Upcoming Ops

A few busy weeks coming up!
On the heels of Contact, I'm heading to Madrid in a few weeks to visit See See and to scout around the shows of PHotoEspaña (suggestion of "must see" shows greatly appreciated), followed by a zip up to the much-overphotographed Guggenheim in Bilbao and whats sure to be entirely too much fantastic food.
Isaac's birthday and graduation from Middle School are also approaching, even earlier -- and then as soon as I'm back from Spain, he's in for three weeks of rock n' roll camp while we also deal with Siggraph, California Extreme, Oshkosh (maybe), Gamefest, and yeah, the girl on the far right of the photo above is carrying an NVISION bag, where I'll be speaking about the future of real-time character animation and rendering (with special guests -- some incredible NVIDIA partners).
Rethinking Gorman
It’s been a couple of years now since I wrote this entry on
digital Black and White conversions. I’m still using a variation of
the Caponigro conversion described there. What prompted me here was a
combination of events, including reconciling the many scripts and actions I
had on several different Photoshop-equipped computers, each of which had
diverged from ts brethren; meeting Bob Carnie at Elevator Digital in Toronto,
thanks to Dinesh;
this
APUG thread, which also included more info from Bob; and the latest
edition of Digital Photo
Pro magazine, which has run B&W articles as its cover story quite a
lot over the last year or two, and this one was no exception. What
surprised me was that DPP were freshly touting the old Gorman/Holbert
method (aka the Gorman
Method).
I've tried the Gorman method a few times in the past, stored actions for it
like many other people have no doubt, and... it puzzles me. It puzzles me because:
As an Action the method makes sense to some degree -- I can imagine applying it to whole directories of pictures at a time. What it lacks in control it might make up for in volume, though you could say that about any Photoshop/Bridge/Lightroom action.
There's also the proof pudding -- Gorman's published shots. They genuinely look great, but... is it really the conversion, or the practiced studio photographer? If he really uses this method, my guess is that he's learned how to nail his desired B&W results time after time by rigid adherence until it has become very natural to use and light for this scheme.
Bob likes Lab too, according to the APUG thread. I'm still scratching my head, though I suppose that the same "use what works for you" logic could be behind his comments (and I have no argument with that line of reasoning, believe me). It's also true that using a combination of all three colors, regardless of just what that composition might be, has the potential to give you really smooth and gorgeous floating-point-precision gradients even without resorting to Dark Side trickery like HDR.
Still, I like the Caponigro
method, and have adjusted it slightly since the previous entry. I don't
try to put the color toning into the same operation, and I put all the
adjustments into a folder, so I can turn them of and on as a group (or fade
them by adjusting the opacity of the entire layer group at once).
I've also added a blank layer I label "burn" to the folder, and set its blend mode to "multiply." Anything I paint into this layer will essentially burn-down (darken) the corresponding areas of the final B&W image, and it too can ave varying opacity in case I get a little too heavy-handed wit the brush (which happens a fair bit). The illustration shows a complete "Modified Caponigro Method" folder.
What about that undisplayed "Layer 2" above the folder?
It's the result of my very favorite Photoshop key commands, a trick I've only heard verbally described as "The Move." It's "ctrl-option-shift-E" and does in one step what the Gorman method does in two -- it merges all visible layers into a new layer at the top of the stack (in the Gorman method, this is done by creating a blank layer and then running "merge visible" on that layer -- exactly the same result).
That "Layer 2" is just such a layer, which has then been hidden for later use (as we'll see).
A problem with Photoshop is that it doesn't let you specify arbitrary blend operations (or filters) on a folder. So the only way to use those sorts of effects are to do a "move," create that new layer, and then execute whatever on that layers pixels. That's what the Gorman method does for its high-pass layer, and how I use it will be described below.
These "merged" layers are great, but do remember -- if you edit any of the underlying Hue, Curves, etc layers, those changes will not automatically appear in the merged layer. Instead, you'll need to hide or delete the old merge and make a new one (clicking the little visibility icons then makes A/B comparisons pretty easy too, btw).
Recently, I've been experimenting with using these merge B&W layers to manipulate color images:
Here are some pics: the first is an un-modified original, followed by two possible B&W conversions, and then the color result of applying those conversions back to the original color image. In the first, darker one, I liked the somewhat bad-color-printing appearance it had. In the second, which also washed-out a lot of the detail in the freckles, the color becomes very soft, looking almost like hand coloring. The last in this group uses the same brght luminance source, but the effect is faded back by reducing the luminance layer's opacity.
As long as we're in Photoshop, it's hard to resist trying near-useless tricks, too. Here's a completely negative luminance applied to the original colors, and its inverse (which gives positive luminance to negative colors).
These samples use a different blend mode: the "lighter color" mode. The result (which looks best, IMO, when slightly faded back) gives slight variations in the overall color saturation according to the overall luminance -- another rather film-like effect and one I really like.
Finally, why not blend components of techniques for something new? The pics below show the high-pass layer from the Gorman technique, applied via "overlay" to the original color image.
So what about video games?I would be remiss not to mention that all of these methods, except for the high-pass filter, can be executed in a single unified pass in hardware shaders, thus also making them appropriate for using in video games (the high-pass filter would require an additional render-to-texture pass). If you've been paying attention to John Nack's blog, you may also know that such effects will eventually be available in real time for Photoshop and Flash via "Pixel Bender" shaders.
Long Ride

