Angelo's Restaurant - Before and After Tutorial

The company I work for recently move to a new office. We needed to come up with names for our conference rooms and after much discussion we decided on names of restaurants which were unique to our town of Ann Arbor, Michigan. My assignment was to get some photographs of each of the places which we would get framed to be hung in each of the conference rooms.

One of the names we chose was Angelo's, a terrific local restaurant which is only open for breakfast and lunch. I had tried to get some pictures before, but it is a difficult place to photograph. It faces north and is next to the University of Michigan Medical campus which has some large buildings. As a result, the building sits in shade most of the day. In order to get a shot of it in sunshine, you have to shoot it between 7am and 8am in the summer. I went out this weekend just to get some trial shots which would help me figure out how I wanted to shoot it. The day itself was cloudy, but bright. This prevented the building from being in shadow, but resulted in flat images. I took several shots from different angles and finally decided on a shot taken at a slight angle to the front, from across the street. You can see from the original, raw camera image, the picture is nothing special:

As I looked at the image, I decided to see what I could do to make the image more along the lines of what I would ultimately like to take. The main things that I originally wanted to correct were the flat look and to eliminate distracting elements such as the light post, one way sign, etc. My ultimate goal with this image was to just have fun and see what I could end up with.

Step 1 - Add some punch to the image

The first thing I did after getting the image into Photoshop was to duplicate the background layer. I then used the Topaz Labs Adjust filter to bring out some color and character. I had recently read a blog post by Scott Kelby on Topaz Adjust and how he used it to create an effect similar to what you would get with the Lucis Pro plug-in filter. I decided to try a similar technique. I open Topaz Adjust and selected the 'Psychedelic' preset and saved the image. I immediately did a Fade of the effect to about 60%. You can see the effect below: (in all the image below, if you move the mouse over the image, you will see the before image and when you move the mouse back out you see the result with the effect/edit applied)

Step 2 - Clone out offending items

When I looked at the original image, I didn't like the fact that there was a light post and a one-way street sign right in the middle of my shot. I had thought I might crop out the left side of the shot to eliminate the one-way sign, but I really wanted the whole building. I spent quite a bit of time removing the street sign, the lamp post as well as the telephone pole and wires, parts of a chain link fence on the right side and a bit of a car which was in the image frame.

Some of the cloning was simple, particularly the parts in the sky. The parts along the building were more complicated because I had to deal with brick and block patterns. I knew that I was going to be applying a 'simplify' filter later, so I wasn't concerned with perfection, but I wanted to have reasonable lines and shapes, without obvious repeating elements. Another tricky element with the clone had to do with the picture frames inside of the restaurant. The light pole covered up half of a picture. Fortunately there was another picture to the left and I was able to take frame elements from it to create the rest of the frame for the right hand picture.

I don't claim that the cloning is perfect, but I'm pretty happy with it. The one thing that surprised me is that I did most of it using the touch pad on my MacBook Pro. I found that I had greater control than with my pen. It was easier for me to position the clone point precisely. With the pen, I found that when I touched the pen to the tablet I might not get the exact position I wanted. Probably just need more practice.

Step 3 - Simplify the image

All of the other images we are using in our new office building are some combination of HDR with the Topaz Simplify filter. I've been experimenting with the Simplify filter to create more abstract shapes out of elements in the background and to create an image which has a 'painterly' quality to it. For this image, I applied the filter and then masked out much of it on the main building. I wanted the building to be mostly sharp, but not quite.

Step 4 - Make local color and contrast adjustments

These next few changes were done to change some of the tonalities in the image The first step was to eliminate the purplish cast to the road. This color was introduced by the Topaz Adjust filter. I used a Hue Saturation layer to reduce the saturation and then used a layer mask to selectively apply it to the street.

The next adjustment was to add a bit more contrast to the entire image.

Finally, I thought there was too much blue in the windows and some of the metal parts (like the chimney). I used another Hue Saturation layer to selectively reduce the blues in the image. If you mouse over the image below you will see where the blue was removed.

Step 5 - Correct perspective distortion

I find myself getting pickier about having tilting buildings in my images, and since I'm not using a view camera which offers the ability to correct for distortions at capture time, I rely on some post-processing to correct such things. I created a new layer and used the Free Transform tool to adjust the image on the left and right side. I selected Skew and pulled the top left and right corners out until I got straighter lines. I turned on the guides to help me out. (as I look at it now I think I could do a better job, have to see)

Step 6 - Additional color corrections

I still wasn't happy with the look of the street in front of the building, so I decided to apply a localized curves adjustment layer to darken it. I started with the Curves dialog and pulled on the curve until I liked the look of the street. I then applied a mask to have the effect limited to the street.

