DxO PhotoLab 4 and Candid Photos

mikemyers · February 5, 2021, 1:19am

Joanna, now that it’s dark outside, I don’t like the last image you posted. The sky and more has a not-very-nice greenish-blue cast, which I don’t like, and the bright golden glow which is why I was attracted to the view is gone.

I tried to accomplish the things you had done, but making it lighter, and making the buildings appear like what I remember. The blue tint you gave to the sky wasn’t there, but I liked the effect so I added that, along with lightening up parts of the image that were too dark to show details - but I don’t remember seeing any of those details. I’ll look out the window tomorrow and check.

Here are my files:

_MJM8687 | 2021-02-03-Sunrise lighting Miami Skyline.nef.dop (106.9 KB)

Since the original .nef file is not altered, I assume I shouldn’t re-upload it here ? If you would prefer that I did, I will do so from now on.

Looking at the photo on my ASUS, the sky looks “better” (like what you did) but I don’t remember seeing any blue in the sky until later in the morning.

The more I look at this image, the more I love it, especially full-size.

I don’t think I’ve been able to do anything like this until now!

Thank you all!!!

zkarj · February 5, 2021, 3:52am

I’ve got a very specific reflected colour problem I deal with quite often. I take pictures of aircraft, often airliners. Our national carrier has white and black aircraft, and a few of them are mostly black. When they are landing, those very black and very shiny aircraft still look black to me, but when I am processing my photos I can often find very obvious green tints underneath as they are reflecting the grass beside the runway!

In some lighting conditions I’ve also detected strong blue tints from the sky on top. With white aircraft which I know are a very pure white, this can lead to interesting results with the white balance eye dropper!

zkarj · February 5, 2021, 3:57am

And as to our perception of reality, I accept the mice are running the planet, but the ruler of the universe has one of my favourite lines that touches on our perceptions.

mikemyers · February 5, 2021, 4:09am

Just a thought from left field - is there a plane on the ground that you have access to, for testing? If so, and if you can get a high-quality polarizing filter, depending on a lot of variables, it might allow you to control (and maybe eliminate) the reflections. I know it does this on automobiles, and water, and other types of reflection. If you’re shooting at the right angle, relative to the sun, this may be useful to you.

I’ve been using a “circular polarized filter” lately, one from Nikon from ages ago, and one from Leica. I also have an Amazon filter purchased to use on my Fuji X100 camera.

Read up on polarizing filters before you start your testing. That way you’ll understand “why” it does what it does.

zkarj · February 5, 2021, 4:28am

I have such a filter for one of my lenses and know I can use it for water, but it had not occurred to me to try it in this scenario. I will have a go when I get a chance. No need for a test subject, just go stand near the runway and some will come to me.

mikemyers · February 5, 2021, 4:47am

I had lots of thoughts on this, all of which got thrown out the window when Joanna posted her “squares” comparison. I no longer think there “is” a reality. Now I think there “are” many. If I built the pieces in her drawing, and set them up with a light from the same angle, they would appear to my eyes just like in her photo, and if I took a photo of them, that’s what it would look like.

Building the bits and pieces would be simple. What would be the most difficult part would be arranging a light to creat shadows like the ones Joanna shows, with such a smooth transition to the edges of the shadows. I have no idea how I would do that.

I have a book I saved from my University of Michigan Art School classes, "Art and Illusion, by E.H.Gombrich. Joanna would love it. I was fascinated by it. One thing from the book - Look up “Ames Chair Experiment”. Here’s a little info about it:

George · February 5, 2021, 6:48am

It’s a start, the eye dropper. Just as the whole white balance is. Unless you work under controlled conditions.
Reflections can be seen as different light sources: mixed lighting. While white balance is a global correction.

In general we want to eliminate the non white influence of the light source. But sometime we don’t as in the sunset pictures. Joanna did put the wb at 5600. I think pl calculates the wb back to 5400, being the initial value you see. So 5400 means no correction.
It’s important to know that the color temperature is not the color temperature. It says rather: correct my white balance to let’s say 5400 as if my color temperature is 6587. That’s why high color temperature are reddish and low color temperature are blueish, just the opposite as should be.

George

OXiDant · February 5, 2021, 7:08am

This one i like.
The les interested part, the water, is more shadowed same as the buzy first section of land.
The sky would be nice if it was like that clouded and sun breaks but you can’t have it all.( you life there so there will be a morning which holds all things you only have to get up early… )

The skyline and buildings are looking great.

