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?

Alexander 6, V111.

A bee is busy picking on roses and flower around, but TJ is busy picking stuff from one lab to the other. Today, I've finished my work with the rice samples, virtually, and all is left is to put on the data into a spread sheet. The hilarious thing is, I've found out some mistake I did when writing down the production and expiration dates. I've found in the sheet that a sample was made in 2012, and will expire in 2016! I lost some time looking for that sample again just to write down the correct dates then. Because of this busy time, I hardly had time to read at all. But, on the other hand, I will be able to read as much as possible from now on, every morning (till) noon since I have nothing to do from the early morning! Virtually let's say!

I received a weird phone call from the "Social Insurance,"  governmental agency that usually deducts some money from our budgets every month to feed the retired people (and also steal some :) ). They asked for my bank account number or some paper to give including that information, to give out some money. I was like "government? give us money? how?" Technically, I'm not used to such thing, because all I know is that we work and get salaries from the government, to give it back to the government, specially with the upcoming ideas hovering around about issuing a law for the "income taxes" like if people don't have enough debts themselves already. However, it turned out, after a long talk with my brother, that the money is like a compensation about my brother's handicap after he had been enrolled into this category and now the SI agency is going to give that amount of money in form of salaries into my late father's account. It is a complicated law, but this is how it is. In fact, I don't feel it is my own money really, and I had a debate with my brother that I should transfer that money to him when I get it. My argument is, if my late father was alive now, wouldn't he give this money to his handicapped son? I guess he would.

Away from this fuss, I've worked yesterday on another image, and this time in HDR. This image specifically was part of a mini-panorama which I didn't really touch before because I thought it was not good enough. However, I picked this slice of the panorama and worked on it. It had been some time since I worked on HDR images, that is, enhancing an HDR image before tone-mapping.

I called it "The Mysterious Window"

This view was taken from a balcony inside the Aughnanure Castle and it was shot handheld. The edge of the balcony itself was apparent in all the slides forming the proposed panorama, and because of this I decided it is not a good panorama. However, I've found out another use for it now. As Christian Bloch describes working with HDR images "painting with light", this is exactly what I was trying to do, converting the bright scene into some dark, mysterious scene, and also helping convering the edge of the balcony! I've discovered now that there are many things I didn't touch still, and there are many panoramas taken that are not essentially to be a panorama after all! A single slide of them would be fine I guess to build up some nice image. That option now expands my stack of images from Ireland taken last year into a bigger pile even, but not necessarily all of them would look nice anyway!

Amazon asked me to write a review for the book that I'm still reading now. Although I can do it write away, but I just prefer to finish the book completely and then write a review, so that I can build up my opinion about it in a more concrete manner. The book after all is a MUST if I should say to any photographer, whether a landscape or any other type of photography is involved.

 

Well. Time now to pack everything and leave this place. I leave you now with a song I do really love and like, and reminds of many things in my life...

__________
2641. Alexander started to eat some herbs in front of him
2642. but their taste was more delicious than meat and fruit
2643. and Alexander felt satisfied and no more hunger he had
2644. thus he asked the Hermit: what are those herbs O good man?
2645. in my whole life I never tasted something like that!
2646. the old man then smiled gently and said to Alexander
2647. "this is the food of the humble and worshipers,
2648. the more you forget yourself and remember the One,
2649. the more He shall feed you and satisfy you dear"
2650. Alexander soon became satisfied and not hungry anymore
2651. then this he said: tell me O Hermit all what you know,
2652. why am I here and what I am supposed to know?
2653. I have been told that you have all the answers!
2654. the Hermit then smiled calmly and this he said
2655. "verily I know what others do not, O dear,
2656. but tell me first, do you know who you are?"
2657. Alexander stared in a strange way for this question
2658. and this he said: yes! of course I do know!
2659. but the old man replied: tell me your name then
2660. Alexander said: weird of you to ask me this!
2661. did you not say you know everything?
2662. who is seeking the help of the other now?
2663. the Hermit smiled back and this he said to Alexander
2664. "the infinite problem of mankind, impatience"

Alexander 6, V105.

