topic Re: More realistic skies in EOS DSLR & Mirrorless Cameras

More realistic skies

amatula — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 04:44:39 GMT

Hi,

I appreciate the help I received regarding image sharpness. My other issue has been skies... does anyone have any suggestions on having skies more realistic. Would a polarizer filter fix the issue?

Thank you in advance for your assistance! 🙂

Annie

Re: More realistic skies

TCampbell — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 05:18:28 GMT

A polarizer only "might" help. The type of polarizer that would be required is called a "circular polarizer" (avoid "linear polarizer" or "top polarizer"). But polarizers work best when the source of light (in the case of the sky that would be the sun) are off to one side -- not straight ahead nor behind you.

The filter that is likely more effective is called a "gradient neutral density" filter. This filter is typically a rectangular shape and it slides into a bracket (at the entry level, the Cokin brand makes these filter. Lee Filters makes high end versions of these filters.). The filters slide into a filter holder (a bracket that attaches to the front of the lens.).

The filter is clear on one half... and tinted on the other half. You slide the filter in so that it only darkens the sky (or whatever you want to dark -- but usually that's the sky) but does not darken the landscape below.

The filters come in different strengths (aka "densities") and they also have a "hard edge" vs "soft edge" variety (the "soft edge" means the change from the clear area to the tinted area is gradual. The "hard edge" means it changes much more quickly.)

Re: More realistic skies

jrhoffman75 — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 11:31:13 GMT

http://www.austadpro.com/blog/neutral-density-filters-and-graduated-nd-filters/

Re: More realistic skies

TCampbell — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:29:11 GMT

If you go to YouTube and do a search with "Graduated ND" or "Graduated Neutral Density" you'll get quite a few videos that show the filters, describe how to use them, and show the results.

One other thing... if you're serious about getting these filters there are one of two things you'll want to know about filter sizes and filter holders. (This, btw, is where the square filter system saves you money.)

Most photographic filters and round and they screw onto those threads, but since graduated filters are half-clear and half tinted and you need to be able slide the filter to the point where the transition betweeen clear and tint lines up with the part of the image that you want to darken (usually the sky) while leaving the foreground alone... you need a filter that allows you to position the transition point and that's why these filters are rectangular and "slide" in... instead of round and thread on.

The holder has to attach to your lens and it simply threads onto the filter threads on the front of the lens. But lenses, of course, come in lots of different filter-thread diameters. So you buy a filter holder in just one size (more on that in a moment) and the filter holder needs an adapter ring to adapt it to your lens. The adapter rings come in every typical lens thread diameter size you can imagine (so you can attach it to your lens) but all attach to the filter holder.

The nice thing about this is that if you have lenses with different thread diameters, you don't buy another set of filters... you use the same filter holder and the same filters and you only buy a different adapter ring for the lens thread diameters that you need (the adapters are cheap).

It turns out, however, that even rectangular filters do come in different widths...

In the Cokin system (the entry level) they have the Cokin "A", "P", "Z-Pro", and "X-Pro". But really the only size you should consider is the "Z-Pro" -- that's the 100mm (or 4") size.

In the "Lee" filter system, they have the "Sev5n", the "100mm", and the "150mm". But really it's the 100mm size that you'd want.

The reason is that that 4" (aka "100mm") system is the most common so you'll find the greatest selection of filters available in that size, but ALSO because it's the size where both systems just happen to match up (both Cokin and Lee make a 100mm wide filter system). That means that if you buy the less expensive Cokin filters to start... but later decide you'd like to upgrade to the Lee filter system, the filters can actually mount in the same holder.

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:55:30 GMT

Or you can learn how to use Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. You can make the sky any way you want it. No fuss. No muss. No fiddling.

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Tue, 15 Dec 2015 15:58:43 GMT

Samples from Photoshop Essentials.

Re: More realistic skies

amatula — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 02:54:00 GMT

Thank you, ebiggs,

That is very helpful (as is the suggestion for the gradient neutralizer filter -- I will look into that too as it sounds like a very useful camera item to have!)

May I ask: I have a free, older version of Photoshop CS2, version 9. I have not seen anything in it for the sky corrections. Is that only in the current version? Or is it an indirect correction using other Photoshop functionality? I have been pondering purchasing Lightroom but if Photoshop has easy sky corrections, I would go with that probably.

Thank you for your time and help!

Annie

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:47:12 GMT

Annie,

Before you waste money on graduated filters or any filter for that matter, you need to know exactly what they do. A graduated filter simple decreases the exposure in graduated part of the frame. It will just make the sky, for instance, look darker. If there is nothing there it will simply darken the exposure. Don't get me wrong here that can work but you really need something there first. And know exactly what it, the filter, is doing.

