An Alternative to Noise Reduction Software

Winter is here and some of my most memorable shots were taken during falling snow. The problem I often run into, however, is that, despite all the falling white stuff, it is often very DARK during a snow storm – even in the middle of the day. To compensate for the lack of light, most of us boost the ISO on our cameras, lower the shutter speed, open the aperture and cross our fingers. After a few bone-chilling hours in my blind, I take my precious (hopefully) treasure-filled memory card to the computer, plug it in and start reviewing my photos. Lots of birds, falling snow and NOISE!!!
Yes, noise. Those annoying little spots and flecks of computer-generated junk in the dark areas behind my subjects. Under snowy conditions, there is sometimes so much noise that it is difficult to remove with the noise reduction application that came with my photo processing software or even the expensive plug-in that I bought. RATS!!!

What to do? What to do? I COULD go back outside and shovel the sidewalk to make it safe for the neighborhood children, or I could try to save some of my better photos. No contest – fire up the software. Here is a shot of a Cardinal I took in a recent snow storm. I cranked up the ISO to a modest 640 and used a shutter speed of 1/320 with an aperture of f/6.3. I thought I was safe from noise, but, as you can see from the close-up, I was not. Noise and lots of it! Noise is especially apparent in the dark areas in the background.

Fortunately, the photo is not too dark. If it needed to be lightened, that would introduce even more noise. As it is, most shots taken under these conditions are a little flat and need a slight boost in saturation. Guess what that does? Yup, it puts in even MORE noise.   

For this photo I tried some of the standard Photoshop techniques, including using noise reduction software (it couldn’t get it all out) or blurring the background (I ended up with waves and ghosts). Then, I reverted to a simpler method. First, I made a duplicate layer in Photoshop and set to work adjusting the brightness and contrast of this new layer. I reduced the contrast A LOT – to minus 40 and reduced the brightness to minus 30. I know this is a huge adjustment, but it did get rid of the noise. If you want to get really aggressive, apply your noise reduction software to this layer. The result looks something like this:

Next, I want to get the main subject (the bird) and some of the detail on the larger branches back. I apply a mask and mask off the bird and the branches I want to keep:

 

As you can see in the close-up, there is far less noise in the dark areas of the background:

 

The overall photo is still a little dull (it was rather flat to start with). I fix this by putting BACK some of the brightness and contrast I took out before (about plus 15 for both brightness and contrast) – this introduces very little noise to the now-flat background. I also boosted the saturation a bit – maybe plus 15 to put some color into the bird. If this had been almost any bird other than a bright red Cardinal, I could have gone way up on the saturation. Finished product:

 

Close-up:

Side by side (click Here to see a larger version of this photo:

Close-up (click Here to see a larger version of this photo):

 

Total time – maybe 5 minutes.

Steve Byland is a wildlife photographer living in suburban New Jersey. His photos can be seen at www.stevebyland.com . You can email him at sbbyland@aol.com

Salvage A (Nearly) Great Shot Using Layers

Eventually it’s going to happen. You find yourself faced with the “perfect” shot and you reach down deep and blow it. The moment passes and you don’t get a second chance. Such was the case when I took the shot below. The subject was perfect, the light was just right and I managed to get the shot crooked. To be honest, I was lying on my back in a wet parking lot and I took this shot from underneath my truck. I was lucky to get anything at all, so a crooked shot was OK considering the circumstances. Here's my original shot:

 

I was so close and the owl in the picture filled the frame so well that simply straightening the picture in Photoshop was going to cut too much out. One option was to add a lot of canvas to the shot, clone in a bunch of stuff on the sides, then use the Straighten Tool. The problem is that this leaves a lot of evidence behind and takes a lot of work. There is another way to approach this problem using layers. I’ve choses a photo that is very busy (providing a lot of opportunities for mistakes). Shots with less going on are FAR easier, but even this shot is not that difficult. THIS is what happens when you use the "Straighten Tool" to try to fix the shot - my little owl is moving out of the frame:

 

 
So, we need to fix this photo using layers instead of the "Straighten Tool."

Step One – Create a new layer and drag the top layer so that the subject (the Owl) is positioned in approximately the right place – you can adjust this a bit later if necessary. If you look closely, you can see parts of the bottom (original) layer on the left and bottom edges of the photo.

 

Step Two – Rotate (straighten) just the top layer to get the subject where you want it. If necessary, you can move the top layer to reposition the subject. Using “Free Rotate” saves more canvas than “Straighten” and gives a little more flexibility, but either tool will work.

Now the subject is straight, but there are obvious lines around the edge of the top layer from rotating/straightening the photo. I have hidden the bottom layer so that you can clearly see this in the photo below.

 

Step Three –  What you want to do now is to blend the top (crooked) layer into the original layer below. With both layers showing, apply a mask to the top layer, choosing a mask that makes the top layer visible. Use a black paint brush on the mask to hide the edges of the top layer to blend the top layer into the layer below.

 

You can spend a lot of time blending with a small brush to make the photo perfect – I spent about 1 minute on this shot. The main evidence of my handiwork is a duplicate of the large blade of grass to the left of the owl, so I went back and cloned it out. All done and ready to move on to the next masterpiece.