At this point I felt that the bright sky was a distraction, so I used a curves layer to make it a bit grayer. I didn't like it that much better which led me to the change in the next step.

Step 7 - Replace sky

I try to stay away from adding elements to an image which weren't in the original shot. However I really didn't like the look of the sky and I was really just trying to create a version of this image which I would have liked to have taken (and hope to get in the future) So, I decided, what the heck let's replace the sky. I happened to have a landscape shot that I had taken which was primarily ground and sky. I dropped the sky image into the image, resized it a bit to fit my image and then proceeded to mask out the parts that covered the building.

Here is the original source image for the sky:

Since the image had already been run through the Simplify filter, I decided that I should run the sky through as well. I tried to go back and add the sky to the image before the Simplify had been applied, but I figured it was too much work. If I had known that I was going to replace the sky, I would have done it earlier in the process, but oh well. The simplify doesn't have much effect on the sky, particularly in the small size displayed on this blog, but in the larger finished image it does make a difference.

Step 8 - Minor tweaks and sharpen

At this point I was just going to sharpen the image, but then I noticed that the 'Open' sign just didn't stand out enough. I zoomed in to the 'Open' sign, selected my brush tool, picked a color from the sign itself and then brightened the color. I painted over the lettering to make it just a bit brighter.

That's it. This was several hours of work for an image which isn't overly spectactular, but it was fun to work on. I'm hoping to get over to Angelo's some morning early enough to capture the sun on the building and hopefully with some clouds in the sky. It would be nice if the umbrellas were open as well. I would still clone out the post and sign, but hopefully the raw image would require less playing around with. Anyway, it was fun to work on and hopefully it gives you some ideas on things you can try with your own images.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe - All rights reserved

Please visit my University of Michigan gallery at ImageKind to see other shots from Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Stephen Ross School of Business - Before and After Tutorial

This is a shot taken of the main entrance to the Stephen Ross School of Business building at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I took this shot on a beautiful sunny spring day, with the mid-afternoon sun shining on the west side of the building. I find this building very interesting. It has a variety of interesting lines, colors and textures from the various materials used in the construction.

For this shot I used my 7-14mm wide angle lens. My camera is an Olympus E-3 which has a 4/3 sensor, so the cropping factor is 2x the focal length. This picture was shot at 7mm (14mm effective focal length) using ISO 100 and an exposure of 1/200 sec @ f/8.0. This lens is pretty good with respect to distortion, but you need to keep the sensor plane parallel to whatever you are shooting or you can rapidly get some drastic perspective distortion. I did my best to keep parallel to the building, but the image still ended up having some distortion.

The image above is an unprocessed version of the final image. I use RAW capture, which always requires some post processing, and you can see in this shot that the image is rather flat. My standard processing either involves doing some work in Lightroom to enhance contrast, or I do the same thing in Photoshop. This time I decided to go straight into Photoshop CS4 to do my work. My main objectives with this image were to improve the contrast and fix the distortion. As I worked with the image, some additional ideas came to me.

Note: In the images below, if you move the mouse over the image, you will see the 'before' version of that development stage and when you mouse out the image will revert to its processed state.

The first thing I wanted to do was correct the perspective distortion. I really prefer architectural shots to have parallel lines if at all possible (unless used for dramatic effect).

In order to fix the perspective distortion I used the Free Transform tool of Photoshop CS4. From here I selected the Skew option. In the image below, you can see how I corrected the image. I started by putting in some vertical guide lines to help me gauge my progress. I then took the upper right corner and pulled it right until the lines on the right side became vertical. I repeated the process on the left. There was still some minor skewing, so I took the upper middle control and moved it just a bit to the right to straighten out the middle.

The next step was to add some punch to the image. I could have just used a curves layer to add some additional contrast, and possibly a Hue/Saturation layer to add a bit more color, but I decided to use the Topaz Adjust filter to see what interesting look I could come up with. Topaz Adjust can create all sorts of interesting effects from simple exposure adjustments to very gritty almost HDR looking images. I wanted something with a bit more punch, but still realistic. I started with one of the standard presets and then adjusted some of the controls to refine the image. After saving I decided that the effect on the walkway was too severe so I used a layer mask to reduce the effect. I also used the opacity slider to reduce the overall effect on the entire layer.

