Wavelets and Lorde

After a major professional photoshoot--the cover and feature article in Australian Vogue--Lorde, the New Zealand songwriter and singer of Royals and Pure Heroine fame--posted a selfie on Instagram. So far 148 thousand of her 2.5 million followers have loved it

My 12 year old granddaughter didn't love it. Too, too noisy. So fix it. grandpa.  (Got her RT trained since she was three and I gave her a big girl camera that took pictures of her feet and her cat and herself in a mirror)

Grandpa's two minute fix. Far less noise coupled with slightly more sharpening. The S/N was measured using ImageJ

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The idea is to remove as much noise as possible and not worry about the sharpness. So there is nothing magic about the  91.59 luminescence. Could have been 100% if this wasn't a two minute fix and I had been paying more attention to the GUI fit on the screen.

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Increasing the edge sharpness strength to 34 restored the original sharpness. Some small artifacts showed up as bright spots at 300% magnification. Using the denoise section of the tool removed most of them. I should note that the  tool is still being debugged and improved so these minor artifacts may not be a problem in the next build.

Final note. The denoise slider numbers in the history panel are the correct numbers. The slider settings  on the right  are the defaults when I set the sharpening strength.

To download the latest version of RawTherapee go to http://rawtherapee.com/downloads
 It's is open source, works great and will be forever free

Mini Workflow Spot Color

The original image of a couple kids being photographed by their mother.

All colors except for blue are desaturated using the saturation curve of the HSV tool.

Fine tune in CIECAM using the JS Lightness and Saturation algorithm.

That's it folks.

But, of course, with RT editing nothing is ever finished. So here is the new stuff you can create when you switch to the all algorithm and start draggin' them sliders around.  The hidden artist titles this 'Cindy's Nightmare - Do you have to tell wicked step moma you caught me sneaking out to the Prince's Rave?'

Main points
The hue slider gives a full range of of colors
When  ISO6400 noise is all the same color it becomes artistic texture. Fine tune that with the Noise Reduction Chromatic sliders
The other CIECAM sliders work pretty much as expected but with different intensities. For example the Q brightness slider is stronger than the L lightness slider and at 100% washes everything except the colors to white

Happy exploring your own Hidden Artist

Processed with RawTherapee 4.0.12.165  which can be found at http://rawtherapee.com/downloads

Infrared--RT's simple workflow.

I've never been that wild about taking infrared images. Not because I don't enjoy looking at them. Rather it because I spent multiple years of my working life designing, building and servicing unusual and very expensive infrared instruments. Learning the ins and outs of IR photography wasn't going to teach me anything I didn't already know.

So I was more interested in seeing how flickr's new interface worked when I happened to visit the discussion area in flickr's Digital Infrared group three day ago.  The thread that caught my eye was on Lightroom, infrared images and some over complicated problems you face using that editor.  I was about to jump into the discussion and shout out all the ways RawTherapee works better, when I thought it wouldn't hurt to process an IR image to check that I knew what I was taking about.

After searching around in my backup folders-- I had vaguely remembered taking a infrared set three or four years ago--I found these images.  And yes, the much simpler RT workflow that produced these little masterpieces is worth blogging and bragging about.

My IR camera is a digital antique, a 3.2 MP Olympus 3020Z, the first digital camera I owned. It has, by today's standards, a weak IR blocking filter. When combined with a Hoya R72 filter it takes a decently exposed sunny day image using shutter speeds of 1/8 of a second.

I must have used a tripod when I took this in 2011. But while preparing for this post I discovered I could loop my camera strap around my neck and use my two legs and my monopod/walking stick to create an impromptu tripod stable enough for shake-free IR images. Big advantage. I'm a handheld photographer.  I'm not interested in lugging a tripod around when I'm out hiking with a camera.

Now the workflow using 64 bit RT 4.0.11.1.

Although I didn't highlight it, up at the top you can see this is a tif file. Without any post processing it loads up with  a perfect 'white balance.'  This is caused by the camera's unusual sensor, one that uses a yellow, cyan, magenta demosaicing filter instead of the standard Bayer red, green, blue filter.

During the camera's internal calculations to create an RGB image that can be displayed on normal monitors several things happen.