 

Steve Byland is a wildlife photographer living in suburban New Jersey. His photos can be seen at www.stevebyland.com . You can email him at sbbyland@aol.com

Advanced Layering Techniques – Bring Back The Sky

If you shoot birds in flight, you’ve probably been frustrated by trying to get the exposure right. Either the bird is blown out, or, more often, the background sky looks perfect, but the bird is just a dark silhouette. Been there, done that, hit the “delete” button.  If you expose the bird perfectly (yay!) the sky is probably too light (boo!).

There are a number of ways to fix such shots. Making major adjustments usually cause some problems. Noise and artifacts appear whenever you lighten a photo, so starting with a photo where the sky looks good, but the bird is too dark probably won’t win you any awards. Let’s work on how to fix the best of the miserable shots you ended up with – the ones where the bird is exposed the way you want it but the sky is too light. Since the bird is the main subject, that’s the part of the picture that you will want to look best anyway.

The simple way to fix you photo is to make a separate layer, adjust the sky, then mask the bird. That’s fine if you aren’t going to print the shot or try to sell it, but it is VERY difficult and time-consuming to get the mask just right. There are places that you just can’t get right (teeny-tiny feather edges) and such. If you use the “Select” tool, there are often parts of the birds that aren’t selected properly, and if you zoom way in, there will be little jagged edges along the lines where one set of pixels were selected while others weren’t. Nothing is more disappointing that working forever on a single photo and, when you are done, it looks so bad that you just delete it.

While nothing beats getting the perfect shot in the first place, there is a way to fix these kinds of shots fairly quickly without showing a lot of boo-boos if you zoom way in or print the photo at a larger size. Yes, you can take a lot of time to go around and clean these things up, but it is time-consuming, and doesn’t always leave a great end product.

This technique will leave you with nicer edges

Let me also take a second to mention that I have to downsize these shots a lot to use on my blog page – there is WAY more detail in the full-sized shots. I’m also making the assumption here that you have a basic understanding of how to use layers and masks. If you DON’T know how to use these, LEARN!!!!! It will improve your processing a million percent and cut the time it takes by about the same amount. Photoshop and Corel Paint Shop Pro pretty much work the same way in the steps I’m going to explain.

Let’s look at a fairly quick and easy way to fix the shot below that is lacking sky detail:

First step, run a noise-reduction step – we’re going to darken the photo and that always adds a little noise. Second, remove the bird (WHAT???) using a large clone tool and save the file using a different name.

Next, make a duplicate layer and set the layer type to “Multiply.” Duplicate the multiplied layer a couple of times until you like the way the sky looks. In this case, I used three layers. Merge all the layers down. Now the sky looks better, but it seems to be missing a bird.

Next, go back to your ORIGINAL photo, copy the entire thing and post as a new layer. If you want to reposition the bird, you can select an area around the bird (instead of copying the entire photo) making sure to get a little of the background all around it and place it where you want. Make a duplicate copy of the layer you just copied in and click the “Visibility” button to make the top layer invisible. You now have 3 layers. The bottom layer is the adjusted sky without the bird, the second (middle) layer is the original photo, and the top layer is the original photo, but not visible. At this point, your photo will appear to look just like the original photo since it is on top of the adjusted sky photo. Now, set the middle layer type to “Darken.” This will put back most of your bird as shown below:

The problem is that the white/light areas of the bird will appear blue as they are not darker than the background. The nice thing is that the computer did all the hard work of putting in all the really fine details on the darker edges of the bird without leaving any harsh transitions.

Next, make the top layer visible again and select a mask that masks the entire photo. Using a white brush, carefully unmask the white/light areas of the bird. You may want to brush across the entire body of the bird to bring up white/light areas there as well. The only place you really have to be a little careful is where the white on the bird reaches the very edge of the body. Still, it is not very difficult to get nice results without much effort – now you only have to work on a few areas with the mask because the computer did the rest.

Before and after:

To see more detail, you can view a large version of the above photo at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve_byland/7686943072/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Here’s the finished product:

Is it cheating? I'll let you make your own decision. Either way, this is the way it looked through my viewfinder when I took the photo and now I have a nice photo. Essentially, this isn't much different than just selecting the sky only and darkening it. The real difference is that this method only impacts the sky behind the bird and leaves the bird exactly as it was - which is the whole point of what you otherwise would have been trying to achieve by just selecting and working on the sky. The difference is that this method doesn't leave a bunch of lines or require a ton of work to make it look good.

I will admit that using photoshop too much can be thought of as turning a photo into art. The same can be said about using polarizers and colored filters - techniques used by photographers for decades. The same can be said about techniques old-timers used in the darkroom such as dodging and burning to give mist around moving water or even (gasp) trying to save a photo like the one I started with.

In this case, I didn't add or delete a single element of the photo. I was simply VERY selective about which components I darkened (which is what a "Multiply" layer does). I didn't even change the contrast, color or saturation. If someone said that they simply darkened a photo, most people would just shrug their shoulders and say, "So what?"

Decide for yourself what you want to do. There may be a gray line (or even a black line) between what you consider art and photography, but you can always fix that with Photoshop ;-)

Steve Byland is a wildlife photographer living in suburban New Jersey. His photos can be seen at www.stevebyland.com . You can email him at sbbyland@aol.com