Since the advanced ability of Photoshop, the requirement for filters is almost eliminated. You can make a small case for a polarizer. But little else.

There were no clouds or blue sky in the original photo of the house. All that was done in PS (CS6). The sky photo was shot seperately at a different time. I routinely take shots of good looking sky and clouds to do just this!.

This photo is copied and put on a separate "layer" behind the house.

You can no longer buy PS. You must rent it. It costs $10 bucks a month. However, there is Photoshop Elements for sale. I think the latest version is around a hundred bucks.

There are other, lesser, choice out there ,too. One is free and does a fairly nice job. It is called Gimp and it has PS lookalike GUI (Gimpshop).

So you can use filters and guess what you are going to get or you can learn one of these post editors and make it exactly what you want! Right before your eyes.

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 15:59:44 GMT

Annie,

You mentioned Lightroom. You can not do the sky photo edit in LR. LR does have a graduated filter built in, however. And aother reason to avoid actual filters! Don't be confused, though, LR is not PS.

My normal routine is to import images into LR first. Do the first simple edits on mass and do specific edits in PS. LR is designed for the person that shoot thousands of photos. PS is a single photo at a time editor. LR is more of a data base program. It makes edits to a data file that is applied when you export the photos. The original photo is left untouched. PS is completely destructive. It makes its edits to the original which is changed forever. It is always best to work on a copy in PS and leave a clean original alone.

The ability to use multiple layers is Photoshop's biggest feature. It is like putting something on a pain of glass. Each one stacked on top of the other. Many times if needed, Each controled seperately.

Re: More realistic skies

TCampbell — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 16:23:27 GMT

Filters in Lightroom (and you can do the same in Photoshop) aren't quite as good as physical filters though...

This is because the physical filter actually changes the shooting conditions before the image is captured. The software "filters" are trying to fix the image after the damage was done.

If the image does not exceed the dynamic range of the camera (nothing is clipped in shadows or blown in highlights) then the software filter can usually do a decent job of recovering some detail. But if anything is clipped/blown then the detail is lost forever.

A landscape photographer will inspect the scene with their eyes and look for areas in the scene they plan to capture ... looking for the darkest shadows they can find and also the brightest highlight they can find. They "spot meter" those two points (take a meter reading not of the whole image frame... just use a metering mode that only only inspects a very narrow piece bit of the scene.) If the difference between the dark area and the light area are within the camera's dynamic range then they calculate the "middle" exposure (the exposure half-way between that can capture the whole scene without anything being clippd or blown) and get the exposure that way. If you do this... Lightroom's software filter can fix the sky.

But if the image doesn't fit within the camera's dynamic range, then they either have to resort to using physical gradient neutral density filters -or- they have to shoot the scene using bracketed exposures (that means you take the "correct" exposure, but also take a deliberately underexposed shot as well as a deliberately overexposed shots and then use software to merge the image as a "high dynamic range" shot (Photoshop and Lightroom have built-in capabilites to merge images to an HDR image... but the program everyone seems to prefer for this is called Photomatix Pro.

When you merge images to create an HDR image you have a lot of choices on how to represent the colors -- and some of these choices result in a very surreal image. The first few HDRs made in these surreal styles were intriguing and somewhat interesting because of their "painterly" look. But the effect is now so over-done that many photographers are really put-off by it and much prefer that the HDR look as natural as possible (in other words the best HDR images don't actually look like HDR images... they just look like you took it in a single shot with a camaera that had enough dynamic range to capture everything.)

Re: More realistic skies

RobertTheFat — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 17:22:23 GMT

As this discussion has proceeded, the word "realistic" has lost all relevance.

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 17:24:21 GMT

"Filters in Lightroom (and you can do the same in Photoshop) aren't quite as good as physical filters though..."

Still one of the diehards, Tim? Filters time has come and went. The advantages in PS so far out weigh filters it isn't much of a decision any more. I'll concede polarizers and ND for now. But just for now.

How many times have you heard the question, "Is it real or is it Photoshop?" It has become a fact of life. It has become difficult to impossible to tell.

Getting your photo right with filters may save you some time, maybe not. It can be guess work, There are times when you'll still need additional help from Photoshop. Beyond what the filter could do. Lot's of time a photographer will use a filter and still use PS to make it better. Right? Hardly ever can you skip PS just because you used a filter, if ever.

There are so many plug-ins made by "masters of the art", it is simply a single click sometimes.