1-The camera creates identical RGB channels from the internal IR RAW values. This is an excellent starting point for B&W images and a no-go for any false color IR images. For those I'm going to have to use a different camera.

2-The blue sky noise is half of what one would expect using a RGB demosaicing filter. At the time this was a marketing tool. I remember one salesman holding up a 30in print of mostly blue sky to promote the noise figure of the camera his store was pushing that month.  He also ignored me or didn't understand me when I pointed out some of the technical reasons his big print didn't prove anything.

3-The biggest and most not technical reason was that in normally printed,  real world images blue sky doesn't need  noise reduction. My 3020Z has low noise highlights coupled with high noise shadows with about twice the noise of a similar RGB camera.. Why? There is a signal averaging step in the calculations which degrades the low signal results when making this type of comparison.

As for the TIF file--whatever version of RT I was using 3 years ago didn't do jpgs. So I was stuck with oversized tifs, 7 images only in the 128MB memory cards that were considered huge storage back when I bought the camera.

From the history pane, I played around with the noise reduction before I did any sharpening. You can do the same thing in two steps by switching to a default ISO noise profile and tweeking the exposure slider. With no sharpening and RT's noise reduction there is no visible noise in the black sky even when displayed 400%

While I've brought up a trace of noise with sharpening , look at the detail in the trees full size to see what I've done to improve the overall image.

With a camera this old it's not surprising to find a hot pixel that require a trip to GIMP.

The clone stamp tool fixed that problem.

 Once again here is what I loaded into my flickr account. In the last two day it has gotten a decent number of views, comments and favorites from other IR photographers.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/scribble1/9078069848/

This is an image I took yesterday-one not as visually interesting but taken only a few steps away from my front door.  It is the street entrance to the greenway that  loops around behind my back yard and leads to Pilgrim park.  Long time viewers of my flickr account might remember the nature walks with young Charlotte that always seem to end at the slides and swing sets there.

With this I tried a different sharpening tool-Contrast by Detail. Notice that I dragged the first slider back to reduce single pixel noise.

While this is out of order and happened before the sharpening,  I found the line of trees a bit boring and added an artifical vignette,

For one final editing step I flipped the image.  The jury is still out on the question 'improved composition?' What do you think?

Or?

 To download RawTherapee 4,0.11.1
http://rawtherapee.com/downloads

An up to date english  manual come with the download package. You can also find it plus non english language manuals that arrives as RT volunteers translate them at:
http://rawtherapee.com/blog/documentation

It's Here!! RAWTherapee 4.0.10

No Noise Reduction

The new LAB noise reduction with its speed ups and individual noise channel controls.

Need I say anything more?  Yup. Great job RT folks!!

Find RAWTherapee  4.0.10.1 here

http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx

In Search of Perfect Color--the New Tone Curves

I shot this a while back at the Villas Zoo during its hundredth anniversary celebration. The Young Shakespeare Players were putting on a performance of The Winter's Tale in the zoo's meeting room.  I caught these performers in a  darkish corner and ended up with a not particularly exciting ISO1600  snapshot.

But after some very quick editing I turned the snap into this.

How quick? Here is my workflow.

1-loaded the snap into RT's default mode

2-set the highlights with a single drag using curve 1 of the new dual tone-curve set in the Film-like mode

3-set the shadows with another single drag using curve 2 in the Weighted Standard mode.

4--adjusted the exposure slider to move the histogram to the left for saturated blacks in the actor's hair and costumes. 

5-dragged noise reduction sliders to roughly the settings I used for my last blog post.

6-developed and then cropped the finished image in Irfanview. Why Irfanview?  Because in my excitement to see a final image I ignored the clutter surrounding my intended image.

Total working time now that I know what to do --two or three minutes per image  Be less if I batch process the other ISO1600 snaps I shot before the play began. Not quite a one click clean up but RT is getting close. Plus the results are-- pure magic!

Two things you learn when you first take up image processing:
1-unless you have developed perfect technique, usually after decades of  professional photography, images straight out of the camera improve with an S tone curve.
2- RGB colors will shift when you apply your tone curve.

Applying a S-curve multiplies the color number in all three color channels by whatever numbers are created by the tone curve.  Consider the RGB color  75,128,175 as an example. With a curve fixed at the  grey point, 128, the red value will go down, the green will stay the same, and the blue will go up creating a different color. Since images and tone curves are unique designing a reasonable algorithm that can follow and corrects these color shifts becomes near impossible .

