Night photography generally requires very long exposures, often several minutes at a time. To get the best image quality, we need to keep the ISO as low as possible to keep our noise levels down to acceptable levels and also to minimize the occurrence of hot pixels and sometime banding artifacts.

Now most people probably will wild guess exposures at night time and just adjust the camera settings to suit. Unfortunately since the exposures are so long, a lot of time can be spent making “dud exposures” that might not turn out just because you guess the wrong exposure time.

Here is what I do, a lot of modern DSLRs can be set up to ISO 6400 and higher, we’re going to use this to our advantage. Lets say we want to take our images at ISO 100 @ f/11 but we’re not sure what shutter speed to use. But we don’t really want to be guessing 2mins? 4 mins? 8mins and wasting our time. We set everything up and then switch our ISO to 6400. Going from ISO 100 to 6400 is equivalent to increasing our sensor sensitivity by 64 times, and the exposure time (shutter speed) can be reduced by also 64 times. This is very close to 60x. But guess what, there are 60 seconds in a minute! What this means is:

• 1 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 1 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• 2 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 2 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• 8 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 8 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• 30 second exposure @ ISO 6400 is equivalent to 30 minute exposure @ ISO 100
• and so forth…

While at ISO 6400, try a few different shutter speeds until you find what you’re after (basically by trial and error), and you’ll only be doing several second exposures so you won’t be wasting any previous time. Then once you find the shutter speed(s) you are after to give you the result you want, switch back to ISO 100 and exposure the same time but in minutes instead of seconds.

This is just not handy solely for night photos, it works great if you are using dark filters such as ND400 filters. You can use this technique to quickly judge long exposures also, and sometimes use it for composition when everything is so dark even Live View is no help (and you don’t want to unscrew/screw the filter all the time).

Some people may not have cameras that go up to ISO6400, that’s okay, you just need to make some quick calculations, but it won’t be as easy as a simple seconds-to-minute translation. So lets say your camera is ISO1600 max, then you can use ISO 1600 the same way but your translation table would be 4s@ISO1600 = 1m@ISO100, 16s@ISO1600 = 4m@ISO100 etc. Note the division of 4x to compensate for the 4x difference in sensitivity from ISO 6400 to ISO1600.

‘Til next time.

The straight out of camera image below is what we will be working with today. It is an image of Bronte Baths in Sydney, NSW Australia.

Trying out Adobe Lightroom

Lets check out our image in Lightroom. The skies are little overexposed, but not too overexposed, as we still have enough detail in the RAW file to pull back. We use Lightroom’s gradient adjustments to reduce the exposure (darken) of the sky to obtain a bit more detail in them.

Now we need to adjust the white balance, to something a little more suitable and representative of what it really was that evening. I remember the skies were orange-red in colour, and the water was very deep green-blue in colour, but the in-camera auto white balance is lying! So we need to make an adjustment.

Lets try and get the skies right. I find it really helpful to make the image really vibrant (using the vibrancy adjuetment), as it enhances all the colours, making the white balance much more sensitive. Once you find the write white balance, you can pull back your vibrancy.

The skies here now look close to what it really was. But the water is now the wrong colour. So now we adjust the WB to 8719K and the water looks a lot better.

Lightroom’s Gradient Tools

But we have a problem, how do we do both of these adjustments, one to the sky, and one to the water or foreground. We look at Lightrooms gradient tools, which are very handy indeed.

We see can make gradient adjustments only to the following:

• exposure
• brightness
• contrast
• saturation
• clarity
• sharpness
• color filter

But we can’t do it with white balance! (you could do it with color filters i guess, but thats a little different all together). The solution to this is smart objects in Photoshop. Lets see how we can do this.

Open your image in Photoshop as a Smart Object.

Open in Photoshop

The little icon in the bottom right of the layer thumbnail shows that it is now opened as a smart object. Double clicking this will bring up the Adobe Camera Raw dialog box, which pretty much has all the adjustments available the same as on Lightroom.

We want to make 2 smart objects. As we want to make separate white balance adjustments (and maybe some other adjustments as well, as we see fit) to each of the copies.

