Cinematic CC/Grading in Adobe Photoshop

One day I was wondering how they probably grade in movies to make it look different, because no matter what you do with your photo the touch of the movies always seems different.
Then I remembered back when I was something like 10 or 12 years old, I saw some behind the scenes stuff of a TV series. At the time I didn't really think about it but I noticed that the image looks pretty flat and kinda boring, first I thought well this sucks why do they make their image so flat and boring, but then it came to me, I started looking at my movies very carefully and noticed, even though they seem to have a nice contrasty picture they retain almost all the detail in the dark areas and the detail in the highlights.
So how do they do this or how are we going to do this? Well by making only the darkest pixels truly black. That way we will retain the detail but still make it look like there is a lot of contrast in it.
A side note, shoot in RAW, this might work with jpeg but I wouldn't count on it and for this we especially need to torture the picture quite a bit.

This is what the picture looks like with the usual or modern corrections, and with the cinematic style.


I also should mention that I also used cross processed the Cine version of this picture to add some extra color and make it little more dramatic.

But I will go over that too.









Well let's get started, once you have your RAW image open it up in Camera raw in Photoshop. Your goal here is to make the Picture as flat as possible. So turn down the Highlights, turn up the blacks, also move the shadow slider to the right and pull down on the whites and contrast also. In this case it looked something like this.

As you can see it's very very flat and you can see almost every detail in the foreground. We are finished in camera raw so go ahead and open it up in PS. 

First make a duplicate of your background layer as a backup, then switch to the 16 bit mode and apply shadows and highlights to the picture to make it even more flat, this may seem like a bad idea but you'll see why I do this. 

I usually don't mess with the highlights but set the shadows to bring back some more detail. And yea btw the 16 bit mode helps you to retain quality while torturing your picture a little more. 

The next step is optional but I did use it to get some more color in the image, I usually if I decide to do this I do it first, adding the color that is. 

You can either use gradients or like I do use a brush both works fine. So I select the color I want, in this case a light orange, make a medium sized brush so it covers a quarter of the image, turn the opacity down to like 80%, set the Hardness to 0% and paint it on a new layer. Then I scale it way up to match the it where I want it, don't be afraid to move the circle out a little, the outer edges of the brush is way softer so I might scale the layer up to a huge size and then use only the outer edge of the color I painted in. 

This might give you a better idea what I am talking about.

First, since I know adding the contrast back with curves later on gives me a lot of over saturated color and such, so I create a black and white adjustment layer and turn the opacity down 40-60%, duplicate it and set the duplicate to multiply to get a darker image or soft light for a lighter image if you work in a dark environment anyways.

After that I add curves, I can't give you a exact number here but I can show you what I did to achieve my picture.

I not only messed with the RGB curve but also with the Red and Blue curve to add the color in the highlights and shadow that I choose. In general it's a good idea to make a nice S curve in the RGB panel. Depending on the picture I might add another curves adjustment layer just to make sure I get the lighting I want, in this case I pulled up the Highlights a little bit to make it seem like a bright day.

And this is what it looks like so far and in this case finished, I was happy with this picture as it was at this point.
But you can do more, you might wanna add some vignetting and maybe some noise.

First off the noise, create a new layer below the last adjustment layer in this case Black and white on multiply, then it Shift+F5 to fill the new layer with 50% grey.

Then go to the Filter tap and Add Noise, choose Uniform then hit okay. I only use monochromatic noise but that's personal preference.

I scale it up a bit to make it look more like a film in which the noise is very random.

Then just put it to soft light and adjust the opacity accordingly.

For vignetting you repeat the process with the 50% grey layer, but this time you put it right above the background and make it white. Go to the Lens Correction tool and then go to the custom tab on the right side of the window and adjust you vignette.

Adjust the settings however you see fit then click apply then set it to soft light adjust the opacity, make a duplicate of the layer and set the duplicated layer to multiply and adjust the opacity aswell.

And that's usually it, I will note here that the vignetting I didn't figure out myself, I caught it on youtube somewhere, this guy did also Cinematic grading.

If you want to go even further by selectively adjustung highlights etc then check this guy out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bpel1NdW50

He does the rest of the Grading almost exactly I do it so if you prefer narrated video then check him out he is really good.

Also if you're not sold on the whole Cine Grade thing and say "Well it's not that good" check out my other pictures many of them are graded with this technique maybe you'll find one of your liking.

