Help me learn CS3 with a macro picture

Pupator

I got a great deal on CS3 - so I'm going to give it a whirl (have used Paint Shop Pro for years).

I'm also relatively new with my camera - a Sony A100.

Recently I was at a local landmark and noticed that the pictures they have to show people what plants to look out for are terrible. I thought that I could likely take some better ones and offer them to the people who run the place. I have three lenses right now: Sony 18-70 3.5-5.6 (Kit); Sigma 70-300 APO 4-5.6; Minolta 50mm 1.4.

I see that the Sigma has a macro mode at 300mm but I had a very difficult time figuring out how to use it well so I took this first round of shots with the Sony. I'd like to get a lot better at taking these macros but I think I've got something to work with in PP.

Now I just have to figure out how to PP well in CS3. Anyone feel like offering a brief tutorial on how to make a macro like this look good in CS3?

Thanks -

i_worship_the_King

Here's a links you may be interested in....
http://www.digitalgrin.com/showthread.php?t=61316
http://dgrin.smugmug.com/gallery/2292454/1

This looks (to me) like a great frame already... for ident purposes you may want something with a lot tighter crop showing just the flower. You may also want to throw in a CD or pencil or something for a size frame of reference. If you're looking to do 5x6 or a larger shot you could even to a frame like you have with a pencil or something for frame of reference, then an inset of the flower itself showing the flower to help identify it.

If you get really froggy you can photoshop a legend on the side that has something like "flowering", "thorns", "height", "causes rash" using icons.

Just stacked on the side... like for a daisy it would be:

(thorn outline, since it has none)
6" (for height)
(filled flower, since it's flowering)
(red spot outline, since it does not irritate skin)

You get the idea...

Hope this helps!

Richard

You're going to love CS3--eventually--but it's going to take some time. Get yourself Kelby's book for starters and the Margulis books for more advanced stuff. All have been discussed at length on Dgrin.

I took a quick stab at this, exaggerating the moves some so the changes would be obvious. In real life, I wouldn't push the colors so far.

I don't know what this flower looks like, so what I did is somewhat arbitrary. I wanted to do three things: make the image pop a bit, make the white parts brighter and bring out the yellow at the center of the flowers.



I converted from RGB to LAB, as I find color moves faster and easier to control there. To deal with the pop, I added a curves adjustment layer and in the L channel, I moved the white point to the left and raised the lights quite a bit. Then I put the blending mode of the curves layer into soft light mode, which darkened the background nicely, thus increasing the contrast. I added a second curves adjustment layer and radically steepend the B channel to bring out the yellows. But I wanted the leaves to stay muted, so I used the layer blending options to exclude everything that was not yellow to start with or was green. LAB is really good for this sort of trickery. Finally, I merged up to a new combined layer and sharpened the L channel, then dialed back the opacity of that layer to about 50%, which looked about right.

The whole thing took only a few minutes. What took a lot longer was learning the moves, but if you can master Vista, you can certainly master CS3. Be aware that there are many different ways of accomplishing the same thing in Photoshop, and the techniques I use might not be the best--they're just the ones I have become most comfortable with over time. I'm sure others will post different takes using different tools.

Hope this helps.

Pupator

Thanks to both of you - very helpful!

Pupator

I started messing with it myself - first following the "Pop tutorial" and then Richard's instructions. The pop tutorial didn't work well with this image for me. Richard's instructions did except I couldn't figure out this part:

"so I used the layer blending options to exclude everything that was not yellow to start with or was green" -- can you give me a step by step on how I do that?

My yellows look green and yours look yellow.

pathfinder

The original image is green and under exposed. I opened it in Adobe RAW converter that comes with CS3, raised the exposure abut +0.75 after getting a better white balance with the eye dropper on a white leaf. I tried several spots, and ultimately chose a spot with a warmer tone to the whole image. I assumed the flower petals are white, not a light gray.

Sharpened a bit in RAW, dropped into CS3, set a black and white point to finalize my color balancing, ran the green areas through Noisewear since the small image I downloaded was pretty noisy. I cropped off the right side to move the white flowers slightly to the right, and this is what I ended up with.


