Video still > lightning shot.

Peter

Aside from taking a lot of still pictures I also do video taping of storms and such. Most of the videos are of lightning storms where I wilderness camp. Little tricky extracting a still image from a video due to image noise. Some softening and then resharpen filters had to be applied.


Peter

wxwax

Very cool. Dangerous work, too! If you're at all interested, do a Google search for Lightning Boy. His site has tons of tips for shooting stills of lightning. It's highly dangerous work - I can't emphasize that enough. If you can see the lightning, it can probably reach you.

grinner

Hey, Peter.
A great trick in photoshop for video stills is to duplicate the layer, add contrast, saturation and blur to the top layer, then make it's opacity 50% or so.
Gives it less harsh of a look after running through 72 dpi to 300dpi plugs or even sharpening it.

Peter

Thanks Sid
Thanks Sid . . . I will check out the Lightning Boy :-)

You are certainly right . . . very dangerous taking pics in the storms. I have captured tracers coming up from the ground as close as 20 feet in front of me. It is when the static level in the air runs really high that I take cover!

A good zoom helps too :-) which is what my video camera gives me.

Peter

Peter

Hey Grinner . . .

grinner wrote:

Hey, Peter.
A great trick in photoshop for video stills is to duplicate the layer, add contrast, saturation and blur to the top layer, then make it's opacity 50% or so.
Gives it less harsh of a look after running through 72 dpi to 300dpi plugs or even sharpening it.

Very interesting . . . I am not educated enough in PS to working with layers but am very interested in what you did. In the image I posted here I had made weak attempts at smoothing etc. Below is the original capture from the video:



Thanks for your tips Grinner . . . appreciate it :-)

Peter

grinner

In this case, you have to deinterlace it before doing anything else.
You can find that under effects/video/deinterlace.
This is due to NTSC video being shot not at 30 frames per second, but 60 fields. While the math actually comes out to 29.97 frames per second, your shooting 2 fields for every frame and gotta marry those two together.
Keep creating.
Have fun, man.

Peter

grinner wrote:

In this case, you have to deinterlace it before doing anything else.
You can find that under effects/video/deinterlace.
This is due to NTSC video being shot not at 30 frames per second, but 60 fields. While the math actually comes out to 29.97 frames per second, your shooting 2 fields for every frame and gotta marry those two together.
Keep creating.
Have fun, man.

Thanks grinner . . .

In the past I have used the deinterlace filter on some of my still shots. But on some images it takes away too much detail. At one time I tested a program which only did deinterlace filtering. It was good in that you could change how much filtering was applied. I lost the program after reinstalling my complete system. The hunt is on to find it again . . .

Take care

Peter

wxwax

grinner wrote:

In this case, you have to deinterlace it before doing anything else.
You can find that under effects/video/deinterlace.
This is due to NTSC video being shot not at 30 frames per second, but 60 fields. While the math actually comes out to 29.97 frames per second, your shooting 2 fields for every frame and gotta marry those two together.
Keep creating.
Have fun, man.

Great stuff, grinner. TV man, eh?

grinner

over 15 years now.
still diggin it