OXiDant · February 5, 2021, 7:34am

Your “problem” is with a Auto WB correction (multipoint) better to handle then a eyedropper(singlepoint).
And with multi-lightsource correction you can handle the gras correction.
Magenta/green colorcasting is a commen issue in high dynamic scenes.

Joanna · February 5, 2021, 8:28am

I also found your rendering to have lost that nice glow but I suppose that’s a problem with having a blue sky and a yellow light - together they produce a cyan(ish) colour. In my latest attempt, I took the grad filter off the sky, put the colour temperature back at 5600°K to restore the blue overall and especially in the upper part of the sky, eliminated the overall saturation and, instead, used the HSL tool to boost the saturation and luminance on the orange tones only. This left the upper sky bluer but brought back the golden glow elsewhere. Maybe the glow could be too much but I’ll leave that to you to fine tune.

Yes, I noticed you had tried to use the auto-mask to do that…

Unfortunately, that tool works best by selecting an area by placing the boundary between two reasonably distinct areas in-between the inner and outer circle - so you did didn’t actually select all of the shadow area. If it were to work properly, you needed to start with the inner circle totally within a dark area and then have the outer circle large enough to cover the entire shadow area.

I would have expected the finished mask to look more like this…

But, because of the nature of the content, selective selecting (if there is such a thing) is always going to be difficult because of the varied content of the area we want to change. In the end, I used a larger auto-mask and lifted the shadows rather than the overall exposure.

Anyway, here is an export of my latest version…

… and here is the dop file that you posted, with my version added in…

_MJM8687 | 2021-02-03-Sunrise lighting Miami Skyline.nef.dop (111,8 Ko)

mikemyers · February 5, 2021, 5:42pm

Aha! So start out with the “inner circle” of the tool completely within a dark area, and make sure the outer circle covers the entire shadow area…

…but a better result is to use the a larger auto-mask, and instead of adjusting the exposure, as I did, only adjust the shadows??

!!!WOW!!!

I was worried about the coverage in blue as I started to mask. I ignored that, and this time as you noted, I was careful to keep the smaller circle in the auto-mask tool within the dark areas. This time it worked exactly how I had wanted it to work!!! …and as you suggested, I only adjusted the shadows.

Also, you seemed to want a little blue in the sky. While I didn’t remember seeing any “blue”, I was thinking that with the sky with a little blue, the buildings by comparison would be even more “golden”.

Need to read and think some more…

mikemyers · February 5, 2021, 5:57pm

I changed the graduated filter for the sky just a tiny amount, which removed most of the visible “blue” in the sky, and in the Selective Tone highlights, I raised it from 4 to 6.

It’s too bright in my room to see this accurately, but it seems to have improved the “golden” color.

Where would I find the setting to get the grad filter to 5600 ? I had the temperature at 5857. Now it is at 5634. If I wanted to set it to 5600, where would I enter that number?

_MJM8687 | 2021-02-03-Sunrise lighting Miami Skyline.nef.dop (180.2 KB)

One last thought. I don’t really “learn” when I read what you suggest. I “learn” much, much better, by actually DOING what you suggest. Huge difference. I need to keep at this, until more of PL4 gets ingrained into my mind.

mikemyers · February 5, 2021, 6:20pm

Walk outside your home, aim at a. car parked on the street, with reflections of the street shown “on” the car. Adjust your filter, and those reflections sometimes vanish, apparently something to do with your angle looking at the car, and maybe the position of the sun. I tried this and all the reflections vanished, leaving only the car in its natural color. You’ll probably need to increase your exposure setting by two stops. Hope you can zoom in, and take photos with and without the filter - if your camera has “burst” mode, leave it on, while adjusting the filter. Good luck!

Joanna · February 5, 2021, 6:26pm

Unfortunately, accuracy is not a strong point of the “equaliser”

Absolutely! If I didn’t “play” with things I have had to learn, I wouldn’t know half as much as I do

mikemyers · February 6, 2021, 4:41am

For better or worse, I collected my to-post photos over the last month, and put them in the “January 2021” folder on my SmugMug magazine, at:

I’m starting the next month’s gallery (February 2021) - there’s a whole one photo there, which I need to update to the latest version - will do that tomorrow morning.