LAB mode is different. Tone curves in the L channel doesn't shift color. Unfortunately, correcting skin tones and the like with LAB's A and B channel curves is also near impossible.  But with the RT's four HSV tone curves, near impossible is moving in on routine.

For those not familiar with HSV terminology the hue is the color.  The chroma or saturation is the intensity of the color. The value is the brightness of the color. You can read off these numbers in RT's left history pane.

RT now has four different ways of creating a tone curve: Standard, Film-like, Saturation and Value Blending and Weighted Standard. I'll leave it to the RT programmers to explain the inner workings of the new algorithms in a promised tutorial because I suspect I'll get the details wrong. Whatever the details since you can mix  and match the methods with dual curves you don't lack for ways to create excellent images.

EDIT: For more info on the four tone curve types you will find an updated manual at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DHLb_6xNQsEInxiuU8pz1-sWNinnj09bpBUA4_Vl8w8/edit?pli=1


First why dual curves? In my example I created an S-Curve by combining two curves. This may seem like a needless complication--my first thoughts--until I saw how well and fast it works. And if you don't care for this new fangled innovation, set curve2 to linear and ignore it.

Below is a test image that one of the developers, Michael, posted. The differences are subtle and are best viewed at original size but in the dual curve version the skin tones blend in more smoothly as the lighting slides from highlights into shadows.

I haven't tested all the combinations in any systematic way but here are some tips I picked up from issue 1529 in the google code where many test images were posted.

Two standard curves (above) work well on skin tones.

Brightening with Film-like adds saturation and gives richer colors. So does switching to a wide gamut working space like ProPhoto. (I've tested this). But if you like your colors less vivid Saturation and Value Blending is the best choice.

Weighed standard for darkening and Film-like for lightening--my example--are a good combination for people pictures.

All methods work for landscapes. Selecting a mode depends on taste

Conventional S-curves work best with Saturation and Value Blend

Whatever curve modes you settle on, this unique feature is a major addition to RawTherapee's tool kit.

This version of RT 4, build 138, can be found at: http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx   An updated manual is at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DHLb_6xNQsEInxiuU8pz1-sWNinnj09bpBUA4_Vl8w8/edit?pli=1  

Teen with Fedora--A Second 'First Look'

In my original post on  RAW Therapee's new noise reduction routines I had excellent results with the image of Charlotte under Lord Shiva but far worse results with some other images. The noise reduction part still worked but thick black vertical lines appeared in the converted.images.

Turns out the noise reduction algorithm broke the image into segments called tiles. It worked its noise reduction magic on each tile individually but sometimes the tiles didn't rejoin smoothly. A tricky and hard to find bug, judging from the number of posts that appeared in the forum while they were fixing the problem.

That bug has been mostly swatted--noise reduction still doesn't work on JPGs-- but with code change set 135 we can now test and work with RAW files.  ( found at http://www.visualbakery.com/RawTherapee/Downloads.aspx  )



ISO 6400  f8.0  1/25 sec  EV -0.7

This snap was taken at Old World Wisconsin in the back of a barn during a demonstration of 19th century cow milking.  The lighting wasn't insanely difficult but as you can see from the camera settings I was pushing my D7000 to get this shot.

So how did RT do when I tried to improve the image.

YUP!  RT noise reduction works,

The noisy image to the left is without any noise reduction, just a +0.7 exposure correction to compensate for the -0.7 correction I did in the camera to move the shutter speed up to 1/25 of a second. The NR settings of the much cleaner image on the left are shown below.

I adjusted the Chrominance slider first. Use a 400 % box on something with little detail like the girl's cheek. Find a setting where all the color speckles disappear and then add a bit more.  This slider works on the A and B LAB channels that only contain low resolution color information so you are not blurring detail. With my D7000 at ISO 6400 about 2/3 of the noise was chromatic so that was a no fiddling around adjustment. Nice

For the other two sliders I picked a region with fine detail, the wood grain on the 2x4, and adjusted them to match the detail in my conversion to the detail in the jpg out of the camera. The Luminance slider controls the strength of the noise reduction. The Luminance Detail slider sets the threshold on  another algorithm that does its best to seperate real detail from random noise.  In this image Luminance 70 and Luminance Detail 50 worked well.