My Flickr

Take Care

Starting Photography: The Basics

It somehow became a fashion to Photograph, it seems to be some modern style wether that might be through the digitalisation, the internet sharing age or the just simply going with a trend, I'm not sure. The last option seems to me is the most popular one but that might just be so in my immediate area. The old motivation to just have a passion for it seems to be rare even though many more people are taking photographs.
Enough of my rant about modern society and lets move on.

Whatever your motivation might be, the key to taking good photos is knowing your basics, and that's what I'm going to write about in this post. I'm going to go through the basics Camera settings and some of the keywords/things you need to know, also the basic post production and Photography Types, so let's begin.

- Focal Length
- Shutter Speed
- Aperture also known as F-Stop
- ISO
- Overall exposure
- File System
- Photography Types such as Portraits etc.
- Basic Gear
- Post Prodcution

The Focal Length

The Focal Length measured in millimetres (mm) basically represents your zoom factor. If you have a long 300mm lens your angle will be greatly reduced and you will be zoomed in on a specific object or an area. So the higher the focal length, the higher zoom factor. On a 18mm lens for example you have a much wider angle of view, you can capture wide areas in a single shot and that's ideal for Landscape Photography, but at a certain point the image gets distorted, that means straight lines get warped etc. an extreme example would be a fisheye lens which starts at 15mm of focal length, with a lens like this the image is completely distorted, but you can capture up to 180 degrees of your surroundings. That means you capture everything all the way from the left to the right. Here's a chart to demonstrate:

As you can see the Angle of View in Degrees gets lower as you move up your focal length, there's no way to bypass that, that's a rule of Optics.

Shutter Speed 

The Shutter is responsible for how long your sensor or film gets exposed to the incoming light, if a shutter is open for about 1/500 of a second the time frame in which the sensor is exposed to light is relatively short but when you expose your sensor for 1/60 of a second or even whole seconds the exposure to light is much longer and therefore much greater.

The main feature of the Shutter speed is to control the amount of light getting in, on a bright sunny day you need a fast shutter speed since enough Photons are hitting the sensor in a very short time, on a cloudy and dark day not as much Photons are bouncing of the surfaces so it takes longer to gather enough photons on your sensor to get a proper exposure.
The secondary feature of shutter speed is motion blur. If you photograph a fast moving object with a very high shutter speed let's say 1/3000 of a second the light is only recorded in that time but the object didn't really move far in that time so it seems like it's frozen, if you photograph the same object moving exactly as fast with a slow shutter speed say 1/120 of a second, the fast moving object will blur because in 1/120 seconds the object might have moved forward a little and the sensor also captured the progressed state of the object.

This can add an artistic effect to the image and is quite often used on purpose.

Aperture

The Aperture ring is an Iris inside of your lens, it regulates how much light at one time gets through your lens to the sensor or film of your camera. For example you might have a 3.5f lens that means your lens can open up it's iris to 3.5f (the f number is calculated by dividing the focal lens with the diameter of the entrance pupil) that means more lights gets in because the iris is opened up much wider than in 8.0f.

You can really think of the aperture like the pupil of the human eye, when it's dark more light needs to get in or through to see properly, that's how the aperture works it regulates how much light can even get through the lens to the camera.
The primary feature of the Aperture is of course exposure control just like before just one other way to set the correct exposure but it also has a secondary feature and that's called depth of field. If you open your aperture wide open, everything which is not in focus will get blurred and very smooth looking. But if you close down the aperture you will get back detail in the places which are not in focus like the tree behind a person will appear sharper even though it's not in focus.

Also highlights which are not in focus and get blurred will create a lot of Bokeh and that gets more apparent the larger the aperture is. A side note to Bokeh, the shape of the Bokeh is determined by the shape of your aperture namely the amount of blades your lens has.

ISO

The ISO is basically just a number which represents the sensitivity to light of your recording device. If you bump up your ISO on your camera you won't need to open your aperture as wide or use a slow shutter.
But generally you want to keep your ISO number low to reduce digital noise, if you move your ISO up, the chance of noise is much much greater depending on how high you go. A good rule of thumb is to change the ISO last, only if you have no other choice or want to achieve a certain effect by setting either Aperture or Shutter Speed.

Overall Exposure

If you set Shutter speed, Aperture and ISO you have your complete exposure and you have to balance each setting to get the correct exposure for you environment.

