Photog BS Arena

Tried macro photo stacking for the first time. It's flawed, but I don't care... first try after all. Nine images stacked using free trial of ZS/Zerene Stacker, no cropping:



And here's a crop to show the details:



You can see where I didn't overlap my shots well enough and it created a blurry section/slice of the image. Gotta start somewhere!

 

Did another stacked image, this time with 16 shots:



It's something similar to a dandelion, and it's all over the high country right now.

 

Finally bought a ball head to swap with my pan-tilt. We'll see how I like it, as I've never had one before. Got a used Acratech GP.

 

Why is photo shop such a pain in the butt to use compared to light room!!! Got used to lightroom ish. And photoshop is nothing like lightroom. How do i save a damn photo in there and how do i get the little highlighted lines to go away on a picture!

Took me about 8 trys to get this and im still not happy with it. Also how do i layer photos??

 

Great thread, been taking forever to get through it!

Another good site for gear info is www.nikonrumors.com

Anyone got any great advice on selling photography?? other than don't. ...


and i have a horribly organized facebook pg for photos if anyone wants to check em out and give advice.

 

Because it's considerably more powerful than Lightroom and has a much broader purpose.

Not sure what you mean by 'save a photo'. File > Save or Save As? In Lightroom you may not actually be modifying files, but rather saving settings applied to files. In Photoshop, at least with the RAW converter, you do sort of the same, but once you are actually in Photoshop after converting from RAW that's a whole new file. RAW files themselves are not editable. Once you start making changes, you have to save as something else (usually tiff for loss-less and continued editing, or jpg for final product).

By highlighted lines I assume you mean the "marching ants" as they're commonly referred to? Ctrl-H to hide them or bring them back, Select > Deselect to drop the selection which is what the lines signify.

Layering photos... you're going to have to describe what you're trying to do in more detail for that one, because it could mean a lot of different things.

 

Because it's considerably more powerful than Lightroom and has a much broader purpose.

Not sure what you mean by 'save a photo'. File > Save or Save As?when i do that it only saves parts of it, like the photo i posted it only saved the black and white part for ever and i dont know what i had to do to get it to save both

In Lightroom you may not actually be modifying files, but rather saving settings applied to files. In Photoshop, at least with the RAW converter, you do sort of the same, but once you are actually in Photoshop after converting from RAW that's a whole new file. RAW files themselves are not editable. Once you start making changes, you have to save as something else (usually tiff for loss-less and continued editing, or jpg for final product).

By highlighted lines I assume you mean the "marching ants" as they're commonly referred to? Ctrl-H to hide them or bring them back, Select > Deselect to drop the selection which is what the lines signify. yes the marching ants i could not get them to go away for any thing

Layering photos... you're going to have to describe what you're trying to do in more detail for that one, because it could mean a lot of different things.
like taking two photos and taking parts of them and adding them to another photo. the photo i posted on the bs page with the gas pump i like how the lighted portion looks but also took the same exact photo with light off to see the red of the pump better and want to combine the two


also is there a way to undue things in either of the two in an easy way? other then restarting the whole thing. like changing the photo to black and white and then wanting to take it back to color??

 

Subbing for future photos.

 

Picture of me and my dog going for a walk.

 

Does this look grainy to you guys or is it just my eyes? And what is BULB mean with shutter speed? Please tell me i can go longer then 30seconds.

 

Bulb means the shutter will stay open as long as you hold the button down.

 

Was just going to edit it. Google is very good.

 

Get a remote and start shooting in bulb .

 

Turns out i have the remote in my bag and i should google more.

 

It sounds like you had an active selection when you went to save then. Though I thought there was a specific 'Save Selection' command and if you just did a save it ignored selections. Layers on the other hand...