Hello. How are you folks? Hope your day is, or was, better than mine. Not really that bad day, but I hate it when I have to walk in the sun for about 15 minutes with a trolly carrying tank that is supposed to be filled with liquid Nitrogen on a rigid ground and with cars blocking my way so I had to take the long way and then wait up for more than 10 minutes under the sun waiting for one sucker to come along but he never showed up despite my phone call prior to my arrival. As surplus for this day, I have a painful wrist that is never seem to be cured whatsoever.

Away from this fuss, I'll get back to photography here now. Yesterday, and after reading the chapter of the black and white in Mastering Photographic Composition, Creativity, and Personal Style, it jumped to my mind that I can probably fix some images who really didn't take up much of my time or imagination and try to fix it in black and white and see the reaction from people I know and how they feel about it.
One of the trials I went on with was merging some images of Aughnanure Castle from the outside into a 32-bit black and white. Then I figured out there is no much sense in that in fact, or maybe little sense! I mean, HDR images are supposed to provide an open EV range in a colored image, but in black and white the EV is limited in general by the nature of the system itself. But does that mean that a HDR in black and white would provide more contrast range (i.e. High Definition) more than the usual black and white? One of the definitions of the HD it is a measure of the levels from black to white (or vice versa) that can be seen or viewed by the device. That is, if some device can view White, Black, and 8 levels of gray in between in a precise manner, then we can say the contrast here is 1:9, 1 being for white, and 9 is the total levels that come after white to the final black. At least this is what or how I understood it when Christian Bloch explained it in his book.

I don't think HDR represent a "HD" in black and white though, I've never heard of this term! Anyway, I was doing that for that specific image trying to eliminate the fuss in the moving branches which introduced a ghosting effect (they were moving because of the breeze). Unfortunately, it didn't work out at all in several softwares, and even in PhotoAcute which is supposed to be good (as reported) with removing moving objects.

Image under inspection

Later on, I've just given up with this image and started to look for something else. This time, I've picked one that really inspired me with the strong presence of the light in it. It was also taken for HDR (3 bracketed images), but here, I have to deal with it in black and white.

Second target. Inside the tower in Aughnanure.

Here, there was some shake but it was fixed simply in Photoshop's "auto-align" command. Now, I have 3 images at hand with different shades of gray (remember, they are all converted to black and white). I was hesitated which one to work on. There were some details here and there that I wanted to include in this image, like the branches that show up on the roof of the tower. This gives me somehow a sense of hope in the image. To go around this, I went on doing a manual labor with manual tone-mapping. It is not a HDR toning, but rather stacking your 3 images in 3 successive layers and apply some masks. I might explain in details in some other post maybe? Maybe! However, the result was good (after doing also some contrast and sharpening), and I reduced my choice into two images, that I have to choose from to upload and try my luck with the B&W now! The first was the black and white version of the first image with EV equal to +0, and the second of course was the "tone-mapped" black and white composed of the 3 images altogether.

Left: +0EV black and white. Right: Tone-mapped black and white.

Most people agreed on the right one being the most acceptable, I think mainly because of the dramatic effect involved. The story was not over by then but I thought maybe a sepia tone would be favorable to add some old or ancient effect, since the place is a historical monument.

Left: Sepia version. Right: Regular version.

The response from people that I've tested these images with was just amazing! I've never thought that black and white images can do such things to the imagination! Most people liked the sepia version for many reasons, but there also some people who liked the pure black and white version because simply it is either reflective for purity, or mystery.

This said now, it encourages me highly to dig for more from my old RAW files and try to work it out in B&W in a suitable manner, providing of course a good light and a nice composition at least!