File Sytem

If you are at least kind of serious about your photography and plan to post process the images you will need to shoot in RAW. RAW is the uncompressed unprocessed 14bit file which comes directly from your buffer, you have all the information which the sensor captured still in them and you can later use it to process your picture more efficiently and effectively. But the files are usually 5 to 10 times higher than your normal jpeg files so you need to keep in mind to pack enough storage.
I always shoot in raw, even if I don't plan on processing them, because I might want to one day and that information I lose when I shoot in jpeg I will never get back, you can always jpeg your finished images later on.

I only think there are 3 situations useful to shoot in jpeg. One being if you don't have enough storage and just need to take a lot of photos, the second being timelapses which kinda falls in the first. And if you don't want or can process later and want a reasonably good picture from the start (picture styles are more efficient and better looking in jpeg.

Photography Types

There are many different types of Photography but there are 3 main categories. There's no particular order to the categories so I'm just going to fire away.

Portrait Photography, is like the name suggests, taking pictures of people in certain situations or environments, like the last vacation etc.
For people mainly wanting to do this I suggest Prime lenses with a large Aperture (lenses without zoom, they are fixed to one focal length) and with a focal length of 35 and above.

Landscape Photography is taking pictures of nature and basically your surroundings, for this type of photography you want to capture as much as possible that means you will need lenses with a wide angle of view 35 and below. Even though they're said to be not as sharp as prime lenses but I would suggest a zoom lens for this, because sometimes you'll need to reframe or change the focal length just a tiny bit like 3 to 6 mm and you either don't have small steps like that with prime lenses or it's just to ineffective.

In Macro Photography you take pictures of tiny things like bees flowers or details of rather large things like a car tire, in Macro you want to capture the finest details in objects or even sometimes people.
For macro you need specialised lenses which support that feature, some normal lenses also have a switch to change between the normal and macro mode. You can also bypass the lenses and make every lens to a macro by using lens whacking but that's more advanced and I'm not going to cover that in the basics.

Basic Gear

Well, basically you just need a camera with a lens on it, that's it. But that's not really ideal and you have many limitations so lets just say a camera with a lens and a tripod. The tripod is very useful to stabilise your shots and get angles which are hard to hold steady handheld.

I'll say this though, some might argue about that but I think if you're really just starting photography have no experience what so ever, get a crappy or just very old camera first, you know something which is really cheap and you can easily afford. And here is why, you learn to work around the short comings of your camera and try everything out to make the picture look good, it's hard and not at all easy but if you switch to a good camera after sometime, everything seems easier and you can get much better pictures just because you learned to think in that way.

Since this is a blog I will add some personal experience here, I started with an old Olympus E-300, it's one of the first DSLR's and it had a crappy resolution, hot pixels everywhere on a exposure longer than 1 second and it was so noisy and the overall image quality and dynamic range was not good at all, but when I got my Canon t3i I could think out of the box to achieve better images and that wasn't just due to the better camera, I learned to think different.

Post Production

Post Production or processing is basically retouching and refining your image you've taken to make it look even more desirable, by adjusting the brightness of the highlights and shadows and how intense the darks and whites are supposed to be, also cropping and much more, but that are the basic adjustments done to almost every image.
Good software for that is Lightroom or Apples Aperture it runs around 100 Dollars and is very powerful for the basic stuff. A lot of you may think Photoshop is the best program, but that is more advanced and that's something entirely different you need to learn for the start just stick with the basic programs you can even use free once like Picasa etc. for the beginning that's all you'll need.

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Retrieving Picture quality from bad Cameras and high Compression. (Underwater)

Have you ever taken a picture with your Cellphone or old point-and-shoot Camera and thought "Well that's a pretty good shot!" and tried to correct and grade it like your DSLR raw files? If you did you may have found it, that it's not that easy.
The Pictures behave very differently in your photo Editor of choice. Highlights can not be retrieved as easily, dark parts of your picture are usually lost.

This all may seem like it has any use, but there are a couple of things you can do with just a Program like Lightroom to get some decent quality and even enhance them.
I've learned this recently when my Dad gave me some of his underwater Pictures of Fish among some other things.

A side note to that topic: Water cuts out most of the light and you'll and up with a picture pretty flat, dull and boring. (Not the good kind of flat) Meaning, all the colors are lost (red is among the first colors to disappear) and so are a lot of the details you may have seen with your naked eye.

