Can It Get Any Worse?

There are some times in life that you would really wonder: what else could go wrong? or you might ask yourself: could it be worse than this?
Some harsh two weeks been passing over my life in all aspects that made me almost paralyzed. The only joy I can do for the time being is just to sit here in front of my PC at home and work on my usual pictures. The past week I was so tired from every single thing in my life, so much that for everyday and after coming from work I didn't even have the appetite to have lunch or anything. I was surviving on some coffee and some biscuits and sometimes, some cereals. My appetite somehow increased a bit in weekends but with some irregularity, ordering from outside most of the time.

To complete the course of the curse, today I woke up late, struck with the fact that my work place has no internet as well (while other places around has it), and with some "nice" news that I will have to move in a chopper with my director along with some people from the ministry of defense in order to demonstrate about some aspects of our field work. The flight is supposed to be to Warbah island, on the borders with Iraq, but later they called and canceled the idea, so we are going to Bubyan (Boubyan) island (largest Kuwaiti island) and by car. The fact that really makes me nervous is that I have to work with the military; a place and a rank of people that I always hated. Well... alongside with cops. After all, I'd rather not to talk about the matters of the heart; they are complicated, yet never to the satisfaction.

So, here I am again with my photos. If you like to see them just scroll down maybe without reading my boring explanations or, if you don't like any of it, then why the heck you are here anyway? Ah, I see. To feel good about yourself having a better life than mine? Yeah, probably true.
In the meantime there is one idea that is still pending in my head and I'm thinking of how to achieve the desired effect to it. This time I'm going to need some heavy work in Photoshop. It is not correcting a photo this time but, instead, manipulating a photo in some heavy way. Been surfing the net for some tutorials and I got some tips, but I don't deem them useful so much for the idea I'm thinking of right now. I have to my out with my own hands to know how things are going to work out. The main problem now is that I'm going to need to take photos of myself by myself; the usual panic.
The idea I'm seeking to implement here has a connection to the Asperger's syndrome. For some time and when I thought I have such a thing because of some attitude and some behavioral. Still though, even after an online friend (who's in the know) confirmed to me that I do not have such a syndrome, the experience of seeking an answer to some of my problems in focusing and other things that kept being after me since high school is on the go. However, this experience made me think about something to express how much this is tolerating for the mind and the psychology of the person indeed. You might spend years trying to figure out why you do things the way you do and why you feel the way you do and what makes you do certain things in a specific manner not like others...etc. All of that, specially when it does not coincide with other people's typical looks on things, can make you feel estranged at times, simply feeling no one does understand the way you feel, but you and only you.

Been working most of the time with my pictures from Ireland. Sometimes I would go back to those taken in 2009, from Galway and Mayo, and then back again to the newest ones taken in 2010. The work panoramas is light relatively, for the time being and after finishing to some extent the dining room, which was so hard to do because of the many problems related to the noise level and to the great difference in exposures in between the slides (specially around the main window in the room).

The Dining Room in LP.

The reason I've made this in LP (little planet) projection only is that, the stitching errors are lesser that way and somehow less obvious if they exist somewhere. I can't really recognize where did I go wrong with the panoramas of the Dining Room and the Lounge before, but my suspects in the case are the not-so-good settings in the camera and/or the shaky position of my camera on the VR-head. Like the lounge before, this panorama was first tone-mapped from HDR, then stitched. Typically, the tone-mapped stitching proved to have lesser stitching errors than the HDR stitching.

I've finished the second album already for pictures from Co. Tipperary and working on the third one, and it is almost over with. Probably would send it over with Christmas coming? Maybe. You can see the second album (if you care) by clicking the link below:

Second Album

I've been trying to make more vivid images with my HDRs as I noticed people really them on MostPhotos.com, unlike other stock sites that think about marketing only. This really encouraged me to get out of the circle of the typical normal images just to please these stock sites (and big times, my images been refused for over filtering or something like that). The result of this enthusiasm is that I've been named as photographer of the month in Mostphotos.com, for being the most active member in the last 30 days! 

I keep my work now in sRGB and Adobe 1998 regions, but never trespass to ProPhoto again. I think the two former spaces make it enough to produce some vivid colors in the photos. Yet, the important thing here is to think of what you are doing and why you are doing what you are doing. 