We now make the desired white balance adjustments on each of the individual smart objects, one for the sky, and one for the foreground. You make any other adjustments you like as well, such as exposure etc. Don’t forget to pull that vibrancy slider back if you were trying out my previous white balance adjustment tip. For my image, I’m going to name my layers to something more description as well. I always like doing this.

Now that we have made the Camera RAW adjustments to the 2 smart objects, we apply a layer mask to the top layer so that only the skies layer adjustments show through in the sky section; while the foreground adjustments only apply fo the foreground. We can control how hard the transition is with how the define our layer mask, position, hard or soft transition, its your choice.

I apply a black to white gradient mask. The side that is black is the end which we will not see the skies adjustment, i.e it will show the foreground adjustment. Therefore the adjustment needs to be black towards the bottom, white to the top. Like so:

Now we see we have our graduated adjustment now. Now for a few other things I love about smart objects. We can also work in LAB colour mode non destructively. And we can now soft proof and show gamut warning. Unfortunately the gamut warning and soft proofing isn’t “live”. Here are some extra adjustments, and with gamut warning turned on (proofing to FujiFlex paper at one of my favourite printers).

We make a few little final adjustments, to get rid of the gamut clipping. Flatten the image, rasterise the smart objects and rotate the image a little to fix the crooked horizon.

So there you have it folks, perhaps it wasn’t the best image to do an example on, but its more of an excerise to show the advantages of using smart objects. A serious landscape would have a lot more work done it such as sharpening, dodging and burning, more careful color adjustments etc. But try it out.

When else would this be useful?

There are many situations where this type of graduated adjustment performed as smart objects could be useful. For example:

• Combined lighting situations, say with combined natural light and artificial lighting such as tungsten or fluorescent lighting. As long as athe lighting isn’t too far mixed together, say for example a light in a window, we can use custom white balancing for different portions of an image.

If you like this tutorial, you may also like to read:

• Photoshop Smart Objects for Photographers – Part 1, Soft Proofing and LAB Color Mode
• How to enhance colours in photographs with Photoshop
• Multiple Exposure Blending for Landscapes

One the features that we have been all waiting for is soft proofing in Lightroom, Lightroom has so many quick and efficient workflow tools, but does not support one of the most fundamental tools of modern digital editing, soft proofing! (are you listening Adobe?)

We’ll see how we can “virtually” soft proof a RAW file undergoing adjustments for conversion.

Smart objects allows you to “embed” a RAW file into your layered Photoshop (.PSD) document. The embedded data contains the RAW file in its entirety, its not reference to the original file, but an actual copy of the original RAW file in the image. You can make adjustments to the RAW using Adobe Camera RAW, which means any adjustments you would normally make in Lightroom, you can do here also.

Here is the closest thing, one can get to soft proofing in Lightroom, if you wanted to see what your final output will look like with certain printing profiles, or to see if there is any gamut clipping in your images.

This isn’t the best usage of smart objects (to soft proof with), but I’m just using it as a good introduction, and as you’ll see in the next few parts I will posting shortly, RAW smart objects can be very handy for the photographer.

To use smart objects (there are several ways to do this, this is one of them), go to File, Open as Smart Object…

Select your RAW file you want to insert.

You’ll then have your Camera RAW dialog, and you’ll find your usual RAW conversion settings.

Remember to choose the appropriate colour space and bit depth. I work mainly in Adobe RGB, and 16-bit. The 16-bit is important to this example due to what we’ll be doing later on in the tutorial.

When you press OK and open the image in the editor, you’ll see in your Layers Palette, the layer icon is a little different.

There is special symbol in the lower right of the layer thumbnail, which indicates the layer is a Smart Object.

Now I turn on my colour proofing and gamut warning, and select the colour profile I want to proof to.

In this instance, I am proofing to Pixel Perfect Pro Lab’s Lambda + FujiFlex Profile.

Now it all looks okay, but lets say if I want to make a little adjustment to the RAW file conversion settings, say I want to increase the vibrancy and saturation. Instead of having to “re convert” the original RAW file, like I would in Lightroom, I can now just double click on the smart object layer, and my Camera RAW dialog will come back up!

I now make my changes, increase (a lot) the vibrancy and saturation and hit OK.

After a little pause, the image on screen will update, and we can not see clipped colours! When you make adjustments in Camera RAW, note it is not in real time, you must hit OK each time to see it update in the main window (updating in real time would be nice, but we can’t have it all hey).

