Orton Effect in Lightroom 3

In this post, I want to describe how to achieve an Orton Effect (invented by photographer Michael Orton) in Lightroom.

I know that there's an article by Helen Bradley on how to create the effect in Lightroom alone and while the results look very good, I felt that it misses the part where the sharp and the blurred image are "sandwiched" as originally described by Michael Orton.

This is what I am doing with the LR/Enfuse plugin by Timothy Armes. The plugin is donationware so you can decide how much you pay for it (the free version is limited to a tiny output of just 1024px at the long side of the image). I strongly suggest that you have a look at it - as you can see, it can be used for more than just exposure blending of high contrast scenes. ;)

Once you installed LR/Enfuse successfully, the process to create the Orton Effect is actually quite simple, but it requires some experimentation with the level of overexposure and blurriness.

• Create a Virtual Copy of the photo.
• Apply 3-5 graduated filters with sharpness set to -100 all the way over the entire image* (I created a preset for Lightroom that does just that, feel free to right-click and Save-As).
• Apply something like 0.5 to 1 stop of overexposure to the now blurred image.
• In the Library grid view, select both the original and the blurred and overexposed Virtual Copy (click on the original, hold CTRL and click the copy).
• From Lightroom's "File" menu, select "Plug-in Extras" and choose "Blend exposures using LR/Enfuse".
• Leave the settings for LR/Enfuse to it's defaults and turn off the image aligning (on the second tab of LR/Enfuse).
• Wait for the process to finish :) and make final adjustments as you see fit.

Below are three example photos. What you see right away is the final image, and you can switch to the original image and the blurred overlay in the Lightbox view (just click on any of the photos to open it).


"Beauty in the shade" (final image - original - blurred & overexposed overlay.)

The final image has some further adjustments via the Tone Curve (more highlights), some Fill Light to brighten the out of focus background with the delicate and muted green, and Vignette to darken the corners.


"Frosted" (final image - original - blurred & overexposed overlay.)

The frost at the rim of the leaves is quite overexposed here; you might want to be careful with the original and the blurred version, the blurry one is certainly too bright in my example, but without it being bright enough the "glow" of the effect won't be as visible.


"Swans in the Snow" (final image - original - blurred and overexposed overlay.)

This image also has additional sepia toning, slight film-grain and highlight adjustment via the Tone Curve. It was not tack-sharp to begin with (1/60s at dusk with the swans moving had them a bit blurry) but I still liked the image, and I like it even more with the soft glow of the Orton Effect applied.

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*) this requires Lightroom v3 - local adjustments of sharpness in version 3 are very different from version 2 and version 1 of the software.

On Photo Sharing (2)

In the first part of these posts I explained my take on online photo sharing today. There's been good feedback on the Google+ post that I made, and one of the "pro Flickr" points was that it is still a very important site to get your work out there, noted and discovered, licensed, etc.; I can certainly agree with that because I'm also selling some of my photos through the Getty/Flickr connection. I mention this because that's not what I perceive as the primary purpose of photo sharing online. For me, that would still be this oldschool thing of making connections with others, getting feedback on your work, that sort of thing, and I want to talk about it in this second part.

On Google+ there's another and new component that is very very interesting: sharing others work with your readers. A component that is entirely missing on the classic photo sharing sites. I've been lucky to be among the 1st to be able to use Google+ and I always try to multiply the attention that I initially received and still receive, hoping that I can channel some of it to other great photographers that do not get the attention that they deserve. Seriously! There's so many fantastic photographers on Google+ that are in far less circles than I am - I just don't get it. I also prefer personal recommendations from fellow users over the piles of lists of photographers that exist in a abundance by now. :P

Now, when people are asked why they show photos online, many of them reply "to get feedback on my work" and "to learn from others", "to grow as an artist", that sort of thing. Quite natural. My question is... on sites that are all about photography and sharing/presenting/selling art online, especially today, where everyone is trying to attract attention to one's own work, is the feedback really helpful? (needless to say, my experience is that it is not.)

In the most extreme form of the popularity contest at 500px, you can almost read the "now please come look at my photos and vote them up after I left that friendly comment on your photo" request between the lines. Or rather, words. Like "great shot mate". Because that's about it for the average comment, no? Constructive and critical comments? They are rare. I've had better photo discussions back in the heyday of Picasa Web Albums, and heck, even a photo rejected by the editors on SeenBy is better feedback than "nice photo, mate".

Let me get that straight: I'm talking about photo sharing websites, not about social networks in general. I simply expect that another photographer, when he or she leaves a comment on a photo, will tell me what is to like (or not) about my photo. On social networking sites like Google+ and Facebook, it's totally fine that users leave comments to simply express that they like a photo. Not everyone is a photographer.