Now we need to talk quality. If you don't buy high quality filters, translates to high dollar, filters, PS will always win. Plus how many? How many different lens sizes do you have? Step up rings or step down rings?

Just like film each day filters get further removed by technology.

Re: More realistic skies

jrhoffman75 — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 18:48:11 GMT

Clarification - Photoshop has its place. I don't indulge because I haven't learned how yet. But even in my local camera club any image that is presented as Nature or Wildlife can have no hand of man in the image and editing (other than standard image corrrections such as exposure, sharpness, color correction, cropping, etc.) is basically limited to dodging/burning, sensor spot removal, ND filters and cropping. Can't even clone out a stick, much less add a sky.

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Wed, 16 Dec 2015 17:42:57 GMT

"... limited to dodging/burning, sensor spot removal, ND filters and cropping."

Right! No lens correction and sharpening, exposure comp and whatever. I have a bridge I'd like to sell you in Arizona.

Re: More realistic skies

amatula — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 03:09:48 GMT

Thank you Ebiggs and Tim!

Photo overlap sounds exciting and I should experiment sometime with that.

Now it seems my options are: filter and/or software manipulation.

Is there **any** digital camera from point and shot upwards that can capture skies more accurately as the film SLRs did?

🙂

I tried looking at b&h images but it is always tough to tell whether someone editted a photo before posting it.

Thank you again. I am enjoying learning!

Annie

Re: More realistic skies

amatula — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 03:13:26 GMT

"As this discussion has proceeded, the word "realistic" has lost all relevance."
Right! LOL! I try to be a purist and not change my photos either (although at my newbie stage, I do need to adjust, especially snow scenes). It's odd for realism that you need to use a software or filter. Then I wondered: are the skies the way they are captured in DSLR images more "realistic" than the way we perceive them with our naked eyes?

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 15:05:45 GMT

"As this discussion has proceeded, the word "realistic" has lost all relevance."

99.8% of all the great photos you love to see in the world are from Photoshop. Maybe that's 99.9% ! (Or some lesser post editor.)

The term "realistic" is relative and evolving.

"I try to be a purist and not change my photos ..."

OK, it is best to learn the hard way. Go for it.

"... are the skies the way they are captured in DSLR images ..."

The sky was captured by a DSLR. It is the way it looked. Exactly as it was. The problem comes in digital photography which is limited to a given f-stop range. Unfortunately the sky or snow and the wanted main subject are outside that range. This is where PS can help. PS makes an impossible shot possible. It can make the shot look like it did to you at the time. Now tell me if that is your definition of "realistic"?

Re: More realistic skies

RobertTheFat — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 18:07:54 GMT

@ebiggs1 wrote:
"As this discussion has proceeded, the word "realistic" has lost all relevance."

99.8% of all the great photos you love to see in the world are from Photoshop. Maybe that's 99.9% ! (Or some lesser post editor.)
The term "realistic" is relative and evolving.

"I try to be a purist and not change my photos ..."

OK, it is best to learn the hard way. Go for it.

"... are the skies the way they are captured in DSLR images ..."

The sky was captured by a DSLR. It is the way it looked. Exactly as it was. The problem comes in digital photography which is limited to a given f-stop range. Unfortunately the sky or snow and the wanted main subject are outside that range. This is where PS can help. PS makes an impossible shot possible. It can make the shot look like it did to you at the time. Now tell me if that is your definition of "realistic"?

The truth is that "realistic" is a very squishy concept, because the human eye/brain system applies a lot of editing (WB adjustment, distortion correction, etc,) to real-world scenes that is not normally applied by a camera. And of course that editing is missing when one looks at images the camera captures. So a certain amount of editing can, in fact, make a picture look more like what the viewer would have thought he saw. The problem is that an industrial-strength editor like Photoshop can easily go beyond such corrections and produce an image that is, by any rational definition, highly artificial. That's not to say that such images are in any way bad, but it can be quite a stretch to call them realistic.

Re: More realistic skies

TCampbell — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 18:40:18 GMT

I've met the extremes where everything must be shot perfect in camera, and you should only ever need to shoot JPEG becuase why on Earth would you ever need to adjust anything... ever.

I've also met the extremes where everything can be Phothoshop fakery and yet they call the resulting image a "photograph" when it's not at all what was present in the scene when a camera was used.

I'm happy when someone presents "art" so that others can enjoy it and I'm even pleased with digital art that isn't photography. But I draw the line when I see someone present a "photograph" when the image never actually existed in reality and someone used Photoshop (or other editing tools) to fake the contents of the image and still try to pass it off as this amazing photograph that just happened to capture because they are that good with a camera and their impressive photographic skil!