__________ 

2497. Alexander thought for some minutes about it
2498. and he thought about the ground that she meant
2499. until they passed over a dark land with dead trees
2500. so harsh and lonely it was that Alexander's heart jumped
2501. then he asked: is this the land of the promised Hermit?
2502. and Aramramátáníth answered: yes indeed it is,
2503. but the time to see him is not due yet at this hour,
2504. the night must fall and a moon must rise upon the mount
2505. it is then when you can see your promised man,
2506. because he spends his days in worshipping,
2507. while at night time he takes a rest for his body
2508. Alexander asked then: and why his land is so dark?
2509. it gives the scent of sadness into the soul of a human!
2510. then Aramramátáníth answered: do not blame the man,
2511. verily he is a lonely old man in this spot of Uhir Daynur,
2512. his arms are his companions and his legs are his carriers,
2513. he eats the plants of the desert and barely brings water,
2514. in this dry land only wild animals live and fight,
2515. this is the Hermit's life in Uhir Daynur, poor man
2516. then Alexander asked: but why he has to live here?
2517. I am sure there are plenty of places in this life
2518. thus Aramramátáníth answered: O dear Alexander,
2519. you should know by now that there are some people,
2520. devoted themselves for nothing but to God

Alexander 6, V37.

Well Well. One busy day I presume. I shall call this day, the day of Panoramas. I've taken lot of short panoramas either vertically or horizontally and most of them were with my fisheye lens. Too bad it doesn't have a zooming capability, as I am working with the images now, seems some of them are going to be small with big portion of the sky showing on. All of that, in Failaka island.
The sea is great. Can be full of wrath, but generous after all. Some of the panoramas I did today were not really exactly to be called a panorama, but rather I loved to include more portions of the sky in the image and hence, I prefered to take them on parts vertically to add a bit more of the sky. The weather was weird though, shiny and cloudy in the same time! And while we were approaching Failaka port, the Salmiyah city port on the main land was still obvious. Such view I've never seen before. The two do not appear in the same time usually.

As luck has it, I was able to view the shores of Miskan island from Failaka's northern shores. Also, there was this abandoned center for seafaring activities which, supposedly as stated on sign posts, would provide a pick-up to Miskan island. Yet, the place was abandoned and no one was there, despite the relatively apparently-new yachts or boats over there. I could see 2 long towers from where I stood... too bad I didn't snap it with my camera! Bad me! I wonder if they were lighthouses as I always thought, or some "chimneys" of some factory over there? Could be? I don't know. Everything is possible after the statement of this man in Silsan, in which he said going there is restricted by now! It was foggy, I could see that. Like some blackish or greyish smoke hovering around the two towers for some reason, and that's why I thought they were chimneys of some sort or an exhaust of some factory and not lighthouses. This view kind of revived the hope in me of visiting this island one day, and I was already looking for someone to ask about going there in Failaka island itself, but no luck.
Not only Miskan was visible, but also the lands of Auhah (عوهة) island was visible before arriving at Failaka's port. I don't know really why they translate it as "Auhah" since we say it as "Oohah" usually, but anyway this is how it is spelled and you check it yourself on Wikipedia.

In the beginning, I played a little prank on myself, again. I got shocked to see the schedule time in the time table for the ferry travels to be delayed more than I thought it was. It said the ferry would leave at 9:00 and come back at 3:00 afternoon, and frankly I wouldn't like to stay there till 3:00 by myself. Yet the date of today, 14th, was on Thursday. I really doubted myself "did I miss counting my days because of this little vacation of mine?". After all I discovered it is all because I was looking at the time table of January 2010 and not this month! Not the first time I do this really.

I was planning to take an inner panorama of that old mesh-holed building, which I think was some governmental place, but I changed my mind later and thought of taking a panorama of the outer area. Moving people there with their four-wheeled banshi all around really frustrated me. I could hard even park there and take the panorama from the outside.

The ruined building from the outside.