I think that social media holds a vast potential for discussing photos and getting good feedback because we're able to connect to "normal" people that simply enjoy looking at good photography, and not just other photographers. The definition of what is "good photography" alone is different, to start with. This of course yields the danger to tailor the content one shares to maximum efficiency, attention-wise. The internet is full of "popular" photos because of that (I'll write more about that in the 3rd part).

There's a problem with critical feedback on photos of course: how do you know it's welcome and wanted? And as a photographer, how do you express that you want it? And how do you deal with it?

A user on Google+ recently asked whether "the pro's" would be annoyed by amateurs leaving critical feedback on their photos. That's a big one for me. I've left (unasked, and apparently unwanted;) critical feedback on some "pro" glamor photographer, and what he did was to delete my comment - and block me. From my point of view... lesson learned. But still, he offered no word of explanation like "sorry pal, this is my public G+ portfolio" or whatever. By doing that, he diminished himself to ridicule. Not "pro" at all. Even if I was wrong with my critical comment, there would have been a chance to explain his style and technique in a professional and not condescending way.

My take on it is: if you want feedback, explicitly ask for it. And if you want to leave critical feedback and aren't sure, ask if it's welcome first.

In part 3 I'll write about the limited angle of view on photography "as a whole" that online photo sharing sites and the popularity concept of internet photo sharing suffer from.

On Photo Sharing (1)

In these posts (this is the first part), I want to put down my thoughts on online photo sharing of the past couple of days and weeks after joining Google+, and the past couple of months after joining and then mostly abandoning 500px, and all that.

A couple of months ago, I was all enthusiastic about 500px and recommended others to meet Shuwen and me there. I'm sorry about that. I have to admit that my enthusiasm was curbed more or less quickly after realizing that it is necessary to spend a lot of time on the site socializing with others, hoping to draw enough attention to my photos so that they would be voted up by fellow photographers, so that they would maybe end up at the top of the "Popular" section on the site.

Looking at that behavior now I can't help but say: oh boy, that was stupid! I mean... what exactly do I gain from being at the top of the Popular section at 500px? From my point of view, it's safe to say: almost nothing. I explained what's really going on with the voting system on 500px already so there's no need to go into great details for that.*

And I don't regret buying the "Awesome" option, because it allowed me to quickly and easily create a good looking Portfolio page. [however, my enthusiasm for that aspect of 500px was curbed too when I recently realized that almost three months had passed already after Oleg Gutsol's promise that the FotoMoto store would be enabled in the portfolios "in the nearest future". Well... given the happenings around the Dislike button, I'm tempted to say that they're still living in the past, so waiting for the "nearest future" could take some more time. ;-) Just a side note.]

Back to online photo sharing in general.

Photographer of internet fame Thomas Hawk has made the claim that "Flickr is dead" in one of his latest blog posts. I go further than that. I say that any kind of site specialized on photo sharing is dead - dead for you, once you made the same realization that I made. Read on to find out what I mean.

Night Skies and Time Lapses

I think we all have a photography-list of things to do and try. After long exposures (see my previous post here), making photos of the night sky and and creating a time lapse movie was on mine for a while now, and with the longer daylight hours of summer it's rather comfortable to pursue these now: have dinner at home, drive out in the evening, find a good location while there's still some daylight left, and then spend a couple of hours outside, in the night.

My location for the photos below was the Laguna Mountains in San Diego county - at an elevation of something like 1600m to 2000m the haze in the atmosphere is less of an issue, and the spot is remote enough so that there's not that much light pollution from civilization. The nights out there were warm and pleasant and I found a nice and dark spot above the Big Laguna meadows (for the locals: where the Big Laguna Trail connects the Noble Canyon and Sunset Trail).


The Milky Way above Laguna Meadows (NIKON D700, 15s @ ISO 3200; f/4, 16 mm (in 35mm)

I found that these stills are actually fairly easy. I used a wide angle lens because I wanted to have a lot of sky in the frame. Using a wide angle lens also has the advantage that exposure times of 15, maybe 20 seconds are relatively safe (no motion blur of the stars will occur yet).

Addendum: just after I posted the initial version of this article, a similar discussion came up on Google+ and it included a "600 rule" for the exposure time. Basically, it says that 600 divided by your focal length is the maximum time you can expose without getting motion blur of the stars. For a 50mm lens, this would be 600/50 = 12 seconds. From my personal experience, that's too long. I have some 10 seconds exposures made with a 50mm lens and they already show motion blur. I'd make that a "400 rule" to be absolutely safe.