Anyway, this is just touching the very basics of the power of using smart objects, as we will see in my next tutorial coming up very soon, we will start doing some things which are a lot more practical.

Remember to save your file, as a Photoshop PSD file, and all your smart objects will stay intact.

Some things to think about, keep in mind you can also add adjustment layers on top of smart objects, but you can not do pixel-specific editing like you would with normal raster images.

Now, I will turn back my vibrance and saturation to something more realistic.

I then change my colour mode to LAB, so we can do some colour adjustment the way I like to do it.

You will probably get this dialog:

Go to Don’t Rasterise. If you rasterise, you will lose your smart object.

You will now be in LAB mode, but you have not made any destructive edits to your image as the original RAW file is still there!

Make your LAB adjustments, here I have adjusted the a and b curves to make the colours “pop”, but without changing luminosity. Its probably a bit over the top, but I’m just doing it to show you as an example (not there is no clipped colours here).

Now if you wanted to make further changes to your RAW conversion, you can, just double click in the smart object again and can make as many changes as you like (e.g white balance, shadow recovery etc), without affecting the LAB curves layer you adjusted. This is great, since without using smart objects, you would have had to go back to your original RAW file and re-convert it, and then do the LAB adjustments all over again.

I hope you have learned something, and keep an eye out on this blog, as I will have more parts on smart objects coming up soon, with much more practical uses.

‘Til next time.

This is one of those subjects that if you ask 10 photographers, you’ll probably get 10 different answers on how they do it. For me, i have two methods i love to use, to enhance the colours in an existing photo. They are both Photoshop techniques.

Channel mixer

This method is quick and convenient, the feel of the image isn’t as good as the next “LAB method”, but for most purposes it works very well. This method is also often called “Velvia” action, mainly due to the look it produces which has a similar appearance to the highly saturated look of the famous Fuji Velvia transparency film.

This is a non-destructive method, meaning that by making this adjustment (with my method), you will not destroy or alter any pixels in your image. It uses an adjustment layer. What we do is create a new channel mixer adjustment layer.

For reference, this is what our test image looks like, before any adjustments:

What we see now, is for each of the output channels red, blue, and green, you can adjust the source contributions from the three channels. By default the red channel is made up of 100% red, blue channel is 100% blue etc. Now what we do is for each of the output channels we make an adjustment as follows:

• red output channel: R=150%, G=-25%, B=-25%
• green output channel: R=-25%, G=150%, B=-25%
• blue output channel: R=-25%, G=-25%, B=150%

Note that for each of the output channels adjustments, the sum of the three source channels is always 100%.

Now that we have added the adjustment layers, we see the colours in the photo are much more saturated and it does a lot better job than simply using the saturation tool.

To control how strong the effect is, we can adjust the opacity of the adjustment layer.

LAB mode a and b channel curves adjustment

This method to me creates nicer looking results. It is not as convenient as the channel mixer method however. It involves adjusting a and b curves while in LAB colour (most people work in RGB colour).

The disadvantages if this method is that it is a destructive edit, you can not apply this as an adjustment layer. To convert to LAB mode you really need to flatten your layers also (in certain cases it may not be necessary). But we can get around this by using backup layers and doing the adjustment as a separate image copy. We must keep in mind also that to convert from RGB to LAB, then from LAB to RGB again, is a lossy operation, i.e you will lose detail. But working 16-bit mode can help minimise losses.

I find this method very pleasing, it is in fact my favourite method as it adjusts the true colour “saturation” without affecting the overall luminosity.

To start, we have image we would like to enhance or bring out the colours a bit. We need to convert it to LAB mode, but since we have multiple layers already, we do not want to just convert it straight away as it would require us to flatten the layers. We need to bring the image into a new window and work from there.

So we go to Image -> Duplicate… to duplicate the image

We now have a new image with all layers intact, we work from here.

Edit->Mode->LAB Color

If you have multiple layers in your image, you will be asked to flatten them, yes you can since you are working on a duplicate copy.

Now you are in LAB mode, you’ll see under Channels there are no more red, green and blue channels anymore. Instead you now have L, a and b channels.