At this point I was ready to stop but then I decided to go ahead and play with the sky. I really like architectural images with some contrast, particularly against the sky. I decided that a black sky might go well with this shot. Fortunately the roof lines of this building are simple and straight. I used the pen tool to draw along the roof lines and created a selection once I completed the path. I created a new layer and filled in the selection with black. I ultimately added a second layer where I filled in a few spots that I had missed. I probably could have used the Select -> Color Range... tool or one of the smart selection tools as well, but I decided to use the pen tool instead.

The final steps in the process were to run a noise reduction tool (there wasn't much to begin with) and do some sharpening. The final image is what you see at the top. I had played around with a black and white version as well, but I didn't like it as much as the color version in this case.

All processing done with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

This image is for sale in my Architecture gallery on ImageKind.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe - All rights reserved.

Ann Arbor Graffiti Alley - A Before and After Photoshop Tutorial

I originally posted this image to images.jameshowephotography.com (my photo gallery blog) a few days ago, and at the time, I thought that it would make for a good 'before/after' tutorial for this blog.

I took this shot in an alleyway in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The alley runs between Liberty and Washington streets and is situated between some old buildings and a newer building/parking structure (seen here in Google Maps). The alley originally had a mural painted on it, but some time ago at least part of the mural was painted over with white paint, and new graffiti sprouted. A search on Flickr for 'ann arbor graffiti alley' yields a large collection of images of this area. There are actually two alleys, one is sort of a branch off of the other. The shot above was taken of the 'branch' alley. This alley was meant to service the buildings, whereas the main alley functions more as a path from the parking garage on Washington Street to the Liberty Street area of Ann Arbor.

The picture above shows what I started with. The colors were rather plain and flat. Since this was a RAW image, it isn't surprising that it would need some work to make the image look more like what I saw when I took it, so my original goal with this image was to simply bring out the color a bit more. However, as I worked on the image, I decided I wanted a slightly more intense and grungy look that was more in keeping with the subject matter. As you'll see below, it didn't take a great deal of work to get to the finished image, and I didn't really do anything drastic, but I think the end result produces an image which has a lot more visual impact.

Note: In the images below, if you move the mouse over the image, you will see the 'before' version of that development stage.

The first thing I did was to import my image into Adobe Lightroom. Inside of Lightroom I played around with various adjustments to convert the RAW image into something more in line with what I envisioned. I actually created a couple different versions using the Virtual Copy capability. The other version had more of a brighter HDR look to it, but it wasn't quite what I was going for. What you see above are the operations I did on the original RAW image to initially develop it. If you compare the altered image to the RAW image, you should notice that it is darker, has more contrast and has a bit of a vignette to it.

At this point I liked the result, but I still wanted a bit more 'pop' so I decided to take the image into Photoshop for some additional work. I probably could have done almost everything in Lightroom, but I'm more comfortable with using Photoshop at this point for certain changes.

The first adjustment was to add a Curves layer to give the image a bit more contrast. As you can see from the curve, I shifted the white point to the left and added a bit of an 'S' shape to the curve to increase contrast.

The next adjustment was to simulate the 'clarity' capability of Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw. For this layer, I converted the layer to a Smart Object so I could make edits later if I wanted, and the applied an Unsharp Mask filter with a small amount percentage and a very large radius. Clarity simply adds a bit more local contrast.

Looking at the image, I noticed that there was a bit of distortion created by the angle at which I took the shot. I didn't like the fact that the window on the right wasn't parallel to the edge of the frame, so I used the Free Transform/Skew tool to straighten things out a little bit.

The image was almost done, but I felt that the bottom left and upper right corners were too bright and distracted from the main subject area. I decided to use the Burn tool to darken these areas. To accomplish this, I first created a new layer which contained all the information from the layers below. The Burn tool is destructive and I wanted to be able to have some flexibility to simply remove this layer if I didn't like it. Normally I would use a curves adjustment layer, which is non-destructive, and then paint on a mask to control the area and amount of the change, but for some reason I decided to go with the Dodge/Burn tool. I used a relatively large brush at a lower opacity and simply painted the areas with the burn tool to darken the two corners. I finished up with another unsharp mask layer using a low radius and moderate amount to get the finished image.