Rare Auld Times

Yes, it is "auld" not "old". It's a famous Irish folk song. However, in this image here and in order to resemble and give an impression of antiquity, the drama of history, and also a sense of the saying "old is gold," I made the image look harsh and somehow like dirty, for a purpose. It is to give a tense look to the eyes in order to deliver a message of how old is this thing, and in the same time I have to keep it unique and smooth without much turbulence in the colors which causes the eye to get tired a bit, hence I added hue layers to turn it into more of a golden object (rather than the simple yellow and the reddish hue in the original after the effects were done). This effect also helped on getting out the patterns and the scratches in the face of the clock itself, which otherwise, would be hard to see in a normal image. Unfortunately, some people commented on this image in technical terms neglecting completely the message I want to deliver.

Another example of patterns that I wanted to extract was an example of a door. The door is for Cahir church and here, I wanted to show the pattern of the wood itself and hence I had to apply what I call the "dramatic effect" just like in the clock face above.

Cahir Church Door

The process for the image above was not all done by HDR and that's it. In fact, lot of effects and enhancements took place AFTER tone-mapping the HDR. My Photomatix didn't give exactly what I was seeking so I had to get to some point close to what I aim at, and then work on sharpening some parts while smoothing the others and then lighten some parts and darken the others and so on. The noise level here and because of the "harsh" tone-mapping, yielded a great deal of noise that was hard to remove without losing details in the most important part of the image, the door. I had to use layer masks, lot of them, to control my work area.

My work during the last week also included some fantasy, some dreams that kept on visiting me from my childhood days; the heroes, the swords, the dragons ...etc. There had been some images that I don't know why I did it that way, but some people did really like it that way! I'm more inclined now to use some Latin names to my images. I think it gives some power.

Somewhere, in My Dreams...

Lignum Vitae (tree of life)

The second image here, the tree, was actually modified in HDR mode before tone-mapping. I've added some blur to the image and made it go toward the tree. I just felt that it needs some life and action and probably, I would better do that before tone-mapping to make the light coherent more.

That's it for me with photography so far, and there had been some photos that I've been doing all over again with some change in the settings, specially images taken in 2009 from Ireland. Right now, I'm trying to organize my life a bit despite the shaky situation at work and home. Thinking about the Ayvarith page that I've promised myself to work with makes me stressed like hell like I'm really not up to it. Zillions of things pass on my mind and wait on the queue to be done but I just don't know what or when to do so. Two things I might have to get on with very soon is the matter of the new car that I need to buy, and also before that, my Asperger's project. As for the time being, I guess I won't be having my emotional part of life for now, and probably for some long time from now on...

Dear Ol' sRGB?

A week now after the training course which I was part of, and still feel tired, mostly of everything. Just today, I woke up later than my usual time, plagued with congested nose. It is a slow and somehow boring week, despite my work on my photos, which was so-so actually, but the core of the problem, who or how, would bring my heart back from New York?

I've been working now and then in order to finish my second album of pictures from Ireland - Co. Tipperary, and somehow I'm almost done. Only one is left and the album is ready to be spread all over, and hopefully I can do this one picture today. Meanwhile, I'm having now a hard time with the Dining Room panorama, after fixing the Lounge panorama with lot of stepping down and compromises.

The Lounge of Thornbrook House.

In this final panorama stitching, I had to give up many hopes I had for this room, but at least I got the general shape in the picture without much loss of "interesting" details around the room. The following steps were stepped down:

• Panorama stitched from JPEG files (not even 16bit TIFFs), because stitching HDR slides produced some artifacts caused by blending extremely dark with extremely bright areas.
• Because of the above, I lost the chance to tone-map the HDR image as I like. Instead I had to tone-map everything in the beginning then stitch.
• To reduce stitching errors radically, I had to give up the zenith and nadir completely. The zenith specifically was important for me because it had a crystalline light chandelier that I wanted to show its sparkles.
• Henceforth, because of the above, I had to give up with creating a QTVR.

It is obvious now, from The Lounge panorama, and The Dining Room panorama, or even from old panoramas I've worked with, that my everlasting nemesis is generally, long straight lines. Such lines do not have much distinctive features making them hard to overlap accordingly by PTGui, my preferred tool for stitching as always. The Dining Room seems to be going on the same steps of the Lounge now, but I'm having a break from this panorama trying to do more single slides and images, not only from my recent visit to Ireland but also, for one image, from my previous visit in 2009.

The weirdest thing I've encountered so far is, tone-mapping HDR images in sRGB color space proved to be more attractive and sharper than tone-mapping HDR in ProPhoto color space! For those who do not know the difference, ProPhoto color space is wider and usually gives vivid colors for display rather than the regular and simple sRGB space. Everything goes back to Mostphotos website actually, when I noticed that images I'm submitting, whether tone-mapped HDR or simply RAW fix, are changing colors significantly on Mostphotos website.