In photo contests, John is correct in that generally they expect that what you are submitting is, in fact, actually a "photograph" and not digital art created by building a composite image. Even journalistic standards now establish that documentary photography may not use Photoshop to change the reality of the scene (the infamous war scenes where they added more smoke to the sky than was actually there.)

Some photo contests require that you must shoot RAW and that while you do get to submit a JPEG for judging, the original RAW file must be made available to the judges so that they can evaluate if you went overboard while editing the image (did you change things other than the basics.)

But put the debate aside... because the "debate" assumes that you could achieve the same (or very similar) result using either the physical filter vs. the Photoshop effect filter. What I'm trying to point out is real physical limits of technology. There are still barriers that digital technology has not overcome.

Imagine you have camera with a crude digital sensor which each "pixel" only has a bit-depth of 1. This means each pixel can either be a "0" representing "black" or a "1" representing white. You can't capture any tonality.

Now imagine you improve this sensor and give it a bit-depth of 2. Now you can represent four possible values... both bits off (00) is "black", both bits on (11) is "white", but "01" can represent dark gray and "10" can represent light gray. Now you start to get some tonality.

JPEG images are contrained to 8 bits because that's the standard. But RAW images are saved as 14 bit images (because that's the sensor technology).

But it goes a little more complicated than that....

The camera sensor has a concept called "well depth" that the manufacturer's don't publish. But through some testing, it's derived to likely be somewhere around 32000 for most Canon 18MP sensor cameras. You can think of the sensor as being 18 million little test-tubes and each test tube can hold 32000 drops of water before they are full. If you've got a pixel which is represented a reading of 20000 in one well, and you've got another pixel that needs to be twice as bright, then that needs to be represented as 40000 and there's a problem because the camera sensor only has a well depth of 32000... so as soon as you achieve 32001 the water drops start spilling over and can't register any value higher than the maximum well depth. If the camera had a bigger well-depth (say... 50,000) then it could handle more exposure range.

Also.. if for any reason you boost ISO, then you increase the reading for each pixel but that reading can't exceed the maximum that can be represented. That means the darks will all get lighter... but anything that would have already been close to the maximum value the sensor can represent will now get "clipped" (boosting ISO decreases dynamic range.)

In other words... there are technical limits to the capability of the sensor to represent everything accurately.

If you shoot an image and your image contains pixels that exceed those limits then the data is lost. If you have white puffy cloud with lots of details and tonality variations... as soon as you exceed the maximum limits of the sensor... the white puffy cloud that used to have detail now turns into a white outline with no detail inside it. You can go into Photoshop and try to reduce the exposure, but now you'll have a gray outline with no detail inside it (the detail is lost forever.)

So the point of the physical filtter is to bring the bright areas of the image (usually that's the sky) down a bit WITHOUT bringing down the foreground part of the exposure. This changes the shooting conditions of the shot such that an image that used to require 13 stops of dynamic range (which the camera can't handle) might now only require 10 stops of dynamic range (which the camera can handle without losing any data.) The gradient ND filters typically come in 1, 2, and 3 stop densities but you can "stack" two filters if you need more than 3 stops. If I meter my sky at 4 stops brighter than the foreground... then I might slide in a 3 stop filter AND a 1 stop filter (for a total of 4 stops).

Now... having captured that image WIHTOUT losing any data... if you want to perform FURTHER adjustments to that photo via software such as Lightroom or Photoshop you can still do that and make a good photo even better. But if you did NOT use the physical filter and the image exceeded the dynamic range of the sensor then it's too late... nothing you can do will recover the missing information.

So I mentioned that we have these barriers that technology hasn't overcome and that's not entirely true... while a Canon sensor might have somewhere around 32000 well-depth, there are sensors with significantly higher well-depth (some of the better astro-imaging sensors are at 100,000 well-depth that are available to consumers (albeit these CCD imaging sensors are wll above $10,000) and the scientific research-grade sensors are at or above 500,000 well-depth. The problem is they are so extremely expesnive that very few would be able to afford to buy the camera. In the world of consumer electronics it's not really a viable product to sell if you can't build it for a price that consumers can actually afford.

So maybe someday... those sensors will get to a point where consumers CAN afford such sensors and we wont need the physical filters. But that day is has not yet arrived.

Re: More realistic skies

ebiggs1 — Thu, 17 Dec 2015 19:57:12 GMT

Just to satisfy full disclosure, Tim Campbell, in his chosen field of the hobby, probably uses more post editing than all the rest of us put together!