What seems to be an ex-electricity housing, in the periphery of the ruined

building and includes in the to-be panorama project.

This said, I'm looking forward now to have some sort of a software to fix my fisheye distortion for real now. The PTGui software, for stitching panoramas, usually takes care of such distortions, but I can't tell it does them as well for single images however. Thus, I'm looking for some software or plug-in to do so. Photoshop does it as well, but it sounds a bit tiresome in Photoshop, and maybe I would get more precise tools out of the framework of Photoshop. I wish if there is any program that would fix a straight line by specifying 2 dots marking the beginning and the ending of a proposed straight line in the image. Maybe there is one, I can't tell really.
Talking about a plug-in, I received a response from HDRsoft people about my suggestion for a web plug-in to view HDR images, and here I quote it for you:

Dear TJ,

Thank you for your interest in Photomatix and for suggesting an HDR plug-in for web browsers.

The closest thing to a plug-in for  displaying HDR images in browser that we know of is webHDR:
http://luminance.londonmet.ac.uk/webhdr/

It might also be worthwhile having a look at Christan Bloch's 'HDRI Labs' website for such software:
http://www.hdrlabs.com/

Regarding Photomatix, we don't have any plans to develop a web browser plug-in to display HDR images at the moment.


Kind regards,

Andreas
Photomatix Support Team
www.hdrsoft.com

This is nice so far. I'm still checking the website as I am writing this (and I'm doing all of that after getting back from that tiresome ferry trip). I don't feel like concentrating on anything so I might leave it for later. In a quick glance over the webpage, there are some freeware included, but I can't tell which one is to be used as a plug-in to view HDR in the web browser, if any. I guess I'm going to ask Blochi for this! Blochi in case you didn't know is Christian Bloch, the author of this magnificent book:

As for now... I should take a rest and work on batch-processing my bracketed images and put them into OpenEXR format for heavy use later. I leave you now with Alexander's story, verse 37.

__________
865. when the stranger calmed down he gazed upon Alexander
866. and Alexander smiled back at him and put down Charnagút
867. then Alexander began the speech again with the stranger
868. "tell me O friend, what is your name?"
869. and the thing said: my name is Birbuár, son of Árúc
870. then Alexander asked: you know this sword? why were you scared?
871. the strange thing then stuttered and said: of course I do,
872. it is the Charnagút, the sword of the great Ayvar king,
873. it is the torture of the sinners and the sign of kings,
874. thus now I believe you are indeed a king,
875. please forgive my impoliteness master
876. then Alexander said: I am not your master,
877. but I am happy to be your friend in this world,
878. I was a king in my world before, but not anymore,
879. tell me O Birbuár, where am I and what is this world?
880. thus Birbuár said: yes I shall answer your questions,
881. but if you do not know already, how come you are an Ayvar?
882. and Alexander replied: I am not an Ayvar, but a stranger here
883. and Birbuár had a weird look upon his face and eyes
884. and this he said to Alexander: but how you got the Charnagút?
885. and Alexander replied back: it is a gift from my father Pilippánút,
886. but I do not know how he got it or made it,
887. but this sword helped me a lot to come here,
888. and discover the truth one by one

Alexander 6, V1.

Somehow, it was a tiresome and busy weekend. I didn't post anything yesterday (Saturday) as I promised myself but anyway, it was not much of importance I believe, except to put on with the first verse of Alexander VI.
I made some experiments again with my beloved golden turtle, and this time I used the FEB (Flash Exposure Bracketing) as a substitute, since I can't use it in a completely dark room;



