking D.O.U.S. (Doily of Unusual Size).

All of that intricate detail is still in the photo. It’s just a bit lost and needs to be found. The clarity and texture sliders in Lightroom are great for enhancing small details without getting those crunchy artifacts sharpening filters can manifest.

—————————–

Distractions!

Avoiding distractions is probably one of the most important aspects of photography and photo editing. And in this photo we have a giant car sized distraction.

With the car, this photo becomes dated. The make and model and year of that car give away a time period when everything else in the photo is almost timeless. So, removing the car seems like the best thing to do for this photo.

In the past, I probably would have employed a mixture of techniques to delete the car. Cloning, content aware fill, the patch tool—I would have found places in other spots of the photo that looked similar to that spot in the photo and just massaged it until it looked correct. A very tedious and time consuming process.

Or I would have cropped the photo if I was tired.

But with Adobe’s new generative fill, I can just circle the car and hit a button. And it does an incredible job of filling in that space with perfectly matched dirt and rocks and shrubbery.

Now the photo looks like it could have been taken in the 40s or 50s or 60s.

—————————–

My nemesis is back. Back with a vengeance.

Direct flash, you are killing me.

Sometimes you have to accept that you cannot get the image to where you wish it could be and focus on what you can do to improve it. Identify the major issues and then problem solve how you can mitigate them.

The big issues in this photo…

• Overexposed.
• Skin tones are wildly varied due to distance from light.
• Hard shadows that are very distracting.
• Bright background causing poor subject separation.
• That lady’s giant hair.

And a bonus issue that only lives in my mind…

The flash overpowered the light on the right hand side and it doesn’t look like it is turned on.

So, I reduced the overall exposure, evened out all of the skin tone issues one face at a time, reduced the background exposure, and I did my best to eliminate those distracting hard shadows.

Unfortunately, the woman on the left had dark hair that was mixing with the shadow and I had a very hard time differentiating what was hair and shadow.

I tried many different techniques to make her beautifully 80s large ball of hair look like it had a natural edge, but I just couldn’t make it work with the energy I had.

But did you see the light? LOOK AT THE LIGHT!

So, yeah… I couldn’t completely fix this photo, but I could make the light more light-y.

—————————–

Well, poop.

Direct flash.

Again.

In this photo the main issue is loss of detail due to overexposure. The light in the windows and the light in the white clothing was too intense and blew out to pure white. In the past there wasn’t actually much that could be done about this. But with the magic of generative fill, this can be addressed.

Am I talking too much about generative fill? IT IS JUST SO HELPFUL, OKAY?

So I went around to each little patch of window and asked Photoshop to just fill it with general shrubbery. But I also went in on the dress and the flower crown and asked Photoshop to fill that in with a texture.

—————————–

Here we have a Greek castle or fort or… ancient structure.

This one was fairly straightforward. But there was no sky detail at all and there was a haze toward the top of the castle. Lightroom has a relatively new slider called “dehaze” and I thought, “maybe I should try that.” And… it totally worked! Always happy when something does what it says on the tin.

Photoshop also has a newer feature that automatically inserts a new sky. And because everything needs to be monetized, if you want access to additional skies you have to buy a sky bundle. Before you know it they will be selling subscriptions to skies. Perhaps a sky-of-the-month club.

Thankfully the feature also lets you import your own skies, so one day I am going to sort through every interesting sky I have ever photographed to avoid all of this buy-a-sky malarky.

—————————–

Next up we have an adorable family outing that was tarnished by some lewd graffiti.

There is always some dick drawing dicks to dick up your photographs.

Thankfully this is an easy job for content aware fill.

Did you think I was going to say generative fill? Because I am in love with generative fill and want to marry it?

Generative fill can take ~20 seconds to do its thing and I usually reserve it for more complicated tasks. Content aware fill is actually a very powerful way to remove simple things from photos and works nearly instantly.

Though I wonder if this tool was really “aware” of what it was covering up.

But then a little devil on my shoulder influenced me to go another way with this photo.

Photoshop can erase, but it can also… create!

Did you find all 6?

I originally meant to send this to Katrina as a prank. But I accidentally sent it to my Aunt Denise instead.

Thankfully my aunt is very cool and maybe a little oblivious to penis graffiti.

And then I had to tell Katrina that I sent the prank to my aunt instead of her.

And I’m pretty sure she is laughing *at* me and not *with* me, but as long as people are laughing I am happy.

Also, I think autocorrect changed bonafide from bonerfide and ruined Katrina’s amazing pun. Apple is just killing all of our jokes. 

—————————–

Distractions! Again!

One of the core teachings in any beginner photography class is to minimize distractions and draw attention towards your subject. And I just felt this scene was very busy and drew attention away.