So here is what I did to make this picture look better....

First I adjusted the White Balance settings to match the blue to a darker and more vibrant blue. This depends highly on the Picture, for some it's necessary to decrease temperature and for others it's required to add warm colors after that adjust the Tint accordingly.

After that I moved on to the basic settings. Said underwater pictures were almost always overexposed so I almost always pulled down the exposure just a bit in this case -0.40. Then increased the Contrast to get some more Details, pulled down the Highlights to get some details back in the Highlights and pulled up the Shadow slider to get some details back in the dark areas. I also increased the Whites but this depends on your picture in my case mine has gotten a little dark for my taste so I increased the Whites and also increased the blacks to get some juicy contrast. Just remember you can't push the image as far.

In this picture I wanted it to look very crisp and sharp, so I also increased the clarity but you often have to go easy on that setting since it adds a lot of noise.
To bring back some of the color I increased vibrance quite a bit but pulled down saturation just slightly to make it more natural.

In addition, tweak the Tone Curve a bit to get the Contrast/Exposure you want. For underwater Pictures I found that increasing highlights and Lights as well as the shadows and lowering the darks to be extremely good looking, it gives you a contrasty but detailed look.

Then I moved on to HSL. I can't give you a go-to answer on that one since this really really just depends on the picture you have taken but here's what I did. I tried to make the fish tails really good looking and a point to catch the eyesight. So I increased the greens and adjusted the aqua and blue tones until it became the color of my liking. Then I moved on to the Luminance tab to set the Luminance of each color, I wanted to make the water look fresh and clean so I dropped down the blues to achieve that distinct look and separate the fish from the background.

That's how you have to go through all of your pictures, what do you want to enhance, decrease, make brighter, darker etc.

Last but not least, the sharpening. It's very important in those low-res, high-compression pictures but it also has to be used very carefully, if you increase it too much, you might actually worsen the quality.
I found a good amount to be around 40 to 70 and leave the over sliders alone, I only use the masking sometimes.

Just remember always adjust according to your image and never overstretch its compression also know what you want the picture to look like. Some of these files are below one Mb so they're extremely high compressed and don't leave you much room to work with.
Also if you really want to use noise reduction use it with caution, especially low-res pictures don't react all to well to NR and you might end up with a soft picture.

All the things I did you can do in most editors out there the buttons are just in different places. (e.g. Apple Aperture)

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Take Care

Lightroom Split Toning

What is Split Toning? Split toning is a process in which you change the color of Highlights and Shadows individually. In simple terms you can change the dark parts of your picture to a bluish tint and the bright parts to an orange tint.

Split Toning in Lightroom is very simple you can either pick a color from the color picker (which is a color scale) or use the hue slider to find a color. Then you simple adjust the Saturation to choose the intensity of the picked out color. Balance is used to adjust which color is shown better either the highlight colors or the shadow colors. 

In this case I took the vibrance in the split toned picture all the way down, in every other way those to pictures are the same. Lightroom makes split toning incredibly easy. 

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Capturing the Stars

Ever wondered how photographers get the Milky Way to pop out like that? Well I wondered the same thing a while ago and I've figured it out (so far at least) and I'm listing the stuff you need and what you need to do.

- Good weather conditions like low humidity, no clouds and so on and so fourth.
- A suitable season, for the northern hemisphere it's Spring or Summer (the Milky Way is further up)
- And what I learned the hard way recently is just a good location, low light pollution and it's very useful if the countryside is very flat. Now on the subject of light pollution we in Europe have a real issue. Europe is so densely populated that you have light pollution almost everywhere, the really really good stuff you can't get around here, even the best equipment can bypass that main problem.
But you still should be able to get a decent picture if you work around as best as you can.
- Timing is key, you need to know where the Milky Way is in your timeframe, a good way to determine the location of the Milky Way is to use the Program called Stellarium, if you turn down the light pollution level you can see the Milky Way very clearly and you can use the clock to set a good time (don't forget to set your location).
- Use Google Maps to mark a good position and drive there in advance.

Now the equipment:
If you got everything up there you also need equipment.