When I go on a “walkabout”, I typically take 50 or so images, throw away all but ten, and nine of the ten get posted after minimal editing, and one of them only gets posted on Smugmug after discussing it here.

Smugmug is supposed to be a way of earning money, but that’s not my goal. Anyone going there can v view the images up to full size, and probably download them as well. I’m doing it because I enjoy doing so, not to make money, and certainly not to get “work” as a photographer. Any of you are welcome to go there, and look around, and to leave comments too. I’m trying to think of a way to promote PL4 in my galleries. Maybe I’lll add “Edited on DxO PhotoLab 4” to the last line of my photo descriptions.

I also have quite a few more photos of India and Nepal to post in the next week or so. And I’ve got a lot of color prints of a Steam Locomotive Service area in Chennai, India - places like that no longer exist, for the most part.

More later - time for bed.

OXiDant · February 6, 2021, 10:29am

Ah you did a curveball, you let us do the tryouts and kept the best image’s for smmg…
Great sunsets.

I like , among others, the skyline and sun burst. Boat in front. Just the right yellow.
The one with sun at the right and orangje flair tovthe left that is for me to dark in the shadows i would like to have a glimp of detail to see before i drift of to the horizon.
But i understand why you didn’t.
You starting to get the hang of it.

mikemyers · February 6, 2021, 1:53pm

I hope you left a comment below the image, so I know which images you are referring to.

Some of those came out nicely, and didn’t need much in way of editing beyond cropping. The ones I posted here were among my favorites, and when I started posting here, I was making many mistakes because I didn’t understand PL4. I thought I would learn better if we discussed one at a time. This “group think” helped me understand things, which at the time I was oblivious to.

Gee, if you think I kept the best images for SmugMug, which are mostly the ones I didn’t ask about here, that means I’m improving, both in capturing the original image, and in my editing.

I know people are viewing them, as I get the “statistics” from SmugMug, but I get next to no feedback.

Meanwhile, when posting here, I get an avalanche of feedback, more than enough (usually) to understand, and always helping me “see” what needs to be done, and “how to achieve it”.

The only feedback I get from email is “what beautiful photos”, but not a word about what in particular, if anything, made the person write that - but the people I mail photos to don’t understand what went into creating the photo. I also post on other forums, such as the Leica forum, but most people don’t understand what I meant. That’s OK. I mostly go there to learn technical things, not to discuss photos.

Anyway, thank you! I know what I think I like, and why, but I learn much more from photos that when posted here you guys have issues with them. Sort of like going to a class and submitting a photo, and after an eternity, getting positive feedback. I don’t learn when people say “how wonderful”, but I learn a LOT when people (here) suggest alternative ways to do things - and 98% of the time I agree.

OXiDant · February 6, 2021, 5:12pm

That’s what i meant.
Need to sign in to comment, but 14/41 nice golden light.
6/41 would be interested to what’s there if you caurefully lift the dark shadows just a bit to reveal some details. (structure)

mikemyers · February 6, 2021, 6:14pm

Well, 14/41 was a compromise, as I didn’t know how to make it better.

For 6/41, I thought it was interesting, but I didn’t like the photo. The ultra-wide-angle lens distorted the photo too much. It’s from my Nikon Df with a 24mm lens - was very careful to remove any obvious distortion.

I re-opened the original. Now I can see some potential in the image, where before it looked like a dead end street to me. So, I re-edited it, using the tools I’ve recently learned. To add structure to the. dark areas, I think I first need to lighten them, and nothing I tried worked for me, so I did it just a little, cropped a little more, changed the watermark to match something in the image, and now I’ve got something I like MUCH more. Amazing! Your suggestion made a gigantic difference.

Any more suggestions?

_MJM2169 | 2020-12-25-Biscayne Jet Ski and Miami.nef (19.7 MB)

_MJM2169 | 2020-12-25-Biscayne Jet Ski and Miami.nef.dop (13.6 KB)

Added later - it looks much nicer on my calibrated ASUS display, and it looks MUCH nicer in a larger scale so I can actually see all the details.

mikemyers · February 6, 2021, 6:31pm

If you ever want to, you and everyone else in this forum is welcome to sign into the SmugMug, so you can post at will, positive or negative, whatever you like.

So THAT is why so few people comment. I didn’t realize that before.

PL4 is starting to feel much more intuitive to me. That’s a good thing.