My first experiment with Luminosity Masks

It has been long pending exercise to try out Luminosity mask techniques on some of images. The trick is to practice more to get desired results. The luminosity masks allows you to selectively edit the tonal regions in images. This technique widely used to balance out the various tonal ranges of the image. The crux, as stated previously is to practice more and understand the image to choose right mask. I used GIMP to create Luminosity masks with help of excellent tutorial which can be read here (GIMP LUMINOSITY MASKS). It has been long time since I dwelt into the theoretical aspects of this technique and now it's finally time to début my tryst with luminosity masks :D.

Here is the image which I wanted to try desperately enhance. What is the worst time to shoot a photograph of waterfall? Yes, i.e. during midday :( when waterfall is under half shade and half sun (luminous of sun!). The pictures turn out too much contrasty and as a result, the image has overly highlights in it. The only technique I could use here to selectively edit the brightest part and balance with shadows. One may argue as to reduce the brightness or curves, before trying those techniques, experiment on your own! Yes, it darkens the shadows also. In picture below, the darks and mid-tones are preserved without loss while the highlights are considerably cooled down!

For the below image, I used four masks LLL, LL, L & D. I did not experiment with Midtones mask. Since my primary intention was to vanquish the blown out highlights, the major focus was on LLL & LL masks. Manipulating curves with LLL & LL masks, I obtained the desired results with additional operations like sharpness, contrast, and saturation. For D mask, I increased curves a little bit to add more charm to first level of shadows! At the end of editing, I was exhilarated to see the results. Hope I had absorbed this concept a lot earlier. From here on, I would like to experiment more on masks and share my experiences in my literary yard :). Remember, working with luminosity masks requires lot of patience and dedication. It may take even days to edit the picture to perfection!

Last but not least, honest feedbacks are always welcome :)

BEFORE MASK

AFTER MASK

THE GRAND SETUP ;)

Timelapse Collection - 2

It has been long break in this blog. Breaking the break, here is a brag about my new timelapse collection this winter ;-). The collection comprises of frames from Bhadra reservoir, Gajanur reservoir, and my village.

There are basically five clips.

1) The first is from Bhadra reservoir and the subject is sinking sun breaking for the day. This was shot around 4:30PM and hence quite intense Sun too! I shot the timelapse with help of 8 stop ND filter & 2 stop GND filter stack to cut down the overall luminosity. This also reduced shutter speed which helps in providing smoothness to flow of water. The main reason I shot this was because of diffused light resulting from piercing of the Sunbeam through strip of stratocumulus clouds! This type of setup scatters the sunlight and sprays the rays on to the earth's surface. The timelapse which is combination of moving clouds, and sun, creates beautiful passing rays with vivid projections on the earth's surface :D. This thought culminated in a timelapse captured for about 40mins. I am not sure on number of images but remember it was framed in 'M' mode since the intensity of Sun barely changes in 45 mins with minuscule cloud density.

The images were framed in KDENLIVE with following corrections

i) Increased the contrast to accentuate the scattered rays.
ii) Increased sharpness
iii) Shifted white-balance towards blue
iv) Did few RGB correction

2) The second was again caught in Bhadra reservoir, however along the entrance. The other mystical part of such type of clouds is that just before sunset, the rays of sun illuminates the stratocumulus clouds with beautiful orange-yellow pattern and finally cools down to blue. Remember, this phenomenon is created by the sinking Sun but actual color of clouds remain blue itself ;-). The colour initially being yellow shift towards orange and falls back to blue. This pattern once again perfect for timelapse and my camera successfully caught it ;-). I guess the shots were composed in 'Av' mode to maintain uniform brightness.

Same software used with following corrections

i) Increased the contrast to illuminate the sky bit more and darken the bottom portion
ii) Increased sharpness

3) The third one is very simple. Just a strip of moving clouds along with flowing water. I used CPL filter in this case to cut down haze. Nothing much significant editing carried out except for sharpness

4) The next two are star trails shot in my village. The first one is moon-set and second one is rise of orion belt from south-east. Booth were shot at f/2.8, 30s, ISO-800, tungsten WB. The lamenting part is not all images are steady. This basically due to absence of tripod. I used an artificial support to cling my DSLR which was not steady. Consequently some of pictures turned out to be blur. Hence the video is flickers at some positions. The final editing comprised of sharpening, increase in contrast and de-noising.

5) The last one is the dancing fog. There is nothing much to glorify about this clip. Probably, I should have turned the clip to monochrome so that fading of fog looked profound.

Hope you enjoyed the description and enjoy the video. Meanwhile, my next giant leap is to pull up HDR timelapse ;-). Do you think I can achieve it, lets try!