The blue background is actually black. But with some fixes and because of the flash light striking it, it turned bright and blue. Combining the three shots was done with Photomatix (and some values of exposures were adjusted since softwares use certain numbers in the EXIF of the image, i.e. data attached to the image). Yet, tone-mapping was done manually with Photoshop (and also fixes) because the Photomatix version was hard to smooth out and equalize the proportions of light. The image you see was actually like split horizontally in the middle, with bright portion being up and the dark shadow being down. Such thing cannot be done with Photomatix, but rather done easily with Photoshop's adjustment layers and brushes. Hue and Saturation were also fixed to some extent and voila! here you go. As for the time being, I've been using Photomatix to merge the images together and save it as EXR, and then edit them (mostly) with Photoshop. Sometimes, I get them back to Photomatix after adjusting them and saving back again in EXR, because my skills with manual tone-mapping are just novice!
This is some of my summary about using Photoshop and Photomatix in HDR making and Tone-mapping; of course people who read some books don't need it, as these are just my thoughts after working a with them, and there are plenty of softwares out there that are good for things and bad for other things maybe and so on:

Photoshop:

 - Good stuff:

• Gives you the ability to adjust the HDR image in various ways with adjustment layers.
• When joining into HDR, a dialogue box appears with calculated exposure values and gives you a choice to tick-out any unwanted images into the sequence.
• Got instant 32-bit slider to view the image in various exposure settings instantly.
• For those who like to use their own hands with baking the HDR, tone-mapping here with Adaptive settings (and others) are fine.
• Plugins capability makes it easier to do noise reduction after tone-mapping directly, if needed.

 - Bad stuff:

• Memory consumer.
• Exposure values cannot be changed manually (only if the file is stripped out of its EXIF data).
• Does not have a tool to view a HDR historgram.
• Aligning, while processing the images to HDR is not, compared to Photomatix, good enough.

 Photomatix:

- Good stuff:

• Does not consume much memory.
• Exposure values can be fixed in case of some problems with calculations (and you get a dialog box even when the brackets of the exposures are not even or normal let's say).
• Got Exposure Fusion capability (which is not an HDR merging but useful at times).
• Can view a HDR histogram (and this is extremely important for me to check that there are no cut-offs in the exposures sequence; at tails mainly).
• Saves the HDR image in major formats as Radiance (.HDR) and OpenEXR (.EXR, ZIP and PIZ).
• Tone-mapping is semi-automatic, with pre-fixed schemes and the ability to adjust the sliders. This is good for none-experienced manual workers like me!
• Has 2 aligning algorithms embedded and can be used in two modes: normal and high (in case your tripod moves much because of the air or something). It is far better than Photoshop's.

- Bad Stuff:

• Once the sequence of the images is made, and when an error pops-up for some problems in the exposure values, you cannot tick-out some images, but only fix the exposure values.
• Generally, it is not an image editing program, thus, you can't do much to your HDR image before baking.
• Personally, I don't trust the "noise reduction" option that is applied to the images before being combined. After all, noise reduction is a must after tone-mapping.
• No plugins capability, thus, you can't work with plugins embedded in it like Photoshop; plugins like NeatImage are deemed useful.
• No instant 32-bit viewer or slider to move and check the various exposures. There is however an option for going up and down with exposure (F11 and F12 keys) which isn't exactly as flexible as in Photoshop.

The term "bake" and "baking" I'm using here, is a term that adapted (and I like it by the way) from Christian Bloch's book, in which he explains how to fix HDR images before tone-mapping, i.e. baking. I think he was hungry when he was writing that section but anyway, it works fine with me... 'cos I'm always hungry.

