PixelatedImage Blog

After Friday’s post on how I deal with white balance, I got a nice email from Ryan Marco asking me about how I go about metering. He asked a lot of good questions about how I determine where and how I meter the light in a scene. Many of you might have the same questions. And I’m about to disappoint you with my answer. I just point the thing and shoot.

First some background. When I shot film I got very good at taking readings off anything that was middle grey, or close to it, and then, using the Zone system, making adjustments from there. Those were simple times. I never used a handheld spot meter, never got too bent out of shape about things, and bracketed a stop in either direction when in doubt. It didn’t hurt that I was using mostly negative film with a broad dynamic range.

So when I tell you my approach to metering in digital leans to the side of simple, you know the background. As with white balance issues, life is just too short for neuroses on this matter. I lean towards the artist more that the geek most times anyways.

But here’s the bigger issue; it doesn’t matter. I suspect I’m going to get in trouble for this, so the caveat is that this is what works for me. But the thing is, digital capture is different than film. What matters, assuming you’re going to take the digital negative into the digital darkroom, is getting the best digital negative. The best digital negative is not the one that looks perfect on the LCD screen. It’s not the one where you nail the exposure using a spot meter. It’s the one (wait for it, this is paradigm-shifting stuff, here) that has the most digital information, even if it looks like crap on the LCD.

I cover this in Within The Frame (pg 44-46) but let me take another stab at it here.

The more digital information in that digital negative, the more able you are to create a final print with greater quality, less noise, and more awesomeness. So before I go into this, you need to remember: the image on the LCD will most likely look like crap. That’s OK. Use the LCD to preview composition and focus, and then pay attention to the histogram to determine exposure.

How do you know you have the best possible digital negative with the most digital information? The histogram. Forget studying your metering modes and learning the fancy voodoo light mojo. Learn to read your histogram, that cryptic graph of peaks and valleys on the LCD screen. You might have to consult your manual to find out how to access this. For most Canon DSLRs you just press the preview/play button and then the info button once or twice until your histogram appears.

This is the histogram from Adobe Lightroom, but the one on your LCD will look similar. The histogram above represents a scene captured with no blown highlights – notice the mountains and valleys don’t go off the right-side of the chart – and no plunged shadows – notice the data doesn’t go off the left-side either.

Now, I’m going to assume you know nothing about the histogram. It’s a graph, that’s all it is, and it’s deceptively simple. that graph represents the light values in the scene you’ve just captured at the exposure values you’ve captured it at. On the far left are shadows with no details, totally plunged shadows of darkness. On the far right are highlights with no details, total burned out whiteness. And between those two extremes are all the tonal values from black to white. The height or shapes of the peaks and valleys, for this exercise, don’t matter. Ignore them. You can do something in-camera with where the peaks and valley sit from left to right, but can’t do a thing about their height or shape. That’s the scene. Ignore it.

Why the histogram matters now gets – for a moment – a little more complicated. It’s logical that as long as you get the whole scene into the box of the histogram – neither wildly over nor under-exposed – you can tweak the rest in Lightroom and be done with it. Simple, perfect exposure, right? Wrong. You’ve created a digital negative but not a good one. Why? Because the histogram reflects some quirky math that can only be understood by wizards and occultists, and it doesn’t respond to the logic of mortals like you and I.

Remember I said the best digital negative was the one with the most information? Well the right half of the histogram is capable of storing exponentially more information in it than the left half. WAY more information. And the right quarter of the histogram, WAY more than the other three combined. How much more? Again, I’m simplifying, but if the right quarter of the histogram can hold 2000 levels of information, the quarters to the left of it can hold 1000, 500, and 250 respectively. There isn’t much information at all in the darks. That right quarter of the histogram can hold twice what the rest of the entire histogram can hold.  It’s a WAY bigger bucket, can hold more information. More information means better image quality and more flexibility in the digital darkroom before noise becomes an issue.

So what do you do with this knowledge?

Here’s how I approach exposure. First, I shoot on AV mode or Manual almost 100% of the time. I leave my metering on whatever your camera’s equivalent of centre-weighted average is. Then I take the shot. Click.

Before you look at the images/histograms: I did this in Lightroom as a simulation only and it’s meant to be an illustration, so don’t get hung up on the EXIF displayed on the histogram, it won’t change and will only confuse you. Look at the image relative to the how the information is distributed in the histogram.

I look at the histogram. Way too dark. Barely has any information in the right half, never mind the rightmost quarter. Then I use the EV+/- function on my camera, push the exposure a stop, try again. Click.

Getting better. But while the image LOOKS OK-ish on the LCD screen, the histogram is telling me otherwise. It is still, in terms of a good digital negative, underexposed. So I go back to my EV +/- and bump it another stop. Click.