Also, remember the crop factor of your camera when you use that rule. With a 50mm on a DX sensor Nikon, it'll be like "600/(50*1.5)" = 8 seconds. (or with the "safe" approach of a "400 rule", just 5.3 seconds)

The real problem is of course capturing enough light within the maximum exposure time frame - and my f/4 wide angle zoom (the 16-35mm VR Nikkor) is probably a bit slow for that. The above photo was made while there was still some light left in the sky; for subsequent shots I had to raise the ISO to 6400, which of course introduces quite some amount of noise in the darker areas. Nikon's 14-24mm/2.8 (for full frame) or Tokina's 11-16mm/2.8 (for crop sensors) wide angle zooms are better lenses for that purpose. A 24mm/1.4 prime on a full frame camera of course will be fantastic, giving another 2 stops advantage - it comes at a price of course. ;)

With a single photo at a high sensitivity and relatively long exposure time, hot pixels are not that much of a problem, but things became quite different when I went for interval shooting to create a time lapse two nights later. Before I go into details, here's the resulting movie - please "click through" to the Vimeo site, click on "HD", switch to full screen, and depending on your screen size, turn the "scaling" option on or off:



Jeff Sullivan has just posted a nice general sum-up of creating time lapse movies on his blog so I just put down my observations from the night-sky time lapse making here.

1. It's important to know where exactly the "infinity" focus is for the lens. As I already mentioned in my long-exposures post, most lenses focus "beyond infinity" (Buzz Lightyear would like it, I guess) - which will turn the stars from bright little spots into tiny little discs. Looks bad, not advisable. I also want to stress that it's important to check the focus twice - once when you set up the camera and frame the scene, and again just before you start the interval mode. It could happen that you accidentally touch the focus ring, and bam. I'm just saying. :P And bring a flashlight to check the distance scale of your lens in the dark.
2. Operating mode of the camera. This should be manual for everything once you're done setting up the camera. This includes exposure (time, aperture, ISO) and focus as well as the White Balance. It's absolutely crucial to turn auto white balance OFF and set it manually. For a nice cool blue of the night sky, it's advisable to set it to Tungsten, or Fluorescent, or somewhere in between (less of a problem when using raw data, but with the amount of data to expect, I chose JPEG - see below.)
3. Make sure the battery is really fully charged, or even better, use an additional battery grip. A 2 hour interval with 5 photos per minute drained my what-I-thought-pretty-full (yes, my bad) battery completely. At that time, clouds had moved in on the scene so it was not too bad as I had to end the session anyway, but for really long time lapses it will be a show stopper - there's just no way to swap the battery without changing the framing ever so lightly when the camera is on the tripod. Had I used long exposure noise reduction (see below) the battery would have been drained even faster I think.
4. File format. I went for medium-sized JPEG files instead of raw data. After all, I wanted to create a relatively low-res movie out of the files. A medium-size JPEG of the D700 is still 6 megapixels (something like 3000x2000), in other words almost twice as high a vertical resolution as required for a "full HD" (1080) movie.
5. The interval time. From a TV documentary I had remembered that the guy was making one photo every 12 seconds. With my relatively slow wide angle lens, that meant I could make a 10 second exposure at ISO 6400 - but couldn't use the long exposure noise reduction then. It turned out that one image every 12 seconds is too much, anyway. If I'd ever do that again, I'd probably go for one image every 20 seconds. Naturally, a long time-lapse movie will take even longer to create that way. On the other hand... the "majestic slow movement" of the night sky (the movie above runs at 20 frames per second) is a pretty nice feat of 5 images per minute.
6. my tight interval timing and the lack of long exposure noise reduction of course caused a lot of hot pixels to appear. For the first time, I found out what the "sync" feature of Lightroom's Develop module is good for. :) I simply went to the last image of the sequence, removed all the hot pixels, and synced the setting over the entire sequence. In the above video, I have removed the red and white hot pixels. If you look closely, you'll still see quite some blue hot pixels (those are pretty hard to spot because they don't stand out so much in the stills).
7. One extremely annoying problem that I ran into where the slightly varying exposure times even while using the lens wide open. Every now and then, a couple of photos in the sequence would be about 1/3 of a stop darker than it's neighbors. Everything was set to manual, so I have no explanation what might be causing that. Jeff's article that I linked above mentions a plugin for Virtual Dub that can average the exposures. I created my time lapse movie with Google's free Picasa (the "movie presentation" feature has a time-lapse mode that can create movies from 6 frames per second all the way up to 30 frames per second).

Conclusion. It's not something I'll want to do repeatedly. Working with the large sequence of photos, adjusting them, even with syncing settings in Lightroom, creating the movie... it's rather time-consuming, and let's be honest: there's folks out there who make absolutely brilliant time-lapse movies, there's no need for me to waste my time and try to play in that league. ;)

One interesting final bit: with the free software "StarStax" it's possible to stack a sequence of images, creating a star trail photo from the stills of the time lapse movie. Here's what it looks like, with all the ugliness of passing airplanes combined:

In the end... was it worth it? Oh yes. Being out in the dark at a location with little to no light pollution is an amazing experience all by itself. While the camera clicked along I was lying in grass, my head resting on my backpack, and simply gazed at the stars. After a while, the eyes adapt to the darkness, and it's quite surprising how bright a moonless but clear night sky can be.