We now add an curves adjustment layer, and apply a change to a and b channels. The a and b channels contain information about colour, it is given a value between -128 and +128. The further away from zero it is, the more saturated a colour is. We then apply a S curve with the following control points (input, output):

• 0,0 (this should already be there)
• -64,-96
• +64,+96
• 128,128 (this should already be there)

The curves adjustment dialog should like this (screenshot shows adjustment curve already set up):

It is important the curve is symmetrical, otherwise you will get a colour shift (more accurately, a shift in hue). The numbers i have given above are just guidelines only and is what i use, but any symmetrical S curve can be used. The stronger the S, the stronger the saturation effect.

Now go to OK and you will see you should have a lot more colour in the photo.

By adjusting the opacity of the curves adjustment layer you just made, you can adjust the strength of this effect on your image. When you are finished, you can flatten the layers and copy the layer back into the original file, as a new layer.

And there you have it.

Automating with actions

If you like those two methods, why not record an action. Theres no reason you need to be setting those parameters over and over again, just record an action and add it to your workflow.

A word about Lightroom

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has a adjustment called Vibrancy which works well as a quick edit method. For non-critical images, this works pretty well so we mustn’t forget this method!

Oversaturation and clipping

Its easy once we start enhancing or boosting colours in a an image to go a bit overboard and over-do it. We must keep this in the back of our minds. There are a few things to consider:

• it is now easy to produce colours in your image, that is not physically possible to be printed on paper
• it is now possible to have colours in an image that is not reproducible on a monitor, and vice versa i.e you can see colour on the monitor that doesn’t exist in the image

These concerns and the management of colour is another article in itself. But for those who already know a bit about colour management, here is what you can do:

• When performing these adjustments, use the Gamut Warning option (in Photoshop) to see when colours are being clipped. You will of course need to select the correct ICC profile for your paper/ink/printer combination.
  
• Use soft-proofing to approximate how your print will look.
• Keep in mind, what looks great on a computer monitor may not look so good in print, so that’s why its important to make your adjustments, with the output device and profile in mind.

In screenshot above, you can see the grey areas in the middle of the image. This is an image which has had the channel mixer method colour boost applied. The grey areas shows colours which are now clipped and are outside the gamut of a Fuji Frontier and lustre paper combination. By using layers masks, we can reduce or mask out the adjustment in that area by careful use of the paintbrush, or by pulling back the opacity of the adjustment layer (which would affect the entire image).

The image used in this example probably isn’t the best to show the effects of gamut clipping, but take a shot like this, full of deep blues. Before adjustment:

Now after a little curves adjustment and a channel mixer adjustment layer for some colour boost:

Now you see why it is important to keep an eye on your colours blowing out. This is what it looks like without the gamut warning on. Okay, i admit it, it does look overdone and a bit too blue! This is an extreme example. But i think we start to get the picture here.

If you are using a CMYK output (for offset printing, magazines etc), the available colour range is even smaller, so you are even more likely to blow out.

Localised adjustments

No one ever said you must apply these adjustments to your entire image. If you only desire the adjustments to be made to certain areas of your image, then take advantage of layer masks, go wild with your paint brush or use some gradients and only apply the changes to those areas that need it.

Other techniques

There are a few other techniques that other people use. I don’t personally use these methods, but i will list some just in case you might like to investigate them:

• increase saturation under hue/saturation
• using vibrancy in Lightroom (i do this if i’m in a hurry and don’t plan on using Photoshop)

Thats it folks for today, any comments or questions, leave a reply down below and catch you in the next one!

Dynamic range

Dynamic range is the range of bright and dark areas in an image, that can be captured and recorded while still retaining detail in those areas. Imagine taking a photo of a man dressed in black with the sun setting behind him. You can either exposure for the sky, and capture the details in the sky, but you’ll just end up with a black silhouette of the man in the suit. There would be no details in the suit, since it is physically impossible for the camera’s sensor to capture those range of bright and dark areas in a photo and still have detail. It is a compromise. Alternatively, you could exposure for the dark suit, but the sun and sky in the background will turn completely white.

All cameras have a limited amount of dynamic range, some have more than others. Digital cameras are on the low end of the scale and have dynamic range not far from that of slide or transparency film (i.e not very much).