So, I deleted half of the people.

Am I… am I Thanos?

—————————–

Last photo!

This is probably the stereotypical image people think of when it comes to photo restoration. It has all of the classic photo trauma. Torn edges, a giant crease, washed out contrast.

We can rebuild it! We have the technology!

The only thing I couldn’t fix was that nobody had eyeballs. There were just blank voids where their eyes should be.

And I wondered to myself, “Perhaps A.I. has become advanced enough to restore these folks’ eyeballs.”

Ummmmm…

Errrrrrrr…

You know what… the voids were fine.

So, that is the end of this photo restoration journey. I hope you found this interesting. If you want to see all of the before and after photos, I made a Flickr gallery here. There is a small icon at the top of the page that looks like a computer monitor with a play button inside—that is the slideshow function which makes it very easy to flip back and forth.

And if you are in need of restoration services please feel free to send me a message. Just know that not every photo is a good candidate—though most photos can be improved to some degree.

This project represents months of work. Hours and hours of tutorials and trial and error and failing and restarting from scratch.

And then this post documenting the project represents months of work. Finding the energy to write all this while going through a very stressful time trying to keep my house has been difficult.

So, I have put a lot of work into this is what I’m saying. I can’t believe I finally finished. I was worried this would be something that just remained a draft forever.

Oh, and if you want to know how Katrina’s parents felt about the pictures…

Mission accomplished!

sirfrogsworth:

Photographers all know about polarizing filters. They remove reflections off the surfaces of objects. We use them to see into water or windows that are obscured by those reflections. But anything with an even slightly glossy surface has a layer of reflection on top. So if you have a shiny green plant, it can remove the shiny and reveal a very saturated green underneath. Polarizers also remove a lot of scattered and reflected light from the sky. Which reveals a deep blue color you didn’t even know was there.

Here is a photo I took of my circular polarizer.

And the first thing I noticed when walking outside during the eclipse was the color of everything was more saturated, just like in that circle. Apparently, an eclipse significantly reduces polarized light and I got this creepy feeling because I was only ever used to seeing the world like that through the viewfinder of my camera.

The other thing I noticed was my outdoor lights. I leave them on all the time because I never remember to turn them on at night. And usually the sun will render them barely visible during the day. On a very sunny day they almost look like they are off.

But you can clearly see they are shining and even flaring the camera during the eclipse.

Our eyes adjust to lighting changes very well so it was hard to tell how much dimmer things were, but that is a good indication. I took this photo a few minutes ago and you can see how dim the lights appear after the moon has fucked off.

I did a calculation using the exposure settings between these two photos. The non-eclipse photo has 7 f-stops more light. That is 128 times or 12,700% more light.

A partial Pringle eclipse cut the sun’s light by 99.2% and somehow our eyes adjusted to make it seem like a normal sunny day (with weird ass saturated colors).

Additional Observations

So, I woke up about 4 minutes before the eclipse. I was very unprepared to photograph it in the normal quality you’d expect from a photographer. However, I did capture some interesting details that I thought I’d share beyond the lack of polarized light.

First up… the shadows.

The shadows were very sharp. In photography there is this concept of light going from a spectrum of hard to soft. Hard light has very high contrast and sharp shadows. Soft light is more flattering and diffused with softer shadows.

To get hard light and sharp shadows you need a small “point” light source. A point light can either be very small or it can be very far away or a combination thereof.

In the studio you could use a bare bulb flash to get a point source.

Or you can attach a modifier like a softbox to create a large light source. The bigger, the softer.

The sun is massive, but it is also super duper far away. So it ends up being the smallest point light source available. However, the atmosphere can scatter and diffuse that light, essentially “enlarging” the light source.

To get perfect hard light shadows you need to go to… the moon.

But the eclipse blocked out about 99% of the sun and it reduced the amount of scattered light. And it greatly reduced the size of the light source causing some very defined sharp shadows.

But not *all* of the shadow was sharp. My left shoulder is very defined but my right shoulder is a bit fuzzy.

You can see it on my fingers too.

Sharp on one side, soft on the other.

This is essentially because the sun has been split into two different light sources in two different directions.

In one direction you have a larger light source causing softer shadows.

And in the other direction you have a smaller light source causing sharper shadows.

In photography we have these strip softboxes that we usually place behind a subject to create an edge light.

Only a narrow, small band of light is hitting the body. If we were to use a strip box to light a face, it would be a small light source creating sharp shadows.

But one trick we can do is to turn the strip light horizontal.

Now the light source hitting the face is large as it wraps around the head.

So a long and narrow light source is essentially large and small simultaneously. And depending on the direction the light is coming from it is either hard or soft light.