- You'll need your camera obviously, it doesn't need to be a full frame although that helps a lot with the noise levels
- A tripod, there's no other way to hold your camera steady.
- A fast lens, meaning a lens with a very wide aperture. F3.5 works but it would be better if you had one with 2.8 or even 1.8. Also your focal length shouldn't be above 24mm (at most) otherwise you have to dial down the shutter speed (I'll explain that some other time, or just google) or you will get star trails very quickly.
- Keep your ISO levels beneath 3200, if you crank it up to something like 6400 it will look like you see a lot more stars but in reality that's just noise.
-Expose 20 to 30 seconds.

Another important thing for the poor suckers like me who live in Europe even if you have a very fast prime lens with a good focal length, and full frame camera, you won't be able to get the Milky Way in the full sharpness other photographers do who are based in say, North America.
The Light pollution is just to intense you could use f1.4 24mm and exposure for 25-30 seconds, but the sky will be almost like blown out. I tried it.

Here the Milky Way fades away in the light pollution and it's very hard to bring it back and maintain a clean image.

Now let's talk processing. 

There are couple of ways to process Astro pictures, for now I'm just going to show you two of them in Lightroom, I'll get into the Photoshop method some other time (retaining foreground detail) 

The first way is very simple and it's just meant to bring out as many stars as you can, but you'll lose all the foreground detail and it will just be a silhouette. But first things first, something we do no matter what is White Balance and Tint. I usually set the WB from 3400 to 4000 Kelvin and adjust the Tint accordingly. 

First bring the exposure up to +1.00 to +1.40, then pull the Highlights Slider all the way up and pull the Blacks all the way down, this gives you a super intense contrast between the dark patches of sky and the bright milky way. (Note: Since the foreground is usually very dark it's going to be completely dark from this point on) If you want to add even more contrast, increase the whites just a bit. 

I usually leave the contrast alone, because you start losing the tip of the milky way. Don't use too much clarity or else you will get a lot of noise but a little is just fine you can get a lot of detail.

The Saturation and Vibrance is a purely personal choice I usually you more split toning so I don't really use those sliders. 

For additional contrast adjust the Tone Curve, I can't give you a number here it really just depends on the Image.

Lastly, noise reduction this is really important since you added a bunch of noise on top of the already noisy image by pushing the raw file to it's limits (Oh yea I almost forgot ALWAYS SHOOT IN RAW)
Leave the detail to around 50 and push the Luminance between 30 and 50, if you go further the image starts to get really soft. At first you will think you start to lose some of the stars and you're leaning towards not using noise reduction at all, believe me that's not true I thought that for a long time but really the "Stars" you lose aren't really stars they're just noise in the dark areas of space.

That's the final image I achieved with this processing technique. 

The next one is a little less noise intense and you maintain more detail in the foreground and the surroundings. 

Again start by adjusting the WB (same as before) then adjust your exposure just a little bit if it's off, but try to stay away from that adjust, adjust the contrast and add something between 30+ and 45+. Leave the Highlights, blacks etc alone, you can adjust that later in Tone Curve. Adjust the clarity to somewhere in the twenties, not too much or again you will get a lot of noise and it will just look awful, add Vibrance and Saturation as you wish, but I wouldn't go to high or to low. 

The Tone Curve adjustment. Add Highlights and lights, pull down the darks and pull the shadows up, this again depends on the image. But this will give you more contrast and make the stars pop more.

Noise reduction same as before, although with this processing technique it's not mandatory since you didn't gather as much noise as before.
You can add a bit of sharpening but go easy or you will get more noise.

I hope this gives you a good starting point, those to techniques can also be mixed or you just use a less intense or more intense version of each, this is entirely up to you and what your image needs.

Take Care

To Start Off

Well, I've never done this before and now I'm not really sure why I do this in the first place. Maybe I just got tired of explaining everything in the description of my flickr account oh well my holidays are coming up and this is probably something I could do, anyways enough of the scattered thoughts and get this thing going.

This is a blog about what I do and how I do stuff in Photography and soon probably Videography. My tricks, my problems, my solutions the stuff that didn't work out and a lot of crappy spares.

Here's an example of what I mean:

This image for example was supposed to be an HDR. But it looked like crap and instead I did heavy grading and correction in after effects. And then it looked something like this:

Just click it it's just a flickr link

So it looks something like this.
Oh yea btw if you like the stuff I blog about and want to keep seeing more then share it so I don't lose the will to keep on blogging if nobody reads it whats the point then?