With points from here and there, it is, at least for me, hard to work with one program alone. I do have to work with both here and there. Yet, my main first step in the workflow, would begin with combining the images in Photomaix first and saving the HDR file. Sometimes, but not often, I do combine the images into HDR in Photoshop but it is rather to check if there is any difference or any enhancement, since the two softwares tend to give me different calculated exposures' values for the same set of images.
I've been trying to do the same FEB trials on my old censer as before, and this time with a black background (from the papers I purchased last week). I did not design a black box yet, but so far I'm putting the paper freely and bend it softly to make a background. In my experiment with the censer (which I did not make up images for it yet), I used the diffuser on the flash head. I did not use it before because, I just thought it is designed mainly for the wide-lens apparatus (as mentioned in the manual) and to avoid vignetting (darkening of edges) when using wide-lens with normal flash. The flash tends to concentrate in one spot then. However, I used it with my 18-55mm lens and it works fine on spreading the flash to a wider area and softening the strike on the body of the censer itself. Why I didn't think of this before? Damn it!
When the diffuser is pulled out, the flash automatically sets the zoom level to that of a wide-lens, and maybe that's why I didn't try to use it in that condition.
Everything was going fine, until it was the time for the third shot which is supposed to have a relative exposure value of +3, when it turned out with a level of "0". This is bad for combining the images later on, even if I fixed the values manually in Photomatix. I made other shots changing from Av (aperture priority) mode to Tv (time priority), but here, the results were not exactly what I want, with the flames of the candle inside were almost turned off and the aperture was set to f5 making a shallow depth and no sparkles (like in the image of the turtle above). It is hard to combine elements from the 2 experiments, but I'm trying still, or I should conduct a new experiment today, completely.
__________
1. thus Alexander decided to leave his people
2. and head to where he never been before
3. alone without any companions
4. weak without any weapons
5. except of his Charnagút
6. and he walked with his torn clothes
7. amid the deserts and mounts and valleys
8. and he stopped at the ruins of Taghlút
9. the capital of the khanate of Ghutan
10. where he crushed some idolaters
11. just like a grain of salt in the wind
12. and he stood upon the ruins of the tower
13. of the mighty castle he wrecked with iron and fire
14. and he meditated and remembered his golden age
15. and the tears could not be kept in his eyes long
16. and he raised his harsh hands up to heaven
17. and praised God and His mercy
18. then he knew for sure deep inside him
19. that nothing in this life remains
20. and like you take, you shall be taken
21. and like you own, you are owned
22. while this life is nothing for sure
23. but like a grain of salt or sand
24. to the wind shall fly away

Alexander 4, V3.

Quiet day relatively, despite the fact that it is Monday! Well, not quite quiet, since I had to pick up back my sister's laptop from the damn workshop. The filthy technician requested extra 5 K.D. for installing the "right" Windows XP, which he did not do in the beginning. He installed an Arabic version and yet, a non-genuine one and I could not do an update. He was acting like beggar really. He made me angry again after I made a decision to calm myself down, but he is a rude one indeed.

Back to work, I had to prepare some samples of tuna and sardines to put them in the freeze dryer;



Believe me guys, with all due respect, the guy who invented sardines is an idiot! What's wrong with flexible cans? My can opener did not work and I made such a mess (and a horrible smell) all over the lab just to get these samples out into some plastic bag. Sardines ARE rocket science guys!


I spent the last night on doing an experiment in a dark environment with only my censer lit (can burn aromatic oils and candles). Well, it was a chance as well to try my filters out and try some long exposures, however, generally speaking the experiment did not go very well (specially with lot of noise in long exposured images). I tried to take images of the lit censer as well in several shutter speeds and I also got my flash involved (and that was an awkward move). The flash's problem is, I can't work with it solely without being connected to the camera (I can, but the control is cumbersome since it is not designed to work that way). This matter is a problem for me now since I want to give some instant light to the objects I want to take a picture of, but from a different angle other than the camera's direction (specially the sides). I will think about it and see if there are some cables or so. My camera is old and do not have the wireless control over the flash, thus, it must be done by a cable of some sort. Combining the images later on was awkward as well, in Photoshop and in Photomatix. Lot of noise and doubled or tripled EV values. All of this, as I believe, is for the lack of my understanding for EV concept. Anyway, I'm looking forward to make out something from these images already.

For the time being, I've finished reading my HDRI handbook, the one written by Christian Bloch (he is apparently a nice guy please visit his page, and, don't forget the credit as well!).