 One of the images where the blue color was "killed" by change of space. 

It is apparently dark here but originally it is brighter in Photoshop. 

Photobucket, after a system upgrade, seem to gauge their acceptance for color 

spaces more than before as such change in colors was not noticed before from my side!

Of course, the first suspecion in such cases goes around the color space. Thus I decided to make a try out and submit my images in sRGB space and see and notice any changes in colors.
After that, I adapted for myself a new approach creating the HDR images, but it is lengthy. Despite the saying that merging HDR from original RAW files is better to include as much as possible of the dynamic range, I converted my files here to 16bit TIFFs and cleaned them a bit from the noise with slight sharpening by NeatImage, then saved those files. Note here in the process of converting the files from RAW to TIFFs by the Raw Converter (ACR), I've assigned the color space as sRGB and worked a bit on each slide of image to avoid out-of-histogram regions for each slide.
Next thing was using Photomatix to merge them to HDR, as I don't trust the capabilities of Photoshop in aligning images when I use the "merge to HDR" command there. I saved the HDR image as EXR for reference, and the surprise was when  I tried to tone-map. The image kept relatively sharp, nd gave out interesting vivacity of colors more than a ProPhoto tone-mapping would give out! Not only that, but the noise is significantly less and the image is relatively sharper than when I do it with ProPhoto. Since I care about the looks and not merely putting out with technical details for the sake of being technical, I'm considering now for real, going back to the rare ol' sRGB!

Image that went under experimentation.

The entrance of Inchagoil church ruins on Inchagoil island, Co. Galway.

I think right now it is the time to put my ego aside and work on the more humble sRGB just to get such significant colors and clarity from my HDR images. The first step was to try it again for real... on another image.

Cahir castle, yard entrance gate.

Don't pass under those dents!

This image proves again that sRGB in HDR merging is better, but I've noticed something now concerning the saturation of some colors. It was hard to make a vivid aspect of the grays and the blues by simply tone-mapping in Photomatix. This problem, however, could be solved using Photoshop's hue/saturation layers. My aim next step now is to try to merge directly the RAW files using sRGB space in Photomatix and see if this will work significantly in the same way. That way, I'll be shortening one step out, that is converting to TIFFs (although I do some noise cleaning in this step usually, but it is nice to try out how much noise will be added in my HDR directly from the RAW under sRGB).

Not all my HDR images, after all, are tone-mapped automatically and given vivid colors. I think this is an important aspect when dealing with HDR images; you have to know what you are dealing with and what are you trying to do. HDR technique isn't really all about "eye-catching" images, but it is just a tool. I try to keep this in my mind all the time.

One of the images that I experienced this aspect with was the picture of the field of corn, taken from over the bridge at the edges of Cashel town back in October;

Corn field in Cashel.

When I saw this picture again, I remembered the famous song, Fields of Gold, and hence I decided to work on it to give some resemblance to the title of that song, Fields of Gold! The main problem as you can see here, the day was foggy, heavily, and the colors aren't saturated much specially in yellows. Sure thing was to seek HDR solution here, but since we have a "picky" approach here to turn the day from foggy to sunny somehow, we can't really rely on automatic tone-mapping by Photomatix or any other software. We have to use the manual tone-mapping with adjustment layers and hue/saturation adjustments, in abundance.

Fields of Gold!

My skill in manual tone-mapping didn't progress much; I still have problems getting used to the tone-mapping curve in Photoshop. The "radius" and "threshold" parameters, although it is advised to not touch them at all, I can't get the hang of it to make a sharper image from my HDR slide. However, with exposure and saturation fixing manually, there was not much "curving" needed further.Just minor touch to increase the contrast between different regions. The artifacts, however, like halos around bodies is more pronounced in the original image when zoomed to 100%.