Much better. Might be a little light for my taste, and where’d my clouds go? Doesn’t matter, I know they are there because none of the scene has disappeared off the edges of the graph. You’ll bring them back in Lightroom or Aperture. Look at the histogram – it’s where it should be, as far over to the right without going off the end. What matters is that now you have LOTS of digital information.

Now I have a digital negative with as much information as possible I can bring the image into the darkroom and adjust it as necessary. In this case I like the luminosity of the boat and the ocean but it was the clouds in the initial scene I loved and have lost. Should have had an ND grad filter in my pocket but didn’t. So in this case I’ll use the gradient filter in LR to darken the sky and punch the clouds – Clarity rocks for this. I’ll make a few more tweaks – including a grad filter along the bottom with Clarity set to -100 to soften foreground waves, and the brush tool with bumped exposure, brightness and clarity to pop the sails.

Here’s the final image (crappy composition and all)

So the name of the game is getting to know your histogram so you can create the best possible digital negative. And the best possible digital negative is what, class? The one with with the most information. There will be times when you have a scene with a larger range of tones than the camera can capture. In this case you have options; several of them. Decrease that range with the use of ND grads to reign in the highlights, or a flash to pop the shadows. Or you might take 3-5 bracketed exposures and bring them together in Photomatix or Photoshop. Or you can just make a choice to create an image with either plunged shadows and/or burned out highlights. (page 45 in Within The Frame has a great example of an image with a histogram that goes wildly off both ends.)

My way isn’t the only way, I’m sure of it. But it’s what works for me. I used to meter then shoot, now I shoot then meter. “Same, same, but different,” as they say in Asia. Does this help? Questions?

If this was helpful and you want more, or if my lunatic ravings didn’t convince you, I urge you to spend $9.95 and download Darwin Wiggett’s article Expose Right. You can find that article HERE on Darwin’s site. Highly recommended.

A late start this morning. I usually write my blog posts the day before and yesterday was Sharon’s's first evening home for over a week so we sat on the couch, had a bottle of wine and watched HOUSE MD re-runs on dvd. Nice way to spend an evening, sorry you weren’t invited.

Yesterday’s post on Faith and Art stirred some insightful discussion, some of it far more profound than the actual post on which it was based I encourage you to read it if you haven’t. One of the things that came up was a further clarification. I thought I’d been very clear that this was not only a discussion of faith in the religious sense, that what I was getting at was broader and applied to all of us, theistic, athieistic, or whatever lies in the middle; that our core values and beliefs about life, ourselves, the world in which we live all form the deepest parts of us, the most unique parts of us, and when we draw from that well to create our art we have the potential to create art that is more uniquely personal than when we stay on the surface of things.

Ok, so a few detaily-linky items today.

First, I got my HyperMac yesterday. The one I ordered is a 100 watt-hour external battery for my MacBook and it’s sweet. Small, not much heavier than a normal MacBook battery, and it’s reputed to give another 13 hours of working time, as well as being able to recharge USB devices like the iPhone. And it came with a car charger so I can charge the thing while driving. I wish I’d had this in Ethiopia. Had plenty of car time, it was AC power when we got into town that I didn’t have. Check it out HERE.

Ever work in Lightroom on your laptop and find you just aren’t sure which angle to put your screen at to get the right tonal values in your image? My buddy Gavin Gough has a simple, elegant solution and if you go to his blog you can download a gradient that you can set as your identity plate and you’ll never have to fiddle with the screen again. Check it out HERE.

I’ve been using Blackrapid R-straps for just over a year now and love them just as much as I ever did. The weak point has always been the snap connector and they’ve finally got new ones – small lockable carabiner clips that seem beefy and well-made. I’ve just replaced my old ones and while I never had a problem I know others did and this oughta make many of you feel a little more comfortable about these brilliant straps. When I visited Blackrapid in their Seattle digs last year we had a long talk about a 2-camera system, and that rig is now out. I’ve got one and will be taking it to Ladakh in September and will review it then. For now visit Matt Brandon’s blog to see his write-up on both the new clips and the new harness. Check that out HERE.

Hope you all had a great weekend. I’m gearing up for Ethiopia this week, I leave Friday morning. That means I’m up to my ears in creative briefs, gear, and a mountain of little detaily things that always seems to predicate these trips. But you’ll be pleased to know I’ve got posts lined up for the week and there will be a new desktop wallpaper on the 30th. July 1st is Canada Day so to celebrate I’ll be announcing the winner of the signed 20×30 canvas I announced HERE.

On the subject of backups, I trust, for the sake of your sanity, you’re being diligent. Most of us back up our image files religiously. Are you also backing up your database files for Lightroom or Aperture?

