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The famous French Aerobatic Team - the Patrouil de France - were in Malaysia last weekend. They thrilled the crowds with their aerobatic flying skills. Unfortunately it was a very hazy day. The cloud base was quite low and the Team couldn't show the full range of their act. Nevertheless many people had a wonderful time although the weather was not kind to photographers. I shot quite a few lemons but managed managed to save a few.
Here is a digitally panned picture of one of the Alphajets landing, click the image for a bigger size photo.
I have a bit of time so I thought why not share my workflow for creating a digital pan with fellow POTY members - especially the newbies to Photoshop. This is a very straight forward technique. To the PS experts out there I say, "Come on. Share your image processing secrets. Let's all enjoy the pleasures of photography in all its various shades.."
This is the start image. Dull, boring and ordinary. Shot in RAW with a Canon 10D and the Image Stabilizer equipped EF100-400 f/4.5-5.6L, at f/5.6, shutter 1/500 sec, focal length 400mm, and ISO 200.
I wanted to give it a bit of a lift. Let me talk you through how I created my Digital Pan. Double Clicking on the image in PS file browser brings out Photoshop's powerful RAW processor. Here's what it looks like:-
Shooting in RAW allows you to conveniently change the white balance and colour temperature to whatever you like, irrespective of what you chose during the shooting stage. You do this by clicking the down arrow in the White Balance window, and selecting any of the standard presets of Daylight, Cloudy, Flourescent, Tungsten, etc.
Or you can choose Custom and adjust the Colour Temperature and Tint to any combination you like. Other sliders allow you to vary the Exposure, Shadows, Brightness, Contrast and Saturation. Complete flexibility to change things even after you've shot the image. With RAW you need only to ensure that your image is properly focused and framed at the instant of shooting the picture. You can change everything else in the computer. Such is the advantage and flexibility of RAW that these days, I shoot only in RAW.
Having said that however, I have to also say that it is best to get your in-camera picture to be as near perfect as possible. Then you dont have to do so much post processing. If you are a pro, time is money, and the pro will always try to get his picture to be perfect right out of the camera. He wants to avoid post processing and spend time only to shoot more pictures for more money. To that extent, I know many proes who shoot only in JPG. News photographers for example, where speed is the over riding issue and resolution need not be pixel perfect for newsprint printing...
Hobbyists like me however, with all the time in the world, can afford to be a little bit relaxed and rely on post processing to rescue my pictures. I acknowledge however that its always better to strive for perfection straight in the camera.
You need to experiment and play with those sliders to get the combination you prefer. Other Tabs in the RAW processor window allow you to adjust the Sharpness, to reduce color noise and to smoothen Luminence. I wont explain what they do. Best that you try them out yourself to see the effects. Click on any of the tabs and play with them to see what they do.
Once you've adjusted the image to your personal preference within the RAW processor, clicking on OK will place the image in the PS workspace which will allow you to further tweak the image if you need to. If not, you can simply save it in a format that you prefer. Within PS, you can crop the image and fine tune colours using various Image Adjustment PS tools. You can add or remove stuff and do all sorts of things. When tweaking an image, I always work on adjustment layers so that the original image is not permanently changed.
Here is the cropped and tweaked image ready for transformation into a panned shot.
The next step is to extract the aeroplane and to place it on its own layer. There are several ways to do it.
The quick and dirty way is to use the Lasso tool to roughly draw an outline around the plane. You can also use the pen tool to do the selection. Or you could use the Extract Filter. With the marching ants visible around the plane you hit Ctrl+C to copy the selection, and Ctrl+V to paste the selection on its own layer above the background layer. You then use the eraser tool to erase the unwanted parts around the plane using progressively smaller and softer brushes until you get a clean extracted image of the plane on its own transparent layer.
Laborious work but who says there is pleasure without pain? Here is my rough lasso of the plane.
It is easier to work in PS if you have a Wacom Pen and Tablet. I use the Wacom Intuos 2 shown below. Wacom makes various sizes at various prices. The grand-daddy of their range is a touch sensitive LCD screen on which you can directly edit an image. Last I checked it cost about US$3500. The Intuos 2 Tablet below at about US$400 is good enough for me.
After lassoing the plane and while it is on its own layer, you use the eraser to delete away the unwanted parts. You could also use a mask with black as the colour to brush out the unwanted parts, and white to brush back in those parts you have accidentally erased. That is a more elegant method.
And here is the extracted image of the plane on its own layer.
Once you've got the plane on its own layer, tweak the colours a bit with the image adjustment tools for curves or levels, colour balance, brightness, saturation, contrast, etc. Then sharpen it a little by applying the Unsharp Mask filter to it. When you are happy with the extracted plane, temporarily switch off the visibility of the plane layer. You are now ready to create the motion blurred layer.
To do this, make a copy of the background layer and then apply Filter/Blur/Motion Blur to background layer copy. You can move the slider to the right to get more blur and to the left to lessen it. Set the angle to zero. I use a value of 35 pixels for the distance. Here's what the motion blurred layer looks like. Remember, this layer is below your cut out of the plane, which you have temporarily made invisible..
If you now switch on the visibility of your plane cut out, this is what you'll get - a perfect digitally pan blurred picture of a plane landing. You probably need to do a bit of work to clone out the motion blurred parts in front of the plane. Nothing too complicated there. Easy, and here is my Digitally Panned Image!
I shot a few other pictures and all were processed to enhance the colours on a very dull day. Here they are, for the aeronautically inclined amongst you....
For more pictures, visit MY WEBSITE ...
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