Richard Kaufmann: Blog https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog en-us (C) Richard Kaufmann (Richard Kaufmann) Mon, 16 Mar 2020 06:53:00 GMT Mon, 16 Mar 2020 06:53:00 GMT https://www.richardkaufmann.com/img/s/v-12/u452356292-o167973059-50.jpg Richard Kaufmann: Blog https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog 100 120 Selective Color Saturation https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/12/selective-colorization I had some fun a few weeks ago in New York City (I was attending a conference at The New York Times Center, another geekier story), and not a coincidence, I was staying a block away from Times Square.  "For a man with a fisheye, the whole world is Times Square!"

_69A2341Times Square ColorfulThe Colorful One – this was shot with an 8-15 fisheye, then straightened via profile correction in LR6.

OK, I like this one.  It was shot on my 8-15 fisheye zoom attached to my Canon 5ds R, and then "de-fished" via Lightroom 6's profile correction feature.  A little sharpening and tone adjustment, and voila!  But... my valued in-house advisor told me "hey, nice shot dude, but it makes my eyes hurt"!  SO, what to do?

First, I thought, channel your inner artiste, and go black & white.  Nice, but a little boring.  Then, I went into LR6's per-color saturation settings and came up with this:

_69A2341Sam thing, but with selective color (de=)saturation.Exact same shot, but knocked all the colors flat, and then brought up a few.

Kinda interesting, no?  You can de-saturate colors for the entire image, or via the spot tool in LR6 (or by using layers in Photoshop), do it for specific areas.

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(Richard Kaufmann) color de-saturation https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/12/selective-colorization Thu, 17 Dec 2015 15:56:55 GMT
Droning On... https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/8/droning-on I admit it.  I have a drone.  (To the theme song from Cops, "Bad Drone, Bad Drone, Whatcha Gonna Do, ...")  I do try and be a nice drone guy, e.g. staying away from people, animals, not invading privacy, ...  But I do love using the drone to take aerial pictures.

Here's one image:

BH 4 5 6 Merge-2Bearded Hollow, Washington State (near Long Beach WA)

The resolution, focus, etc., is actually pretty decent.  Did I lift a big heavy camera?  Nope...  The image above is a panorama stitched together from three video captures!  OK, it's 4K video (four times the resolution of 1080P "HD" video).  Some technology helped:

  1. The camera is a GoPro Hero4 Black.  It shoots "pretty good" quality 4K video at 30 frames per second.  "Pretty good" is relative – a $5,000 professional 4K video camera would do a better job, but compared to most anything else it's "freaking fantastic."
  2. The camera is mounted on a two-axis gimbal.  This is a gizmo that uses accelerometers and motors to keep the camera stable with respect to roll (tilting forwards or backwards) or pitch (left to right).  Yaw is fixed.
  3. The gimbal is attached to a 3dr Iris+ UAV ("drone" for short:-))

The camera controls are primitive on my setup.  Turn the camera on, press the record button, go for a flight, land it, turn record off, turn the camera off.  I do have an "FPV" system ("First Person Video") that lets me see from the ground what the camera sees from the air.  So the trick is to zoom around while the always-on camera shoots interesting stuff.  If you think you're in an interesting spot, hold the drone in one position (in my case by turning on "loiter" mode, which uses GPS and accelerometers to keep the drone over one spot) and "spin" the drone by controlling yaw in discrete steps.  That way you'll get a few seconds of stable video pointed to cover each part of a panorama.

The image was stitched together in Photoshop CS 2015 in Photomerge, with a little bit of massaging.  (Often you'll rebuild a piece of the sky to block out a propeller.)  The steps:

  1. Play the video in Quicktime.  Pause at a frame that would make a good part of a panorama.
  2. "Copy" to place the still image into the Mac's clipoard.
  3. Go into Photoshop.
  4. File-New.  Photoshop notices the image in the clipboard, and sets the image size to the size of the clipboard.  (Very civil of it, no?)
  5. "Paste"
  6. Maybe a little "Smart sharpen"  (Don't do too much yet!)
  7. Repeat Steps 1-6 for the other components of the panorama.
  8. Go into Photomerge and put the images together
  9. Spend about 20 minutes getting rid of stitching idiosyncrasies.  These include moving objects that get duplicated (if they move in the same direction as the camera), and (arghh!) waves that need to be blended together.
  10. Bring the image back into Lightroom to put it into the database.

(There may be a better way to do the above, do let me know!)

Note: if you'd like a full-resolution copy of this or any other drone image, just contact me or leave a comment.  Happy to send it to you.  (I don't have a commercial UAV license, so I won't ever use an image for commercial purposes.)

More drone shots here... 

Finally, here's a great picture of my little miscreant, taken by a friend (I was busy playing pilot):

Drone ShotIris+Picture courtesy C. Bradshaw (photo courtesy C. Bradshaw)

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(Richard Kaufmann) https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/8/droning-on Wed, 12 Aug 2015 15:15:12 GMT
Some thoughts on my camera journey & my latest stop: the Canon EOS 5ds R https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/8/some-thoughts-on-the-canon-eos-5ds-r My history with cameras starts a LONG time ago.  (Yes, we used to use acetate film...)  In 1968, my dad let me use his Rolleiflex TLR.  