You absolutely need to be sure your Lightroom Catalog files are backed up. Lose them to a corruption or hard drive failure and you lose a heartbreaking amount of work. Lightroom allows you to specify where these backups can be made and when. Problem is, none of the options offered include one to backup when shutting Lightroom down, which is when I would want to do it – after I’ve imported, made changes, etc. All their built-in options are for backups when Lightroom is launched and I think that’s really lame.

So because I embrace my paranoia I finally did something about this. My main machine has several internal drives. One is my main drive, and another is the backup of that main drive. The rest are drives for RAW files and until recently they also held my Lightroom Catalog files and got backed up in a pretty haphazard way.

So here’s what I did. I moved them all – I have 6 right now – to a folder marked LIGHTROOM CATALOGS on my main drive. My main drive gets backed up by Super Duper to my internal backup drive automatically every weekeday at 9:30pm. So now I have automated back up that is never more than 1 days old, unless it all goes down on Sunday night, then it’s 2 days old.

Now all you have to do is re-open your catalogs, go to Lightroom > Catalog Settings > and under Backup Catalog chose Never. Should you have a problem you’ve got recent backups sitting on your back up drive and Lightroom won’t keep asking you about it.

A good Monday morning to ya. I got some great feedback on my Global Workflow article. Articles like this always bring up a bunch of “yeah, but how do you…?” questions. A couple of them were about organizing and file naming in Lightroom, so I’ll walk you through some ideas I had about this.

First, you need to understand that Adobe Lightroom is more than a put files here and fix images there, kind of program. One of the genius things about Lightroom is that it operates on a database. So frankly, if you wanted to put 10,000 images all into one bigg-ass folder called My Photographs, Lightroom would handle it just fine. So this isn’t about how you structure your folder or buckets or drives. It’s about the tools within Lightroom to keep you organized. Second, you need to understand that I’m naturally pretty organized, my brain just knows where things are – most of the time. This arrogance will no doubt come back to bite me as I age, but for now it means I don’t have a huge organization system I can teach you, just a bunch of tools I can show you. So in the spirit of The Big Q:

The Big Q: How do you keep organized in Lightroom?

1. File Structures. Ok, I said this wasn’t about this. But it’s just way easier for me to navigate to my folder: Round The World > Havana than it is to search in other ways. It’s how I work. So I keep my stuff in folders that are usually a simple description of a place or project and that one is inside a folder delineated by year. So the structure would be 2009 > Round The World > Havana.

2. File Naming. When I import images I generally convert the RAW files to DNG and re-name the file. Did you know you can change the file-naming templates in LR? I have mine set to YYYYMMDD_Text_Seq but you can set to whatever you like. In the import dialogue in the File Naming section click the Template field and go to Edit. Now just add the fields you want in there. I like custom text because if my file name is 20090108_Havana_0001 I can always just use the search function in LR and find all images with Havana in the name. Easy. Also makes it easier to find if I’m searching for images in Bridge, which I do occassionally.

3. Keywording. I’m getting better at this as my forays into the world of stock begin to make more sense to me. But generally I’m lousy at it and only paint with the broadest of strokes. So I use Keywords like Travel, Cuba, Havana – mostly so I can keyword an entire folder of images at once. Still, the more disciplined at this you are, the easier it’ll be to find the right images using LR’s search functions.

4. Color Labels. I use colour labels on my files to indicate use. Some are personal (yellow), some are for clients (red), some are for stock (purple) and some are use-pending (blue). So if I know it’s a shot of Havana that’s in my stock library I use the filters, search for Havana with keywords (Havana) and ask LR to filter out only the red labels.

5. Ratings. I rate my best work with 5 stars. Makes it easy to toggle the filters on and off – want to see my 5 star images from Havana, no problem. Navigate to the Havana folder and toggle the filters to show only the 5 stars. Or search for images keyworded Havana and rated with 5 stars. Or….

6. Use Collections and Smart Collections. Collections are easy. Create a new one called Havana 5 Stars, then drag in all the Havana 5 Star images. Done. Now it’s there anytime you want to see those. But Smart Collections go one better because, well, they’re smart. You can create a collection that is dynamic. Let’s say I do a trip to Havana every couple months for a long-term project. I create a Smart Collection called Havana Best, and when I do so it allows me to specify the filters. So I create one that automatically puts ALL images with keyword Havana, rating 5 star, and colour-label Red into the Smart Collection. Each time I come back from Havana and import, keyword, and rate/label my images it automaticall updates the collection. Brilliant.