Gears:
---------
Camera: Canon EOS-550D
Lens: Sigma 17-70 f/.28-4 OS HSM lens
Tripod: Whatever steady surface at the location
Filters: 8Stop ND, 2 stop GND & CPL
Video Editor: KDENLIVE under Linux
Music: Royalty free music from Youtube

Skywatch Friday - Sunset in your eyes

Just returning from visit to Ramadevara betta last week during deepavali festival. The Sun had lit the sky with deepavali lamp. The sky after rains, is lit colorfully by the sinking sun with golden light. I feel, this phenomenon has some scientific fact behind it. The Sunset coupled with stray clouds paint the sky with dramatic patterns during golden hour, few minutes after rains. The patterns are vivid if the rays of Sun pierce through the shattered clouds! This time, even in Ramanagara, the scene was similar. There was significant rain for 10mins and later on the sunset with clouds created colorful medley in the sky. The rocky hills and green fields added more charm to the entire scene. The lone upright tree added to the rule of thirds to the composition :). Overall a perfect scene to capture HDR images. I had GND even this time which again restricted exposure bracketing to 5. The final HDR was composed sparing the +2EV picture for all of them since +1EV had enough shadow details. The images were blend in Luminance HDR and final editing with Darktable. Lot of tweakings were carried out in darktable to match the "Sunset seen in my eyes" :).

The title is used to depict the Sunset seen in my eyes that day hoping for colorful days with vivid patterns. I hope you enjoy the pictorical Sunset in your eyes too!

This time the musical credit goes to the beautiful work by TrancEye - Sunset In Your Eyes. Just lovely piece of music with orchestral melody and spectacular piano. Here are special aspects of music.

--> 2:20 orchestral melody followed by medley of piano at 2:45
--> the silent piano melody 3:25
--> beautiful breakdown outset at 3:51

TranceEye - Sunset in your eyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv1fWYD24co

Share colorful patterns of skies in Skywatch Page

Skywatch Friday - Fields of My Village

I was skimming my CRDi motor between the bitumen trail of Kaup and my village on a relatively less overcast day. On the way, I stopped nearby paddy fields to enjoy the greenery for sometime. This is first time I am taking photographs of the paddy fields nearby my village :). Especially monsoon season adds more glory to the landscape. People of this area harvest twice a year due to ample availability of water (a stream runs nearby). These are few HDR and normal images captured during my journey. Never thought they look so beautiful.

Finally here are some HDR images from my village itself. The first one was captured during morning hours while the rest was during sunset.

I was wandering around village on a clear evening day. As I was roaming, this scene caught my eyes and my camera's too which tempted me to grab a HDR shot. It turned out to be beautiful too ;). The enjoyment could not be sustained for long time since ants had ascended the leg and started biting :(. I love the starburst reflection of Sun on the watery field. The field was prepared for slush race organized recently. The water presence is still persisting due to the diversion of stream water towards the field. Also monsoon season is keeping this temporary water body alive! The monsoon is backpacking for this year and consequently there was beautiful sunset during fine evening. I used GND filter to compose bracketed shots. The advantage is reduced luminosity of orange hot balloon which reduced bracketed shots from 7 to 5 ;). Hope you enjoy the pictures. My mother was excited after seeing final image and asked if it is was captured from any rivers along highway. When I explained that it was the nearby water body, she was astonished to see the beautiful scenery :D. My father taunted the excitement stating inept images looks beautiful in cameras :(.

Music Time B-):

This time its once again beautiful music by New-World named Fields of La Tourette. This guy is amazing man. He is just 24 and creates stunning music! The way he blends high and low pitch notes is mesmerizing. His music is always flavored with ecstatic orchestral melody.

Here are few of my feelings from music

0:34 --> birds flying over field
1:46 --> slow moving clouds over the field
2:15 --> the orchestral + guitar melody
2:41 --> profound orchestral melody (rising sun over field)
3:10 --> the fantastic breakdown outset (fast moving clouds with running deers)
3:29 --> The combination of high + low pitch notes again
4:03 --> Time to fly over the field :)

I don't have the privilege of visiting the place and have a feel but his music truly reveals the the emotions of the La Tourette. I felt in paddy fields of my village :). This post is dedicated to the beautiful music of New World and hope you enjoy the same. Fly over the field relishing the melodious music from Gordon.

New World - Fields of La Tourette: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox7gghnlmbE

Be his fan: https://www.facebook.com/NewWorldTrance

Not to miss equally wonderful remix from Ahmed Romel once again with stunning orchestral melody and beautiful video from Simon.

Ahmed Romel Remix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POoJEBriuL4

Share your fields of glory in Skywatch page

Skywatch Friday - The Rainforest

As we know, the monsoon started with lame note and later gained fierce momentum during month of July. The deficit as of now in Karnataka has drastically reduced and at some places it has recorded excess. Mere two months of torrential rain has tranformed the dry lands to lush greenery. The western ghats were no exception too! There is never dearth of rain in these regions however threat of El-nino was looming over the region fearing drought kind of situation. Now everything is washed out by ferocious monsoon season :).

Enough of story! This Ganesh chaturthi, I had been to hometown to drop parents back. How can I miss the lush green rainforests. I drove 220kms in 2:30hrs to enjoy more time in Shiraadi ghat and I was well satisfied to capture those water spots and enjoy the roaring Gundya river for sometime. There were many tiny waterfalls which I could not capture due to lack of time. Also intermittent rains hampered my program but that is how rainforests get their name! I am satisfied with whatever opportunity I could gain. After final prayer to goddess chowdeshwari, it was time to drive towards the coast to reach niche. Many a times I had desire halt here for maximum amount of time to spend quality time in between woods. It is difficult to manage while we have set goals and pathetic road conditions :(. Nevertheless, this time it was not so much bad :). May be it is better to ride two wheeler along the stretch to fully enjoy nature. Hope you enjoy pictures. No HDRs this time and most of them captured using 2stop GND filter. Using GND filter along with CPLs creates near HDR images (not all times). I did not use CPL this time (not sure why), hence had to reduce highlights on images to reduce white patches on silky flow of water.

