In this series of articles we’ve been exploring the histogram.  In the first two articles we discussed what it is.  Now we’re looking at different types of histograms and exploring how to work with them both in the field and during the post processing.  If you want to review or catch up, here are the links to the preceding three posts.

Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 1: Introduction

Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 2:  A Closer Look

Mastering Exposure – Histograms Part 3: The Rocky Mountain Histogram

In this article I want to discuss my favorite histogram, the Mole Hill histogram.  I like this one because so much can be done with it in the post processing.  Subtle colors and tonalities can be revealed in soft radiant light.  It lends itself to some of the most creative and expressive images.

Read on and we’ll look at what it is, the conditions in which it occurs, how to photograph it and how to work with it in the post processing to reveal the scene in all of its hidden glory.

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I was working on a photograph last night that turned out rather well. It was taken during a recent photography workshop in Zion National Park in Utah. I took the group to the famous bridge to photograph the Virgin River and the Watchman Tower at sunset. It’s a must photograph. It seems every photographer in Zion with a tripod is there. But we also returned for sunrise and had the bridge to ourselves.

There is a time of day when exposure becomes very tricky. This is during twilight when the sun is a little below the horizon so the earth is dark but the sky is very bright. You end up with what I call the “Grand Canyon” histogram – there’s a huge spike at the shadow end and a similar spike at the highlight end with a large gap in between. This is a challenging situation that, if you master, can provide some spectacular images. In this blog I’d like to walk you through the process.

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Sometimes I create a post just to document and remember a learning process I’ve just gone through.  This is such a time. 

I just spent an hour or so recalibrating my laptop monitor.  I calibrated it recently and it didn’t seem to come out right so I decided to recalibrate it again this morning.

Calibrating your monitor is a critical first step in the whole color management process (an area of study that hundreds of pages have been written on and that I won’t go into here – maybe later).

There are two settings you need to set in the calibration software – gamma and color temperature.  I made some guesses as to what these were and guessed wrong.  That’s why things like colors and tonalities didn’t look right.  A little digging into Lightroom help provided the answer (when all else fails, read the documentation – yea, I know).  So here it is.  Hopefully it will save you some time in the future.

Gamma: 2.2
Color Temperature: 6500K

Good luck.

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I’m a landscape photographer who likes to do it all himself.  I don’t want my camera making decisions for me.  That’s one reason why I shoot RAW.   And I don’t want Lightroom doing it either.  Lightroom has default presets that it applies to your photographs when you import them. 

To make things interesting, I shoot with two cameras (three if you count my iPhone).  My main camera is a Canon 1Ds Mark III and my don’t-leave-home-without-it camera is a Canon G11.  These cameras have widely different characteristics to say the least.  Lightroom applies the same default preset to files from both cameras when they are imported. 

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could set up separate presets for each camera and set them up the way you like them.  Well, that’s exactly what you can do.  In fact, you can go a step farther than just undoing the Lightroom defaults.  If there’s something you always do to every file you can create presets specific to each of your cameras and apply all the adjustments you want.

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Lightroom 3 came in the mail yesterday (along with CS5) so today I’m trying it out.  There’s not a lot of new functionality like there was when LR2 introduced local adjustments.  But there are some new things I’m really excited about.

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Last night we had a beautiful sunset.  The sky was baby blue, the clouds were pink and the horizon was golden.  I couldn’t resist.  So I grabbed my Canon PowerShot G11 and walked over to the neighbor’s front yard where the view is just a bit better.  I composed what I thought was an interesting image and snapped a few.

This morning I uploaded them and got to wondering about color saturation in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  I have a technique I’ve used for years to enhance colors but there are a couple of other techniques I thought I’d like to understand better.  The three Lightroom controls are:

• Saturation
• Vibrance
• HSL (the control I use the most)

So, for starters, here’s the original unadjusted image.

As you can see, the colors are really quite nice.  But my recollection of the sunset was that they were a little more saturated, more intense.

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These HDR tips resulted from a conversation with my good friend Andreas Waldeck, an HDR expert who happens to work with HDRSoft, the publisher of the premier HDR software Photomatix Pro.

In Tip #1 we talked about the correct way to capture multiple images HDR images in the field.  See HDR Tip #1.

Now I want to start discussing the processing of these image files.  The software tools we’ll discuss are Lightroom, Photomatix and, to a much lesser extent, Photoshop.  So let’s get started.

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I shoot a lot of HDR.  That’s where you take multiple images at different exposures so that you capture the full dynamic range of the scene in front of you.  Many people consider HDR to be unnatural and you can definitely get a surreal effect.  But HDR is the only way you can capture certain challenging scenes and make the results look like what you see, not what your camera sees.

I had a talk with my good friend Andreas Waldeck who works for HDRsoft, the creators of Photomatix.  This is the premier software for doing HDR.  Andreas shared some things with me that were real eye-openers and I’d like to pass them along to you in a series of HDR Tips.  So let’s get started with the first tip.

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Ever since I attended my first workshop two years ago I’ve been pondering personal style.  At first I had no clue as to what my personal style was.  But as time has gone by and I become more aware of the kind of work I produce, the idea of a personal style is starting to become clearer.  So, I plan to write a number of posts on personal style and my journey of self discovery.

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I worked on two photographs tonight that have been giving me trouble for the last week or so.  Both were shot in Zion NP.  The one I’ve been working the longest on was what I finished up on tonight.  Hopefully I have it.  We’ll know tomorrow morning.

My point in this post is I often get the feeling I’m wandering in the fog.  You can’t see where you’re going very well and you just stumble around.  You take a step, look around and decide where to go from there.  It’s a slow process.  I make a print.  It takes several minutes for it to come off the printer.  Then I look at it.  Often times it’s very disappointing, especially tonight.  Think about what’s wrong with it for a while, make the changes in PS and make another print.  It’s disappointing so think some more, fiddle in PS some more and make another print.  Hours go by.

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