This isn’t a full-on tutorial, I realize. Might even leave you with more questions. Some of you are already clicking the comments button, “yeah, but how do I…?” Tell you what, FIRST open LR and play with it for 10 minutes, see if you can figure it out. I’m betting you can, and you’ll retain it better. LR is incredibly intuitive when it comes to this stuff. But if questions remain or just dying to tell me I spelled something wrong, let me know

Got a tip I completely overlooked? Comments, as always, are open. On a completely unrelated issue – my book, Within The Frame, comes out 5 weeks from today.

I know there are many of you that don’t get Photoshop User Magazine. I also know you know that I think you should be a member of NAPP and getting this magazine as part of your membership. But I’ll save the sermon for another time. The kind folks at Photoshop User Magazine have graciously allowed me to post the PDF version of my latest article, a gift of love to all you non-NAPP folk out there who want to read the article but don’t subscribe. Click HERE for a downloadable PDF version of my article GLOBAL WORKFLOW, an excerpt from the April/May 2009 edition of Photoshop User.

A quick 5-minute video to run you through my personal back-up system. Click the screen capture above to see the medium-sized Vimeo version.  If you’d like to download a tiny version for the iPod or iPhone, click HERE.

Well, nearly made it through a whole video without the cats interrupting. Not that I mind when they do but soon y’all are going to get your expectations up and start coming here just for the cats and that’s when they’ll go on strike. Keep an eye out at the end, the cats start doing a scene from Fight Club. They’ve been rehearsing.

Here’s an oversimplified cheatsheet.

When it all comes down to it what matters is not whether I use DVDs or not (I don’t) but whether the system you have works for you well enough that you’ll use it. If your computer blows up or is stolen tomorrow does it leave you high and dry? With the cost of harddrive space these days, there’s no reason not to have some kind of back-up plan, even if it’s not as paranoid as my own.

Got a plan? Share it with us. (And yes, I know I got the date wrong. I recorded this on March 23, a Monday. Sigh…)

How many of you use tablets with Photoshop or Lightroom? It took me a while to get used to mine a few years ago but now it’s so much a part of what I do I can’t imagine going back to the clunky old mouse. Anyhow – I’d love to know who uses one, and – here’s what I am really getting at – what do you do with your ExpressKeys? I finally switched from my beloved Graphire to a real, grown-up Intuos. I just know there’s some cool things I could do with these customizable strips, but it’s just so much easier to have people give me ideas. My brain hurts right now. Thoughts? Have you got a set-up you just can’t live without? Let us know, spread the love!

Just a quick post before I get on the plane for Dhaka.

I brought my latest issue of Photoshop User Magazine to read on the plane, noticed that The Turning Gate has a new Lightroom Gallery just for iPods and iPhone. I’ve been looking for this for a year. My current online portfolio is flash-based, so while it rocks for regular browsers, it’s useless on the iPhone/iPod and I’ve been wanting to get something up that iPhone users can look at too. Enter Turning Gate.

The cost of this bad boy? $5. Can it get any better? I submit that it can not! Check it out HERE.

OK, time to get to the gate. Happy Valentine’s Day, y’all.

This month’s Photoshop User magazine is the usual excellent content, but with the addition of an article I wrote on Vision-Driven Workflow. It’s the featured article in the Lightroom Section. I’m not sure if this makes it a must-read or the one issue you can just skim over, but there you have it. Consider yourself warned.

If you’re not a NAPP member, ahem, you should be. This same issue also features Scott Kelby’s Gift Guide – so if you’re looking for ideas for your favourite photographer, Scott’s guide is a good one.

I know others have linked to this, but in case you limit your blog time and haven’t seen it – check out THIS POST at Gavin’s place about the Magnum blog’s list of advice for young photographers. While you’re at it, check out THIS POST at Pixsylated about high-speed flash sync. It’s excellent. I’m increasingly open to the idea of playing with my strobes while in the field, and it’s this kind of info that keeps me from tossing the darn things into the rubbish bin entirely. And David Hobby’s STROBIST too. If you loathe your strobe, you need to get over to STROBIST and get in on the lovin’.

Since Lightroom introduced us to the Clarity slider I’ve been a big fan. When used well it can subtly affect the mood of an image. In the 2.0 release you can now REMOVE clarity, and the result is a little like the effect gained in PS when you duplicate a layer, set its blend mode to Multiply, then add some gaussian blur. You’ll discover your own uses – but here’s the smart-ass tutorial:

1. Select image and open in Develop module
2. Slide Clarity slider to RIGHT and watch contrast between midtones pop. Ooooh
3. Slide Clarity slider to LEFT and watch contrast between midtones smooth into blurry goodness. Aaaah

Illustrations of aforementioned technique:

fig01

fig.02

Thanks to Matt Klowskowski for showing this on his Lightroom Killer Tips blog – I had no idea you could do this. Even cooler? You can now use the brush to apply this technique, or its reverse, selectively. Oh, LR2.0 how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…