Also related to the talk about the HDR imaging, I've been looking for a reliable freeware for tone-mapping HDR images, and found some substitute, but none, so far, can really be a match for Photomatix, not in terms of quality only, but in term of easiness to use as well. The thing that really sparked this search is the memory issues and the weird squares showing on my Photomatix window (regardless of the memory issues) from time to time, preventing me from seeing the full picture and make good judgement or even move the sliders with easiness. Hence, I thought I might try some other programs and who knows, there could be really nice options out there undiscovered yet, and most importantly, free! I've encountered some programs, free- and shareware, but all in all, I couldn't depend on them completely to be a substitute for Photomatix. But some of them are good one way or another and kept them installed just in case. Some of these were:

• Picturenaut: A freeware made by Marc Mehl and co-authorized by Christian Bloch (Blochi). They claim it is really memory-efficient (and designed specifically aiming at HDR panoramas). I've downloaded it (from here) and tried it, and I think it is indeed as they say! Memory-efficient! The main issue here is, from my perspective, is that Picturenaut is the good-boy type of tone-mapper. It has many controls and many different aspects of the tone-mapping, but generally it doesn't provide the potential to give those fancy looks or the grunge look to your HDR images. I didn't frankly test much of its other aspects like aligning images, but I do trust Blochi did take care such an issue. If you have an HDR image or panorama, and you want to be the old good-boy type with it and fix the issues with highlights and shades, and just give it the brilliant "normal" look, then this is yours. Of course, if you have memory issues, this could be the best for you. And it's free!!! (Don't hesitate to donate though, they are doing great job there!).
• Qtfsgui (a.k.a. Luminance HDR): Another freeware. Frankly, I don't know what QTFS stands for, but the GUI is surely for "Graphical User Interface". This software has the potential of giving you the weird looking tone-mapped HDR images, but it is still under development and would need a really steep curve of learning, for me, to know what I'm doing. To tone-map an image, you would need to pick up an operator from the list of operators and work on the sliders to adjust the values as you like, to give the image the look you like. In case you don't know what are operators, let's say they are the type of algorithms or approach of tone-mapping your HDR image, and there are local ones (adjusting group of pixels or certain areas in your image) and there are the global ones (applying the algorithm to the whole image at once). When you choose an operator it gives a little description, but all in all it is not sufficient to know what you are doing with the operator. Every time you change a value of some factor, you need to click "apply" and a new window will be pop-up each time to see the latest changes to your image (and sometimes it gave an error and the program closed). It is the work and effort of one person, thus I can't say this is bad at all. The guy deserves some donations at least! You can get it from here.
• DP HDR (Dynamic Photo-HDR): A shareware by Mediachance, and hence, you can expect it is advanced. The main feature of this tone-mapper it offers variety of operators and categorize them accordingly to local and global, and under each category there are sub-categories that are direct to the point; like "eye-catching" option for example. It extends further in controls giving you the ability to control the alpha channel itself, or the layer inside HDR which controls the luminance; you can blur it more, invert it and some other stuff, to give your image the drama needed. I can't describe all the options provided in this software but one way or another it is similar to Photomatix but with different names sometimes or more specific sliders. When merging into HDR, it gives you the option to do your OWN aligning (Cool! somehow!). It has also a built-in Noise Reduction tool (while Photomatix does that automatically) and gives you the chance to control it as you like and even brush off areas that you don't want it to be affected. So far though, I don't remember it supported OpenEXR format (.exr) but only the Radiance format (.hdr). One weird concidence though, I tone-mapped one image and saved it as 16bit TIFF, but in Photoshop it appeared completely different than what I saw in the software's window! Weird, but promising.

There had been other trials on some other programs but I didn't experience them enough to write something about them here, like FDR Tools (basic version is free while the advanced version is shareware), and easyHDR (shareware). The latter is a promising software and bears resemblance to Photomatix, but the question now is all about the memory issues in between all of the mentioned above. So far, I'll be using Photomatix, and I still feel I didn't grab it all in my mind yet.

After all of the mess above, you might be thinking I was busy with something for real, well, I was trying to. Pushing myself hard to do something out of nothing and forget some thoughts that invade my mind from time to time about life. My life, that is. I've been in the process of grasping some phrases or words in my mind and really want to write them down, yet, I can't really glue them together. My mind is scattered apart. Since my return from Ireland, I've become more isolated around myself and not able to interact much with people specially at work. The new lunar year is on the gates and the month of Muharram will start soon, announcing days of mourning and black clothing. It will be a period of silence for me, and I have to stop listening to the songs that I do listen to usually everyday. It's going to be hard and to be frank, my conservative education is against what I'm doing, but the turmoil around me wherever I go left me no choice but to let off the steam via music-listening. I just hope and wish I will be pardoned in this life and the one after...
All I hope for now, is to get rid of this annoying nose congestion.

Alayhá, šá ayná ðánúħ kay ayná yaħavt? Limaz má tixmaŧ ayná élaká yi xawant ayná e-ąasiy?