Destin from Smarter Every Day explained this phenomenon briefly in his eclipse video.

I also think this large and small light source phenomenon affected my lens flares when I photographed the sun.

In this photo it literally looks like I’m getting starburst flares from two light sources.

And in this photo the flares have a sharp bright edge as well as a dimmer more diffused area.

Normally these starburst flares (caused by light leaking through the metal aperture blades in the lens) have more homogenous tines without that feathering effect.

And then I noticed a different kind of flare in my photos—with all the colors of the rainbow.

And each band of color matched the crescent shape of my partial eclipse.

Like a camera obscura, these flares were in reverse orientation to the crescent sun. And while I wasn’t able to get the sun in sharp focus, the purple section of the flare is very defined. I think that represents approximately how much of the sun was covered by the moon at my location—about 130 miles from totality.

I am a student of light. That is essentially what photography is. And I found this to be a fascinating lesson on how bonkers light can be. I was a little bummed I couldn’t road trip to southern Missouri to see totality, but I am grateful to still have a cool eclipse experience.

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:

Remember this joke?

Well, I am going to do something similar only with photography. This is a photo someone took for an Amazon review of their Clinique products.

Honestly, it is not a terrible photo. They did some staging. They have an interesting background. All of the labels are legible. It is properly exposed. This would be a perfectly acceptable product photo for an Etsy page.

I’ve been taking these advanced photography courses in preparation for whenever I am able to create a new studio in the house. And my teacher is a photography badass. I just watched a 6 hour class on how to recreate a professional Clinique ad. And at first glance it looks deceptively simple. It’s just some skin care products being splashed with a little water.

Which is why I wanted you to see an average person for reference.

This is what Karl Taylor came up with.

And I don’t think I’ve learned so much about photography in one tutorial before.

Product photography is just loads and loads of problem solving. You have to light the chrome caps with a gradient. Which requires giant diffusion scrims.

Those big white panels are literally only there for the two chrome caps.

You need a pure white background, but you can’t let light spill all over the studio, so you put up giant black light blockers.

And you have to add another light just for the orange bottle on the right.

Oh, and if you want the bottles to glow, well, you have to hide a silver reflector behind them.

But you still want the edges of the bottles to be darker so they have some contrast. So you add some black tape to the sides.

And in order for the reflective labels to have bold black lettering, you have to reflect black cards into them.

Ack! Karl’s beautiful bald head is showing up in the chrome caps! He must put on the naughty blanket.

And once you get every aspect of every bottle perfectly lit, you finally get to yeet some water at it all.

I don’t love product photography because I have a weird obsession to help greedy corporations make their wares look more beautiful. I love it because it is a complicated and challenging new puzzle every time. Every product is a different shape and requires a different technique to make it look its best.

I don’t know if I will be able to live up to Karl’s standards.

This is about the level I was at in 2017 before I quit photography.

I have so much more knowledge in my brain now. I’m really hoping I can surpass that.

A few people mentioned they thought those product images were created in photoshop and not actually photographed. CG renders are becoming a bigger aspect of commercial advertising. It can be more versatile. There are a lot more CG artists than high end product photographers. It’s cheaper. A lot of car advertising uses CG.

However, there are some big brands that insist on the real thing. Apple, Clinique, and Rolex, for instance. And there are things that CG is not as good at representing. Organic shapes and textures can be hard to represent photorealistically. So food, clothing, and anything that requires a human in the picture still need photography.

And I’d like to think there is an ineffable aspect photography can sometimes deliver that CG tends to struggle with. In the end, it is usually up to the art direction on whether an image is successful.

Karl actually did a comparison of his photography against CG. Feel free to guess which image is a render and which was photographed. I’m curious to know if you can spot the difference.

Fancy Watch.

1.

2.

Orange Cologne.

3.

4.

Blue Cologne.

5.

6.

Apple Watches.

7.

8.

Answers below the cut.

Keep reading

This has been generating a lot of interest so I thought I’d post it here as well.

If you are interested in photography and are a beginner, I recommend this free online course.

And if you are at an intermediate to advanced level and want to learn how to sculpt artificial light using flash or strobes, I highly recommend Karl Taylor’s Visual Education platform. Yes, there is a monthly fee, but there are nearly 1000 classes spanning all genres. I think it would surpass just about any university level photography education. Karl personally replies to every comment on the platform and answers any questions you may have.

And once I get my home studio up and running in a few months I plan to restart my own photography education over on my @frogmanslightschool Tumblr.

I’m going to be focusing on photography for non-photographers.