There are a number of ways or things you can do to combine two different photos. You could have one open and use it as the source for the clone tool while painting onto the other one. You can select just a portion of one and click/drag the selection onto the other one where it will drop on top as a new layer. You can also do that with the entire photo by just clicking somewhere on it and dragging over on top of the other one. Or select all, ctrl-x, click the window of the image you want to paste into and ctrl-v. You'll want to figure out the Layers palette - how to reorder them by dragging; that the background layer is always the bottom so sometimes you have to select everything and 'create new layer from selection' to 'lift' something out of the background to arrange it above other things; that you can turn them on and off but whichever one is highlighted is the active layer and will be affected by whatever tools you're using (regardless of whether the layer is off/not visible or not); that you can lower the layer's opacity using the slider at the top to help line things up and then turn it back up once it's in position; you can link layers together and apply filters and effects and such to them individually as well as overlay them with different blending effects. Note that not all formats support layers - mostly just tif and psd. I typically work in psd, and do not keep layers if saved to a tif even though it supports them. I just use tif for saving lossless. You will get a warning if you try to save a file with layers to something other than a Photoshop format.

Something to keep in mind though is parallax. If you shift the camera viewpoint just a little bit, lining things up becomes more of a challenge in a hurry because you change perspective and the actual parts of things you can see (particularly the wider the lens and the more distortion it has). Stacking images, be it for focus or exposure (HDR) or whatever, is best done from a tripod. Failing that, using continuous shooting with bracketing so that the time/movement between frames you'll combine is minimal.

Undo is ctrl-z. That undoes what you just did, or undoes your undo if you do it again. Ctrl-shift-z is step backward, which will keep undoing everything you have done one command at a time. For more than that you need to find and learn how to use the History palette. That lets you see every command you've done (depending on how long you've been editing, how much memory you have, if you've saved, and program option settings). You can pick specific commands out of the chain and drag them to the trash can on the palette to undo them, or even use the History brush to 'paint' an area back to a particular point in this history while leaving the rest alone.

Beyond that you'll want to learn non-destructive editing, which I haven't even gotten around to. Basically it's workflows where you do everything with layers, so rather than actually convert your image to B&W you'd just create an adjustment mask layer that makes it B&W. If you want to go back to color, you just turn off or delete the mask layer.

 

Grain and noise are two different but related things. Generally I wouldn't comment on quality type things with an image saved for the web because there's already so much loss in just doing that. But... there's some bad fringing (left edge of barn roof in particular) which is a combination of lens quality, lighting conditions, and editing choices. There is quite a bit of noise in the image which is coming from exposure time and ISO setting given the light levels. Some of it is hard to distinguish from jpg compression for what you've posted. The sky is mostly suffering from that. I can't tell if the noise in the grass (red/green splotchiness) is more from sensor noise or jpg compression artifacts. That's probably the 'worst' thing I see, or what imho detracts most from the image. Given the nature of the image and subject, I think the graininess belongs/adds to it.

Yes you can go longer than 30 seconds with bulb as you've already figured out. However the longer the exposure the more noise and hot pixels you're going to have in the result, regardless of ISO setting. There is some balancing to higher ISO shorter exposure vs lower ISO but longer exposure. There are also dedicated filters and add-in plugins and programs that can reduce or clean up noise in an image.

 

On the combining two photo's and taking parts of one to add to the other one you will of had to take them both at the same time without moving the camera. Then you would do a mask and use the brush tool with both photos loaded to basically let the bottom layer show through to the top layer. The bottom layer having the gas pump the way you want it. In simple terms you're cutting a hole through the top photo to let the bottom one show through and giving it a soft edge so it's not noticeable.

 

ok @L3Goullon I was doing some stalking on your truck... I love the bed rack! but I really like these photos, can you walk me through what you did to take them? lights? what? the dog in the one is a good touch because I dont think its a long exposure but thats why I am asking

 

Expose for the ambient, add some off-camera flash. From the lighting on the truck, I'm going to say at least two flashes were used. The shadows look soft enough that some light mods may have been used as well.

 

Ordered some prints last night since my wife was complaining about a lack of wall art in our house. The panorama below got split up into 3 vertical panes, so it'll be like a triptych hanging on the wall.