Much of what I did would have been done better, in the camera at the time of exposure, - better color balance, correct exposure, more depth of field, etc.

Richard

Pupator wrote:

"so I used the layer blending options to exclude everything that was not yellow to start with or was green" -- can you give me a step by step on how I do that?

Sure. First you set the curve to enhance the yellows by steepening the B channel:



Just move the end points inward, but make sure that you are moving them in equal amounts so that the line passes through the center point. Otherwise, you will change the overall balance between blue and yellow.

Click OK to accept the new curve layer and with that layer highlighted, click on the Fx button at the bottom of the layers palette and select blending options. There are a lot of options here, but all we are interested in are the Blend If sliders. These let you include/exclude the effect of the layer based on ranges in each of the channels in both the new and underlying layers.



Select the A channel and move the Underlying Layer slider towards the center. By alt-clicking on it, it splits, giving you the chance to define a gradient range over which the effect is applied. This prevents abrupt transitions. I have set the slider so that the layer will have no effect on the greenest parts of the image.



In the same window, switch the channel selection to B and move the Underlying Layer slider to the center. This excludes the effect of the layer from the blues. It prevents the very steep B channel curve from giving a blue cast to the whites in the flower.

This move is straight out of the Margulis book, Photoshop LAB Color, which has been discussed here on Dgrin at length. Of course, you can use blend if sliders in other color spaces as well. I like LAB for this sort of thing because I find it an easier model to understand than RGB, where luminence and hue are mixed on the same dimensions.

As I point out frequently, it takes much less time to do these things in PS than to explain them, so don't be discouraged if it seems very complex at first. You'll get the hang of it soon enough.

Pupator

Thanks Richard - very helpful as I didn't know about the fx button. Now my yellows pop (maybe too much - heh).



Now the flaws with the original image that Pathfinder mentions become more obvious to me. Am I on the right track with these fixes?

The image is underexposed - likely because there wasn't much ambient light (late afternoon in a thick forest) and it was handheld. I guess the only correction for that would be to take a tripod or my off-camera flash. (ISO was already 400) I worry about the flash (even with a diffuser) blowing out the whites.

Color balance is screwy - I could have manually set the white point, but I was taking so many pictures with varying backgrounds it might have been too much hassle. Better would have been to shoot in RAW and deal with the color balance after the fact.

More depth of field - f-stop was 5.6. I could have gone smaller there and probably still gotten pretty good sharpness. Also it would have improved if I had the tripod and used it for a longer shutter right?

i_worship_the_King

I think he was suggesting more DOF, as in 'deeper?'

To get that you'll (unless you're packing a DOF calculator) just close up the aperture and (consequently) slow the shutter speed.

I remember it as DOF corresponds directly to f-stop. Higher f-stop, more DOF (generally.)

Try this: put into aperture priority, f/16 or better, Iso as low as possible (if it's blowing in the breeze a 1" exposure is not going to cut it), shoot with a tripod and 'bracket' using +/- 2/3 stop. What this will do is snap 3 frames, one metered, one meter-2/3, one meter+2/3. For me 98% of the time I nail at least one that way, cause the meter can get confused with bright white.

Richard

Pupator wrote:

The image is underexposed - likely because there wasn't much ambient light (late afternoon in a thick forest) and it was handheld. I guess the only correction for that would be to take a tripod or my off-camera flash. (ISO was already 400) I worry about the flash (even with a diffuser) blowing out the whites.

You can always set negative flash EC if you are worried. It sure beats lugging a tripod on a nice walk through the woods. I have gotten some pretty good results with on camera flash through a Lightsphere.

Color balance is screwy - I could have manually set the white point, but I was taking so many pictures with varying backgrounds it might have been too much hassle. Better would have been to shoot in RAW and deal with the color balance after the fact.

Shoot RAW. It's good for you. Seriously, exposure and white balance problems are much easier to correct in RAW.

More depth of field - f-stop was 5.6. I could have gone smaller there and probably still gotten pretty good sharpness. Also it would have improved if I had the tripod and used it for a longer shutter right?

Well, maybe. If you are very close to the subject, DOF is still going to be rather narrow. Narrow aperture and longer exposure would have helped as long as the wind wasn't blowing. But you do have the right idea here.