So where are we at now.  The left top line profile is from a RT conversion with no noise reduction.

The one below that is from the camera's jpg where I used the D7000's normal noise reduction setting.  It also is very close to the noise I measured when I used RT's default settings.

The top right profile is from my detail preserving image.  And finally the insanely low noise ISO 6400 profile below it is from when I went all out with a Luminance of 90 and a Luminance Detail of 6 to see how low noise I could go.

How bad was that image.  When I displayed it side by side with my tuned image I didn't have to pixel peek hard to see I had lost detail.  But if I had emailed it to Fedora Girl I'm sure she wouldn't have screamed "WHERE IS MY DETAIL" and immediately sent it into the bit bucket. We RT users are after the very best quality but in this world drowning in imagery, I'm afraid most viewer don't notice.

So great job RT folks and especially Emil who designed the algorithms and did the coding.

First Look--RAWTherapee's New Noise Reduction

Last Wednesday during this hottest on record Midwest heat wave Charlotte and her Mom and I drove in air conditioned comfort  to tour Charlotte's favorite museum, the Milwaukee Public. There Charlotte became my guide. My Nikon D7000 hanging around my neck, she led me from exhibit to exhibit.

Excellent exhibits, I'll admit. But from a low light, hand held photographer's point of view, the trip was not a successs. The lighting, or lack of it, was the pits. Still, I snapped away and came home with a few GB's of images, hoping for some lucky shots.

What I discovered when I went to process the RAWs wasn't luck exactly. I've been following the development of RT's new noise reduction routines for over a year and I check their forum regularly. The developer's denoise compile I downloaded isn't bug free and only works with 64bit Win7, but with my new computer its match with my museum snaps was perfect.

This snap was taken at a 1/4 sec and ISO2500.  Charlotte held her pose. Image stabilization and I held the camera steady. After a 2 EV boast in exposure and a tone curve, it's a decent image to see how well RT's latest and greatest works. There is no manual entry yet but the routine turned out to be more automated than I expected and easy to work out.

The luminance slider sets the maximum strength of the noise reduction; the luminance detail slider sets how much of that maximum strength is actually used. At a detail setting of 100, no or very little noise reduction is applied. At 5 and with a strength of 20--the settings I used here--the noise reduction was both artifact free and very impressive. But I was clearly losing detail as you can see in comparison with an image with no noise reduction (right)  below

I'd gone too far. Below is a tuned version where I tried to preserve detail.

I kept the luminance setting at 20 but ran the detail slider up 60, added more unsharp mask sharpening and set the gamma to 1.4 to bias the noise reduction towards the shadows. Below is another comparison with the no noise reduction image. Beside being significantly less noisy the tuned image shows as much and perhaps even more detail than the no noise reduction image. Click on the image and go to the original size if you want a better view.

 (note--if you download this build from http://dl.free.fr/getfile.pl?file=/unoeMxPZ RL convolution sharpening is broken, When you process an image in the queue the software grabs all the available memory and crashes when it can not find more.)

To finish off this first look here are the respective noise profiles--05 detail on the top, tuned detail in the middle and no noise reduction on the bottom.

While this is not the released version and there are still some bugs to work out, I'm  very impressed. So congratulations to everyone involved.

Mistakes--Serendipitous

By Madison in Febuary standards last Saturday was balmy. Despite the sunny, mid 40's weather my D7000 and I spent the afternoon indoors at the Olbrich Garden photographing the Children of the Rain Forest.

This month's performers were the Hale O Malo Polynesian Dance Group, Their costumes and dances ranged from a New Zealand  Maori war dance to a Tahitian fertility dance. That invocation of human fertility came with a friendly warning, "Do not attempt this at home."

This image was shot during the pictures-with-the-kids session at the end of the show using my new Tamron 18 -270 mm f3.5-5.6 super zoom set at 18mm wide angle.  The manual exposure settings were f8 and 1/200 sec combined with an auto ISO. That ended up at 6400.