Wikipedia Rolleiflex_f2-8-FWikipedia Rolleiflex_f2-8-F

This was a great camera that took amazingly high resolution pictures on 6cm x 6cm film.  Generally rolls of film were good for 12 exposures, and every shutter press cost you more than $1.  For a 12 year kid, a roll of film was a scarce commodity.

Life since then has made a trade for worse image quality in exchange for convenience, size/weight, number of shots, and cost.  35mm greatly reduced the cost of each image, and the cameras and lenses were a lot more portable.  And then Kodak invented digital photography.  (I'll leave it to others to discuss how badly the business side handled the transition; the technical folks were spot on.)  It took a while for digital images to get out of the "junk novelty" phase.  For me, this happened in 2009 when I switched from a Canon F-1n film SLR to a Nikon Coolpix 950.  Instead of images that could be blown up to wall size, the results of these early cameras were barely acceptable on 1024x768 pixel computer screens.  Yuck!  BUT, you could take as many pictures as you wanted, and even see the results immediately.  The term "chimping" was invented to describe the process of "take a picture, see if it's any good, fiddle to make it better, repeat until bored."  Ahem, even a chimpanzee could do it (which I suspect is the etymology of the term)!  If you want proof...

We never looked back.  The convenience and cost savings were mind blowing.  The image quality got better and better at a pretty rapid rate.  I went from Nikon Coolpixes to the Nikon D100.  And then, ..., and then, Canon blew everyone's minds with the EOS 20D.  Image quality was almost as good as 35mm film (not even close to 6x6).  But it was close enough for all practical purposes.  Huzzah!

Since then, I've been exclusively on Team Canon.  Even during "drought periods" when Nikon's bodies were better, I stuck it out.  I almost changed tribes when Nikon produced the D800 and D810 cameras (man, they were good), but the cost of change is extreme – selling and rebuying lenses is EXPENSIVE!  And then there's the strobes, and other goodies.  Oy!

Back in 2009, I upgraded from the 20D to the 1ds iii.  That was a HUGE investment, but that camera was a remarkably wonderful tool that I truly loved.  Until the EOS 6D came out in 2012.  The 6D took essentially identically good images, was smaller (a little less rugged, but hey I'm a fair-weather photographer!), and had geotagging and wifi.  I'll post something on geotagging at some point, it's an addictive habit.

Anyway, my Team Canon loyalty paid off as of last month. (July 2015)  Canon introduced the EOS 5ds R, a 50 megapixel digital camera.  It generates better quality images than 6x6 cameras (some might quibble, but talk to the hand!), and is especially suited for my style of photography (contemplative architectural, landscapes and nature scenes, occasional people pictures, wildlife).  I am not a sports photographer, and I don't need to take pictures when it's pitch black out.

And my reward?  Insanely excellent high resolution pictures.  I've lately been stitching together panoramic images that are north of 300 megapixels!

A few samples from the camera...

_69A0794_69A0794One of the first images with the 5ds R. Near sunset at La Jolla Cove.

_69A1175-Edit_69A1175-Edit

_69A0791_69A0791

And for those in the mood for extreme resolution.  This is eight 50 Megapixel images blended together in Lightroom LR6.  The result is ~150 megapixels (almost 3X overlap).  Zenfolio made me lower the quality to fit into 36 MB.  Sorry!  (But if you click on the image, you'll open another browser window with the full image.  I hope you have a big screen, and a great internet connection!)

_69A0169-Pano-2_69A0169-Pano-2

Is this the end?  Nah.  There's a new Sony that's just coming on the market that's better in low light, takes insane quality 4K videos, and (gulp) can even mount my Canon lenses!  I may succumb...  At some point we may reach a logical end to the camera technology race.  Unless 3D becomes a "thing," this may well happen in the next decade.  But between now and then, I'm expecting to have my mind (and wallet) blown by a wave of great new camera bodies.

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(Richard Kaufmann) 5ds Canon EOS https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/8/some-thoughts-on-the-canon-eos-5ds-r Fri, 07 Aug 2015 03:50:46 GMT
Give a man a fish, and... https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/8/give-a-man-a-fish-and The image on my home page has been seriously tweaked from the original.  Here's the final result:

_SK_6943_SK_6943

And the original:

Interesting, eh?

Image shot with a Canon EOS 1ds iii using a Canon EF 8-15 fisheye lens. Processing in Lightroom 6.

Adobe Lightroom incorporated a "de-fishing" tool (actually applying a lens profile) a few versions ago, and it's been getting better and more aggressive over time.  (Us de-fishing afficionados have been using tools like ptlens to do this, but now everyone can get at them!)  Simplying applying the lens profile does a pretty decent job, but the really fine work involves going into manual mode and working the vertical, horizontal and distortion settings to make the lines ruler-straight.

There are tradeoffs, however.  De-fishing can severely warp objects in the corners (and spread the pixels out a bit, so you might lose a little resolution on the margins), so a fair bit of subjectivity (and subject matter selection) is necessary.  For example, if any people were close to the lower-right or lower-left corners, the picture would have looked terribly unnatural.

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(Richard Kaufmann) distortion fisheye lightroom https://www.richardkaufmann.com/blog/2015/8/give-a-man-a-fish-and Thu, 06 Aug 2015 03:37:07 GMT