Read more in-depth info about here.

It’s not a HDR tutorial

This is not a HDR tutorial, though technically it is HDR-ish capture since I really am capturing more dynamic range than what is normally possible with a single shot taken with a digital camera. But… it is not traditional HDR “tone mapping” (which is what HDR in the sense of the word really refers to).

The initial exposures

The most important part of this method, is the capture of the initial images. Here I have shot two images:

• 1/8s @ f/8, ISO 100 to exposure for the sky:
• 1s @ 1/8, ISO 100 to exposure for the foreground:

There is 3 stops in between them. It is what I felt was suitable for this scene. But different scenes may have farther apart exposures, some closer. Your mileage may vary.

I’ll assume that you know the basics of photographic exposure and how the interaction between the scene, the shutter, aperture, ISO, camera interacts etc, so I won’t elaborate too much on how I selected those exposures. But basically, one of them gives me the detail and exposure I am after in the sky, and the other for the foreground.

I think it is important that one visualises how the final image will look before setting up for a shot like this.

Develop in Lightroom

Now I load the images up in Lightroom. You can use Photoshop and the Camera Raw plug-in also. But I’ll go through Lightroom as that is what I use.

For each of those images, make any adjustments that you need. Be conservative and don’t go too wild with things like saturation etc, you will be editing this in Photoshop later and more adjustments can be done there. Some of the things that I always look for are:

• exposure level, may need some tweaking
• setting the white balance
• remove any chromatic aberration, fringing etc. This sort of thing is far more easier to fix in Lightroom than Photoshop
• set sharpening to minimal radius (0.5), I mainly do final sharpening in Photoshop.

If you have Photoshop CS4 with Camera Raw 5.x

I don’t have this, but if you do you can take a shortcut and skip the next section about Photoshop CS3. You can select the two images in Lightroom, right click and go to Edit In, then Open as Layers in Photoshop…

This should open a single Photoshop PSD file with each image in its own layer. I’ve never done this before since I do not have CS4, and from my understanding, it only works in CS4 (or more accurately with Camera Raw 5 which only works with CS4).

If you have Photoshop CS3

Open each image in Photoshop, right click and Edit. With the two files open in Photoshop, you need to move one image into the two second image as as a second layer. So you end up with a two layer file. I generally like to have my dark layer on top of the bright layer. But it works the other way around too, we’re trying to demonstrate the principle here and not so much any hard set rules.

Composite in Photoshop

Now we have the two layers loaded in a photoshop file. We then add a layer mask to the top layer (the dark frame).

You can do this by selecting the layer and then clicking the “add layer mask” icon (image above). You’ll then see a layer mask added. By the default new layer mask it will be pure white. We then add a gradient to the layer mask, a black to white gradient to control how the two images blend into each other. You can see below the gradient I have created. You can control how gradual the blend is, and the location of the blend. All images will have its own optimum blending patterns.

With the gradient layer mask added. You should see something which looks like this:

You can see now, we have combined the two exposure to something which looks a lot better. It has nicely exposed foreground and skies. Now we perform a curves adjustment, to increase the contrast.

Now this looks more like it. As you can see, it still doesn’t look like my finished image at the top. I obviously have performed more work on it, such as boosting colours, selecting “dodging and burning” etc. But I hope you can see how the exposure blending works.

If you’re interested in seeing more behind the scenes techniques, leave a comment below and let me know you’re interested.

Do it straight from the camera

Well, that might have sounded like a lot of work. Can we do this in the camera? Yes, no problem. This can be done using ND grad filters, which is basically a filter with a dark area on one end, and clear on the other. You can buy these in different levels of darkness (e.g ND8 grad, ND4 grad etc), and also how hard or soft the graduation is. Cokin make quite a few of these.

These filters are a good idea, but I don’t really shoot landscapes all that much (I’m more a people photographer) and I can’t warrant spending the money to invest in a nice large Cokin filter system. So I’ll keep with the exposure blending system for now.

Other pages you might like

If you like this tutorial, you may also like to read:

• How to enhance colours in landscapes in Photoshop, make your colours pop
• How to use Smart Objects in Photoshop, for photographers Part 1

Links

• Cokin graduated filters
• Tutorial about using layer masks