ONE OF SMALL WATERFALL

CLOSER LOOK

HEART OF RAINFOREST

STREAM SNEAKING FROM CANOPY

GALLOPING GUNDYA RIVER

ONE MORE SEASONAL WATERFALL

MAGNIFIQUE GUNDYA RIVER

Options used in darktable:

1) Shadows and Highlights
2) Vibrance
3) Saturation and brightness
4) Local contrast
5) High pass filter with overlay as mask
6) Luminosity curve (manual) to increase Green and Yellow color appearance
7) Color zones (for few images)
8) Color temperature

I usually make use of GND filter 2 stops, half way down. Since I had actual GND this time, soft GND was not required.

Do tune to Andy Blueman's rainforest. A perfect combination of soft bass and synths creating rainforest ambience. The music on an entirity reveals perfect rainforest environment comprising of thundering waterfalls, roaring streams, clanky insects, flying birds, heavy rains and wilderness. He has promised to complete this tune soon which is good news. I love this music very much and remembered when I was in between dense jungle and thundering Gundya river. Just perfect music!

Linked to Skywatch Friday

Lessons learnt from recent star trail experiment

There were lot things lacking in my first experiment of star trails (read it here). I am not kind of guy who achieves success at first attempt. Most of the time it is long hard journey. Initially, even though it creates disappointment, the joy of struggling is more exciting once we reach appreciable level. There were many faults in my recent experiment as mentioned. Time to correct those and build on top of that. The mistakes were spotted while reading write-ups from professionals. Following are the mistakes ;-).

1. Long exposure noise reduction should be turned OFF (my settings were ON)
2. Do not get illusioned by camera light metering. My image was shown as over exposed by light meter :-(. Ultimately they looked darker. So I should have exposed shutter for bit more longer time (around 25s).
3. ISO should have been around 1600
4. Should have focused upfront. I was struggling getting focus right at night. Many people suggest to focus to infinity around twilight and prepare to shoot at night.

There may be many more. Need to experiment lot more to get it right. However the experiment can be carried out only in my village and there is less scope in Bangalore. Hope will improve in my next trial :-).

Here are two start trail images created using StarStaX free software. There are gaps in between the trail which I need to rectify. The software is available for linux also but has some bugs. So I ran windows version on top of wine emulator and worked perfectly :-).

THIS IS BRIGHTEST BUT MORE GAPS!

THIS IS DARKEST BUT LESS GAPS. A SLIGHT INCREASE IN ISO WOULD HAVE HELPED

HDR of Gaganachukki Falls

This is 3 exposure bracketed HDR of Gaganachukki falls. The shots were taken during my solo bike ride to Shivanasamudra and Talakaadu on 03-Aug. I had taken 5 shots however it did not come out so well and hence limited final composition to 3 bracketed shots in Luminance HDR. There was huge crowd as expected and bracketing steady shots was difficult. I found a wall along the steps where I could place the camera to compose bracketed shots without any mis-alignment.

Even with 3 bracketed shots there were slight problems. At the edges of the hills there were fringing which could be noticed only after thorough investigation. For normal viewers, it may not be noticeable but people in landscape photography forums do notice such fine details. I was really annoyed seeing it. Eventually I wanted to correct it by some means. First I gave a try reducing chromatic aberration tool in GIMP which did not work out (or I did not use it properly?). The next option was to select the damaged part of image and reduce saturation values for those colors. The major dis-tractors were cyan and red. I chose Hue-Saturation tool and selected cyan and red and teared down the value to -100%. Bingo! all fringes are gone :-). I was really excited after seeing the result. Hope you will enjoy the image too! One more thing I learned was to bracket only 3 shots for HDR during broad daylight. I believe more bracketing is required only during magic hours. Please let me know if you have any alternate opinions.

So why do I struggle so much for HDR? As mentioned in earlier blogs, the natural world looks so beautiful in HDR. Our eyes have greater dynamic range while cameras do not have. The cameras which do have are highly expensive. Hence this sort of circus is required ;-). Once again I did the same mistake, not shooting RAW. I don't know when will I correct myself.

GAGANACHUKKI FALLS

Settings:

Camera: Canon EOS 550D
Lens: 18-55mm kit lens
Focal Length: 18mm
Focus: Manual
Aperture: f/22 (of-course to get vast depth of field)
ISO: 100
Picture Style: Neutral (Thought of increasing sharpness later)
Metering: Center weighted average
No of images: 3 (initally 5)
Exposures: -2,0,+2 (initially -2.-1,0,+1,+2) (1/30s for middle one)
ML Firmware: v2.3
Softwares: Luminance HDR (Fatal operator), GIMP