Almost time to say goodbye to China, now that I'm back in Beijing. Also time to say goodbye to:
If I can just keep my laptop and 5D working for two more days....
(Followup: I remind myself, a bit, of my old second (third) cousin who raced motorcycles and cars and kept soldiering on through the many hospitalizations as just part of the passion....)
Which doesn't begin to compare to what happened to Michael :(
Hot Pot

Chongqing: grand scale, tiny side streets, cultures in rapid transition, spicy goat tendon, "Happy Birthday" trucks, 33 million people and growing by over 1300 per day. What's not to love?
Beijing 2007

Pretty busy, and generally some pretty poor net connections. Surprised I could manage to get this posted.... I'll be back in mid-January.
Back to China

After my first visit to China I knew I would have to return. I love it.
And so I will be returning -- touring from mid-December until mid-January, entering and exiting via Beijing & wandering the country by rail or whatever with planned stops in HK and Shenzen, Chongqing, Xian, and hopefully Jiangxi & Guangxi.
A challenge this time will be to maintain my "one bag that you can easily carry for long distances" rule, this time for a trip more than three times as long as the last one (but that length makes the rule all the more important!). Fortunately I can carry less than Louie Palu (I think I'll skip the second hard drive and the Kevlar helmet), though a bit more than Tim Ferriss (mostly because I have a larger laptop and camera).
Free and Easy

They say you can't create in a vacuum. It's probably true. But as with most aphorisms, its opposite is as valid: you can't create when pummeled with unending high-pressure noise.
With that in mind I've moved myself away from internet inputs in a formal way, announcing and enforcing strict limits on when I allow myself to worry about incoming emails, or blogs, or the hundreds of other information-rich but meaning-spare electronic minutae that had been dominating my time.
I still leave Outlook turned on all day. I still compose e-mails at any hour. But except during narrow windows of the morning and afternoon, I leave Outlook in the Task-list or Calendar views. As the Quebecers say, je me souviens.
Soundslides

I've finally started to mess around with SoundSlides -- I've had a link set to it for some time, ever since seeing a quick guide on Martin Fuchs blog almost a year ago (ouch).
The link above is my first crude attempt with the demo, a little recap of Isaac's summer hockey season -- after ten minutes of using the program I promptly sent Joe Weiss a nice PayPal delivery (and ordered myself a new audio recorder (sorry Griffin, my iTalk is cute and tiny but not a general-purpose tool) and some replacements for my main mics, which have seen better days long ago)(more stuff to carry when shooting -- hoorah). I'll replace the prezo some time soon when I get my proper SoundSlides reg code and also re-record the audio with Isaac playing it (or something similar).
Obviously I've got an learning curve ahead of me but I'm excited -- SoundSlides is just far easier and more direct to use for these sort of presentations than anything I've see so far using regular Flash, or Flex, or even Premiere. All good programs, but SoundSlides is directed -- it does one thing and does it well. No wonder it's so popular for news shooters and wedding folks.
Older Entries:
24 September Narita Express