100X100 – episode 18

The year’s end is coming near, and all the glossy lifestyle magazines bring plenty of ‘variations’ articles. Nine fresh ideas to dress the family dinner table. Five ways to mix a cocktail with gin. Three trendy preparations for fresh tuna. Four alternatives for the traditional Christmas chocolate trunk cake. And so on…

That variations theme led me to think about different ways to
‘interpret’ a single image in totally different ways. Not just sticking to whatever you had in mind as the shutter clicked, but a little creative exploration of different looks and moods. And what better and easier way to tackle this challenge than to randomly grab in the goodies bag offered by post-processing plug-in suites.

This is what my X100 ‘saw’ from the fifth floor hotel room balcony on a drab and windy Sunday morning. You’re looking at a part of downtown Breda, in the south of the Netherlands: the Chassé Promenade, with the Chassé Theater and the Holland Casino in the background (locals by now will know where I was staying).

Let’s start with a simple basic treatment in Lightroom. A little tweak of exposure and contrast, a pinch of clarity and vibrance, and a more interesting crop: that’s all.

Over to Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro: a tool I could hardly go without anymore by now. I ended up with this rather dramatic, dark and grainy look. As a matter of fact: this is the ‘look’ I had in mind when I took the picture.

Creativity can come in colors too: Nik’s latest Color Efex Pro 4.0 spoils you with stackable effect filters and selective blending.
For this one I combined one of the Cross Processing filters with a Bleach Bypass one; a few carefully placed control points were used to set each filter’s strength in specific areas.

 
You cannot let a cloudy sky and such concrete walls slip by without a try at HDR processing. The starting image in fact was the middle one of a three-frame bracketed series with –1EV, 0EV and +1EV exposures; that setting too was premeditated… Unfortunately, the X100 does not offer you a 2EV spacing option, more useful for HDR capture. The three frames were combined in Nik’s HDR Efex Pro. This time, I ignored my preference for a more realistic rendering and rather pushed for more. Here again, one or two control points and a little tweaking once back in Lightroom added some final touches.

Do these plug-ins, with their endless creative variations, make your pictures better? I will leave that for others to decide, but they do at least help me to look differently at my shots. And I will visualize a broader range of options when I next push the trigger.

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100 – Silver Efex Pro, Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

100X100 – episode 17

A blessing or a curse?

So far I haven’t really made up my mind about the role and usefulness of ‘creative filters’ in post-processing. Sure, they are my go-to tools for B&W conversions and HDR processing, and I will use them without hesitation as long as their effect on the final image is subtle and seemingly non-existent. Based on that same logic, I will rarely include Photoshop in my workflow, except for ‘mandatory surgery’: I prefer staying within the capabilities and confines of Lightroom and its basic toolset.

And yet, having installed a fair selection of plug-ins for some time now, I find myself revisiting my original position. Photomatix Pro has become my workhorse for photorealistic HDR images, and Nik Software’s excellent suite serves me well for more artistic versions and interpretations.

For creative experimentation, I would have a hard time doing without Nik’s ‘Efex Pro’ triplet. It has become so easy to see a fast preview of any effect, thanks to the many built-in presets, and there’s ample sliders to tweak the processes to your personal liking. And then the luxury of the almighty U Points!

There’s one drawback in taking this route. Potentially, a big one. It is so easy and alluring to take an otherwise bland, uninspired shot and transform it into something ‘worth looking at’. Indeed, a trendy effect may make the picture look more interesting – at least to its author - than content or composition deserve. I note the same pitfall in so many iPhone snaps that litter Twitter and Facebook: often empty shells but coming in a nice gift wrapper.

On the other hand, creatively fooling around makes you wonder why an skipped discarded at first suddenly looks more promising, even takes on a new personality. Perhaps that brings us to a better look into composition and the use of light and color. And thereby teaches us a thing or two to make our next pictures a tad better. What do you think?

Gear notes: Fujifilm X100 – Silver Efex pro, Color Efex Pro, HDR Efex Pro

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version

App-Art

More than a month without new posts on this blog, I feel quite embarrassed… It’s just that I haven’t been shooting much (that I could share) over these few weeks, but that should change for the better soon.

So now for something completely different!

The popularity of the iPhone as a camera-to-go has caused a flood of tiny apps that do ‘creative’ things to your quick shots. I wouldn’t call the end results great photography, but at least these apps quickly provide a fresh look on otherwise uninspiring pictures… We all (should) know about the more famous tools: Hipstamatic, Plastic Bullet, 100Cameras and the likes. I ran into a few other equally fun ones.

Released very recently, Tiny Planet Photos warps your images into small stereographic projections. I actually moved some older archive shots to my iPhone first to run them through this free App.

No doubt inspired by this App-wave, we’ve seen the first desktop utilities to make similar creative edits to pictures. One that you too may like very much is Lo-Fi. A more than funky user interface alone makes it worth looking at that one.

No fresh pixels to play around with? Get your creative juices flowing and have some fun with your image libraries!

(Note: I did apply some minor Lightroom tweaking afterwards, for instance to crop, adjust levels or add a white vignette effect).

Gear notes: various smoke & mirrors

Click on the image(s) to see a larger version