The steps I took to go from start to finish may not be the most optimal. I tend to start with the image, work with it a bit in Lightroom to get something I like and then finish in Photoshop. For this image, most of what I wanted to do could probably have been accomplished in Lightroom alone using some of the newer tools like the adjustment brush and gradient filter. In Photoshop, I simply experiment with curves and other adjustment layers until I get the look I like. As Bert Monroy is fond of saying, you just need to "play". That's the nice thing about the digital darkroom, you can play with your image, and as long as you don't overwrite your source 'negative' file, you can develop and redevelop your image many times to suit your mood. Ansel Adams once referred to the negative as the score to a piece of music and the finished print as the 'performance'. I think the same holds true in the digital world.

All processing done with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop CS4.

This image is for sale in my Color gallery on ImageKind.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe - All rights reserved.

University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA)

(Olympus E-3, 7-14mm at 7mm (2x crop factor), ISO 100, exposure 1/125 sec @ f/11)

This image shows the back side of the new wing of the Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. The architecture of the new wing is quite stark, with lots of clean, flat surfaces. It's quite a contrast to the original museum (to which it is attached), since the original museum was done in the Beaux Arts style (see here). The clean lines of the new structure offer some interesting photographic opportunities.

I took this shot on a sunny day in late morning. The sun was to my left and created a very high contrast situation which was difficult to capture. I tried to expose the image so that the bright side of the building wouldn't lose detail, while at the same time keeping detail on the shadow side. I was surprised that I was able to capture the entire dynamic range without any clipping. I used my Zuiko 7-14mm lens at 7mm. I backed away from the building to a point where I could capture the entire side while at the same time keeping the camera as parallel to the face of the building as possible. This lens is reasonably distortion free, but as with any ultra-wide angle lens, if you tip the lens you will start to exaggerate the perspective. Keeping the sensor plane parallel with the building minimizes that distortion. My goal was to try to take a relatively distortion free image and then crop out parts of the image that I didn't want. This approach is similar to what would happen if I had a true tilt-shift lens, but I don't have one of those, unfortunately.

The image above shows the original, unprocessed image. When I took the shot, I wanted to make sure I had some blue sky. I was thinking that I would probably want to convert the image to black and white and having the blue sky meant that I could easily lighten or darken the sky by adjusting the blue slider in Photoshop's black & white conversion tool.

When I started working on the image, I initially planned on keeping most of the sidewalk at the bottom of the image. I liked how the concrete led up to the building. However, I didn't like the manhole cover and the vent. I briefly thought about cloning them out, but decided against it. Instead, I started playing with different crops. I initially went for more of a square crop to eliminate the two manhole covers (bottom and lower right), but I still had the vent. I then cropped a bit higher to eliminate the vent. I also brought the crop in from the side, trying to keep the big sculpture (upper right) in the frame. These two crops are shown below:

I kept playing with the crop as I continued to work on the image, finally arriving at the crop of the finished image. The remaining work on the final image involved converting to black & white and correcting for some of the remaining lens distortion. The series of images below show the steps I took in arriving at the final image. Some of the changes might be hard to see at this size.

The white balance adjustment was created by picking a black point and a white point using the curves eye dropper tools. When I was working with the color image, I thought it made the concrete too yellow, so I used a layer mask to limit the effect to the sky. Ultimately in the black & white conversion this layer probably didn't have much effect.

Since I decided to convert the image to black & white, I experimented with various photo filters. I finally settled on blue. The blue filter let me darken the sky more as well as some of the other shaded areas. It also darkened the bright side a bit, but that was fine.

For toning, I used the curves adjustments you see to the left. This curve adjusts the red and blue curves to give the tonality of the old platinum toning process. I didn't create this curve myself, but rather downloaded it from Paul Butzi's web site from an article discussing image toning. For this application, I applied the curves adjustment and then backed off on the opacity to about 58%.

At this point the image was mostly done. However I was not happy with the remaining distortion in the image. The left side was pretty good, but the right side wasn't straight. Since the building has nice vertical lines I wanted to get those lines to be as vertical as I could in the finished image. The first image shows the layer after I corrected for the distortion on the right side. Unfortunately this kicked the left side out a bit. I then applied a second correction to bring the left side back into vertical. I used Free Transformation with a combination of skew and warp tools to adjust the perspective.

I created a couple variations of this image, one being a lighter version of the finished image, but in the end I preferred the darker image.

All processing done with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

This image is for sale in my University of Michigan gallery on ImageKind.

Comments and feedback welcome.

Image and text Copyright © 2009 James W. Howe - All rights reserved.