It is a magnificent book, specially for beginners. Before reading this book, I used to tone-map my HDR images down and I thought this is the core of the event, but now the whole concept had changed in my mind and there are lot of things that I could have fixed in old images that I made (specially those from Ireland) if I was to read this book before this time! However, there is no solution for any blured images!
As for now, and beside working on the translation work for Alexander VI story, I'm starting to read the books that I've already got from Ireland (from a souvenirs shop!). They had been in the dark corner for long now, and I think this is the right time. But, I will still think of some photography books to purchase, specifically from "rocky nook" series. As for the time being, I picked a little book entitled "Irish Ghosts" by John J. Dunne.

 

The cover is different, but the title and the author's name are the same, so I would say they are the same book. By the way, I might be fascinated by ghost stories, but I didn't say I like to meet one, ok?

I've forgot already how many books I've purchased from J.P. Keogh & Sons shop, but I remember I've purchased something about the Irish dancing and something about Irish music with music sheets (or notes) in it.

This one here is a small book, I shouldn't take much time to finish it all! I hope! But the most important thing for me now is, to burn my writing skills back as I did stop for a long time now in favor for photography and experimenting with my camera.

Words got beauty in my heart.

__________

49. and by arriving there the villagers shouted
50. "Alexander O Master, let us get back
51. the lands is not ours and shall not be!"
52. thus Alexander was surprised and wondered
53. "what is that you are saying O good people?"
54. then a villager named Chidhwárthí advanced
55. and with a weak voice full of fear he did say
56. "O Master of the good, you never heard of Zimúrá,
57. the land of mischief and the heaven of mutants?
58. the forefathers were sinners and so they were after them
59. like animals they live and hunt, and mercy left them out
60. cannot you see how black is their place?
61. cannot you smell how it is full of bad scents?
62. cannot you feel how gloomy this place is?
63. come on O Master, let us not waste the lives
64. there are so much good can be spread elsewhere"
65. then in a humble voice did the hero say
66. "O good man, I was not ordered to retreat,
67. did you not follow me asking for glory
68. did you not forsake the justice to be all over
69. what is the value of your lives amid the fear
70. and what is the value of your deeds for no good
71. who is afraid to come let him be back to his wife
72. and I am not leaving this, until God commands me!"

Alexander 4, V1.

Still struggling. I seem can't fill the interior circle for my new work of "Caisleán Achadh na nIubhar - Little planet". The projection makes a hole in the middle which will be filled with white in case I saved as a JPG, unfortunately. I'm trying to work around this problem for a week now! And as always, my RAMs are always a pain.

Early Friday, that is, after midnight and the beginning of Friday, I went on a little semi-adventure after dropping my friend back home, alive. While driving here and there that night I noticed that beautiful building that I insisted on snapping it, and since my friend was a chicken I had to drop him back home and then get to work. I wonder if he was afraid of ghosts at that time or just afraid of cops. However, I went on roaming around that building here and there trying to catch a good spot to snap it, and in the same, an isolated one somehow. I went into some weird alleys, full of dust and bumps and my car almost turned into a bicycle, but the angle there was not so good. After all, I roamed around again and found out a nice spot although it was not so isolated but yet it was somehow a quiet place; the parking lot in front of the Khalijiya complex, where the DHL facility lies. There far away in the parking lot, I used my telephoto lens in a speedy manner in that cold weather that I didn't check even some settings for mirror-lock-up before shooting, and snapped the image;

The images were hard to compose though into HDR. I took 6 images (2 series of 3 shots, with focus changing from f5.6 to f16). The problem is, the wind played a role and shook the tripod a bit. Photomatix played a nice role in aligning the displacement somehow but Photoshop did not. The technique of aligning images is described in the HDR book made by Christian bloch, and seems the Photomatix algorithm is more complex than its counterpart in Photoshop. However, some work was needed later on to cool down the colors (the original image was yellowish) and to crop the image to remove the objects at the bottom that were blocking the way of my lens. I'm not completely satisfied about it but at least, I tried. The moon at the top is a later addition, beside, there was a crane on the top of the building that I had to clone-out.