Not an optimum or necessary ISO for this image. It could have been much lower.  At 18mm the lens opens at f 3.5. For a static shot a shutter speed of 1/60 sec would have worked. But I had set up the camera for telephoto dance images, 1/200 sec to give a sense of motion without excessive blur and f8 to sharpen up the lens's slightly soft long end. I didn't spot any massive noise problems when I reviewied the screen shots during the shoot so I went with the default settings.

For post processing I downloaded RAW Therapee's latest 64 bit build, version 4.7.01. It doesn't have the new noise reduction routines yet, but it does have enough new features to  justify a build jump from 4.6 to 4.7.  I'll talk about a few newfeatures in this post, plus some older ones that I haven't used much, starting with the big review images in the file browser.

With dance groups I tend to over shoot.  You know, long continuous bursts hoping to capture that perfect combination of step, twirl and jump. This time I filled my 16 GB main card and moved down to my 8GB secondary card. There I found Miss Thumps-Up posing for Mom's perfect snap combined with an interesting environmental background.

Viewing the preview jpgs full size on my laptop screen while using the number and color coded ratings sped up my selection workflow. I ranked my 'maybe images' during a first pass and then fine tuning the selection set. Definitely a winner.

Judging by the curve of the molding board at the top, this image, shot at 18mm, has serious wide angle lens distortion.  So I tried the fix in the Transform/lensgeometry/distortion tab. My first guess, a -0.5 pincushion setting went way over the top. But it did open up ideas for some creative playing around later.

The for real setting was -0.09.  I pulled up a grid Guide Type to provide straight lines as a reference. At the moment the routine bends the image only one way and creates a curved blank area at the bottom. So I used auto fill to clean up that problem. And for those interested in composition rules the Guide Types include rule of thirds, rule of diagonals and several harmonic mean or, as I used to call them, golden sections.

With the proper settings I created an '18mm tamron' default profile that I can call up to automatically correct my wide angle images.

This fixed I tried out a  new profile that came with RT 4.7-- 'default ISO high'. After I applied the profile  it was  'WOW!! Where has all the ISO 6400 noise gone!!?'

Turns out the RT team had done some interesting things but the real WOW maker was my serendipitous mistake. I'd been working with the jpg not the NEF file, a jpg that had already gone through one pass of the Nikon D7000 excellent in-camera noise reduction routine.

I posted twice last August about how well RAW Therapee works as a jpg editor   My mistake turned up another use- one that is especially helpful to someone who shoots flash-less low light party and people photos.

Here is the most interesting settings in the 'default ISO high' profile along with my modifications.

I left the Impulse Noise Reduction at 80. Luminance comes up as 0 so I set that to 20. Gamma 1.2 has the effect of shifting noise reduction into the shadows where it is needed the most. As usual the effect of all this is to blur detail (bad) while removing noise (good).

The RT folk's ingenious addition is to use 'contrast by detail levels' to recover a surprising amount of the blurred detail. The default values are 0 (finest) =1.00 and the next level '1' =2.00 but at the time I was thinking noise rather than detail;  So I may have gone a little too far fiddling with the sliders and cut out slightly more detail than the noise reduction needed. Either way, the noise cleanup and preserved detail  on this ISO 6400 image is dramatic.

How dramatic. Here are my results. And unlike the Tahitian fertility dance you should definitely try this at home.

The image on the left is from the NEF using the current noise reduction routines. It has the highest noise. It also has the most preserved detail in the girl's hair so I could have pushed its noise reduction harder.  The middle image is the jpg from the D7000 using its default jpg (Sd) and noise reduction (norm) settings. While I wouldn't have called it bad a week ago, now it looks flat and washed out next to the RT image on the right. I lost some detail in the hair but with the noise now so low I can print it up large, perhaps to 11 by 14, without showing objectionable noise. Not shabby for an ISO 6400 image.

Lesson learnt. At the moment there is no advantage working from NEFs using RT. Not that this is a massive bash; the D7000 has one of the best in-camera noise reduction algorithms around. And judging from the comments in the forum, RT should get better soon. See Issue 1052: New luminance NR algorithm  http://code.google.com/p/rawtherapee/issues/detail?id=1052  for up to date details.

With a CPM member's show coming up and several low-light images I'm considering exhibiting, it is time for some serious post processing. Will let you know how everything works out.

PS. The line profiles were taken off the wall over the girl's shoulder.