How to use your smartphone or a cheap DSLR to get decent photos of important life events without having to learn every aspect of photography. I want to develop simple recipes for common situations like celebrations, ceremonies, pets, kids, sports, etc. Feel free to follow me there and ask any photography related questions you have. Just know the educational content won’t start for a while.

sirfrogsworth:

Corgi comfort could be researched for centuries and still baffle scientists.

sirfrogsworth:

I am really getting tired of this FAKE NEWS.

Trump DID NOT say windmills cause cancer.

If we are going to disparage this bloviating buffoon, we need to do it accurately.

He clearly stated the *noise* from windmills causes cancer.

Don’t let this man get away with being less ridiculous than he actually is.

Noise cancer is orders of magnitude more stupid.

That would mean we could record windmill noises and then weaponize cancer by holding a boombox over our heads.

People are assuming they already know what is in the above video and are skipping it.

I’m just saying that might be an erroneous assumption.

sirfrogsworth:

Moon Over Waffle House

When I went to take pictures I thought to myself, “I don’t think I’ll need my other lens.”

And I didn’t.

Until I was driving and right in front of me I saw this giant full moon directly above a Waffle House. And I just thought there was something majestic about that so I pulled into an empty parking lot to capture it. But then my lens was not nearly long enough to get the composition I wanted. But, using my motto “get the data you need” I took four pictures and smooshed them together.

So, I ended up getting the shot I envisioned in my head, but I’m definitely not going to leave my other lens at home next time.

Also, the stars are fake. The stars will always be fake. St. Louis has some of the worst light pollution in the country and I would have to drive 2 hours to hecking Mark Twain Forest if I ever want to see stars again.

I feel like I’ve been one-up’d.

No way I can compete with that. But I commend this photographer for a great shot.

Nick Martino [ Instagram ]
h/t: @tramtheram (thank you for finding the source!)

hueypshootin:

sirfrogsworth:

He chose the one physical characteristic I am consistently complimented on.

I am… baffled.

Don’t nobody compliment this nigga hairline. They both goofy looking

I don’t see it.

sirfrogsworth:

I was looking at my photos from the eclipse, came across this one, and I noticed something weird in the street.

When I zoomed in I was very perplexed. I did not remember anything like that in the street today.

I zoomed in closer and saw it had… metallic ends?

And… lettering?

To me it looked a lot like when a generative fill goes wrong in Photoshop.

But this was nothing I added.

It was in the original photo on my phone’s memory.

And then I started up my conspiracy brain. I knew Samsung had been fucking with people’s moon photos and “enhancing” them with other moon photos they used to train their photo app.

And in response a high level exec said this shit…

I started googling to see if Samsung had started adding A.I. crap into photos automatically. I looked at my settings to make sure I didn’t have some feature enabled.

Finally I was going to walk down to the street with my flashlight and double check to see if there wasn’t something I missed. This was really driving me crazy. THE IMPLICATIONS!

And just before I walked out the door, I noticed something…

You see, eclipses are super bright and it’s a really good idea to bring along…

Yeah.

Feeling pretty silly right now.

A.I. paranoia has started.

It’s going to get worse, isn’t it?

sirfrogsworth:

Normies during an eclipse…

People with doggos during an eclipse…

Mythbusters during the eclipse…

Muppets during the eclipse…

sirfrogsworth:

He chose the one physical characteristic I am consistently complimented on.

I am… baffled.

In my head… “Oh, he’s going to make a fat joke. Wait… that’s new.”

I’m super late to booping.

I want some quick boops before booping turns back into a pumpkin.

In exchange I offer this remastered photo of Otis fighting the evil broom.

He was such a cutie.

Okay, boop away.

sirfrogsworth:

sirfrogsworth:

Silly me. I would have said GO TO THE FUCKING HOSPITAL.

Had no idea the power of onion feet.

The Power of Onion Feet Part II

I’m pretty sure if he takes this advice he will have one less foot to wrap in onions.

I looked up the origin of this and it dates back to around the middle ages.

I just can’t imagine someone saying, “Here is a medieval onion cure to try” and being like, “that sounds like a reasonable course of action.”

Some other notable medieval medicine includes bloodletting, drilling holes in heads to let out evil spirits, and flagellation—trying to cure the plague by whipping yourself as penance to God.

How about some medieval obstetrics?

“If physicians believed the uterus had made its way toward the top of a woman’s body, he placed unpleasant-smelling fumes under her nose and sweet-smelling fumes between her legs. The hope was that this would cause the uterus to retreat back to its rightful place in the body.”

I guess they thought the uterus had a functional nose? Like, how else would it know something smelled good or bad?

And I wonder if you couldn’t afford a doctor maybe you just ask your husband to fart on your face while you shoved flowers up your cooch.