It's not the first time I take a picture of this building by the way, but that night was special. The blue lights in the building were magnificent.

__________

1. thirty days and thirty nights the hero spent
2. in the lands of the bulughmans, the nomads
3. he taught them arts and crafts
4. he taught them how to speak in manners
5. he taught them how to write and read their own words
6. their letters were called the Bogol
7. and their tribes as the bulughmans
8. and then he taught them how to build houses
9. how to plant trees and how to find water
10. then he prayed to God to bless the lands
11. and clean the hearts from envy and mischief
12. as much as He desires so to be for them
13. then the rumbling started among the men
14. some are tired and some want the homelands
15. while some asked for more lands to takeover
16. and now Alexander had half of what he had
17. he stood in the middle of his camp
18. one point from his hand and everyone was silent
19. and after praising God and His favors
20. and after he reminded them about his vow
21. he announced firmly to them
22. that he will not move or get back
23. until the commands of God reveal themselves
24. or until his soul is taken away from his body

A Busy Relief...

It had been a long time since I've been busy like this. Busy with work I mean and not with my own business. After finishing the translation of Alexander's story VI, I'm thinking of taking a bit of a break for the time being. A break from Ayvarith, but not from other things that is.
I brought my usual book about HDR to read today and also the manual of my new baby dedicated-flash to read for today, but I got so busy with the motor in one of the labs that I didn't do such readings in the early morning but later in day. I think I will snap a further picture for this machine that I'm preparing my samples with. It's called "Freeze Dryer". Ever wondered how come there is a milk powder? Well, this machine can do it. It sucks all the air in a space enclosed by some plastic or glass container, and freezes this space. Depending on the sample's weight this process can take some several days. The larger the sample is, the more time you'll need. But there is always a regular check for the oil level in the motor, which is critical for the work. There is one motor that is dead and I'm working on fixing it, if possible, so I don't want to go on with another damaged motor and hence, no work to be done with those fishy samples.
And I just discovered that when someone interrupts or interfers with what you were doing oiginally, is something fishy indeed.

Keeping my work with the pictures I took in Ireland, specially around Aughnanure Caslte, I've come to test some theory with composing HDR. This time, I wanted to apply one of the things that I've learned from the book I'm reading already, and that isharpening before tone-mapping. In fact, I never thought of mangling with the images in HDR (or 32-bit) format because in Photoshop, lot of options are turned off and you can't do much, and hence, I've never thought of doing something other than tonemapping my images and fixing the lights in some areas, and for this reason alone I seldom use Photoshop now for HDR purposes. But now, I've learned that I can do sharpening to the original HDR image and enhance the image before tone-mapping. Sharpening the image usually pops out some artifacts or noise in the image but with HDR, we have an open space of values assigned to each pixel in the image and hence, we can sharpen the image and not affecting the data. This is the theory. However, in my trial I wasn't successful (and maybe misunderstood some concept or Mr Christian Bloch does not want to give me all his secrets!), and I produced lot of artifacts that I need to remove. Anyway, for my image, I decided to sharpen the normal way after tone-mapping in Photomatix, and I will give another trial later on with a new image. Maybe my image was not so good after all... specially with the chromatic aberration on the edges (I'm supposed to clean those in the original RAW files before I merge to HDR, anyway too much headache for me now!).


I have one Panoramic HDR that is making a headache for me, and so, I think I will to do the whole process with Photoshop this time instead of Photomatix, since Photomatix has a problem with memory usage. I know, my PC is not a competant but well, I could handle the file only in Photoshop so far.

This day seems different since I was busy with my hands mostly and not writing as usual. And tomorrow I think I will be alone in the work place! Yeppieeeee...