My GPS Camera Phone

One of the Christmas gifts to the family was a pair of binoculars for each of us. We intend to use them on our trips to Paynes Prairie and other nature spots around town. We took them to a recent trip to the park to look at the birds and squirrels in the pine trees, when I was suddenly struck by the idea of shooting through them.

The process is simple. Point binoculars at subject. Focus on subject. Line up camera phone lens with either side of the binoculars and then shoot. The results are interesting and even a bit voyeuristic, but with a little more experimenting, I might be able to pull something worthwhile together. In the meantime, here’s a sample of the results.

Yesterday, I posted a shot of the moon rising into a deep blue evening sky. It was reminiscent of some NASA photos I’ve seen where the blue sky turns to interstellar black. Now I’m here to tell you that what I posted was only part of the story – in other words, it really wasn’t a good photo at all. However, the magic of Photoshop allows you to make something out of nothing.

The source image was a whole lot more than a sky and moon. In fact, it was a parking lot (with a sky and moon):

Though I took the photo because I thought the sky was nice, the rest of it could stand to be eliminated. So that’s what I did. I selected a crop area that cut out everything that wasn’t sky, while still giving a decent placement to the moon:

The problem we have now is the noise generated by a low-quality, 2 mega-pixel camera phone. The file is saved as a JPG with high compression (to save space, I presume), which affects the overall quality of the photo. High compression produces poor color gradients and a pixellated look, so we need to eliminate this with a photo editing tool. Enter Photoshop magic.

As I posted recently, there’s a simple filter to smooth out gradients and reduce noise. This filter is appropriately named “Reduce Noise…” and can be found in the “Filter” menu under “Noise.” For this particular noise reduction, the settings I used were as follows:

• Strength: 10
• Preserve details: 0%
• Reduce color noise: 100%
• Sharpen details: 0%
• Remove JPEG artifact: checked

By using extreme settings, the color should smooth out nicely. You wouldn’t normally do this, but there’s no detail to preserve and we want the best smoothing possible before adjusting the levels. NOTE: Before applying the reduce noise filter, duplicate the background layer and switch off the new duplicate layer. You’ll need it later. Here’s the image with noise reduction applied:

Once the noise is worked out, we’ll add an adjustment layer to control the levels by going to “Layer->New adjustment layer->Levels…” Be sure that this layer is at the top. Adjust the settings to your liking. In my case, the blue becomes much more blue and the dark areas become almost black. Almost there:

Now wait, there was a moon in this image. What good is a noise reduction filter if it is going to blur everything out? Good question.

Remember that duplicate layer? Turn it on then outline the moon using the polygonal lasso or whatever you’re comfortable using. You will notice that the noise reduction didn’t apply to this layer because it wasn’t selected at the time, which means the moon is still visible. Once outlined, right-click (CMD-click in OS X) on the selection and the choose “Layer via copy.” Now the moon is resting on its own layer, hopefully above the noise reduced layer. You will know this immediately because the moon will suddenly be visible. Add a watermark and you’ve got a finished product:

Adjusting levels, saturation and other settings in Photoshop can have a dramatic effect on the mood of an image. Take the image below, for example. What you see is a standard landscape photo of Paynes Prairie in late fall. The lush greenery is becoming dying brownery, accented with patches of yellow flowers. The sky is overcast with no defined cloud patterns. Overall, a pretty plain photo, aside from being shot through a fence. Nice, but plain.

I like Paynes Prairie, though, and I want to save this photo somehow. Photoshop holds the key. It holds many keys, but I’m going to use only a few this time around. Via the magic and awesomeness of adjustment layers, I’ll take the ordinary photo above and turn it into something moody and dark. The same could be done to make it happy and light, but I’m going in the other direction (which some might even call drab and plain!). The beauty of using adjustment layers is that you alter the photo’s appearance without altering the original photographic layer.

Open the photo in Photoshop and crop it to your liking. Using this cropped selection, add an adjustment layer to take out most of the color – in this case, everything except yellow – by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Hue/Saturation.” Take all colors down via the Saturation slider to their lowest value, then increase the yellow slider a bit to make the flowers pop more. You should have a semi-desaturated image at this point.

Next, add another adjustment layer for level adjustment by going to “Layer->New Adjustment Layer->Curves…” (or adding a Levels… layer). Adjust the levels to your liking. There are endless possibilities with this setting, just like the saturation layer, so don’t be afriad to play around with multiple variations. It comes down to personal preference.

To finish this off, we want to bring those clouds up a bit more, since there’s really no definition in the gray, overcast sky. This can be easily done with the burn tool. Make sure to burn the highlights, midtones and shadows in order to achieve maximum effect.

Now sit back and enjoy your creation!

High file compression is a given in the field camera phone photography, but I had not discovered a way to counter this efficiently, instead trying to manually reduce it through lighting and shot angles. Well thanks to the tutorial, “Reduce Noise in Photoshop CS3,” by Mike Rodriguez, I discovered a goldmine in the world of Photoshop.

The image above was taken some time ago (during Negative Week in August 2008), but it didn’t make the cut because of massive amounts of noise in the darker colored areas. Well, here it is now, cleaned up and much better for it. All this photo needed was a good dose of the “Reduce Noise” filter, a standard filter in the “Filter->Noise…” menu. I think I never noticed it because “Noise” implies making it, not taking it away. Now I know.

Give it a try and you’ll see how incredible this filter is. After viewing Mike’s tutorial, be sure to check out the rest of the detailed tutorials on the Layers Magazine site. They’re thorough, easy-to-follow and worth a look.

I’m fairly certain that the thought of shooting photos at night is rarely given consideration by the average photographer, who rightfully expects a bad exposure. I am supremely confident, however, that the idea of shooting at night with a camera phone is laughable, causing the photographer many years of humiliation and painful, underexposed memories.

In an attempt to test this theory of laughability, I took a series of photos in a dark parking lot illuminated only by a pair of floodlights and a nearby streetlight. While many of the photos turned out awful, some of them were surprising, given the poor lighting conditions.

Here’s six tips I picked out from my nighttime experience that you might find useful. The last two are editing tips, but I think they’re valid points.

Tip 1: LED flashes are useless.

Personally, I’m partial to photography using natural light, but that’s probably because I don’t know how to effectively use a flash. However, calling a tiny LED light next to the camera lens a “flash” is ridiculous and bit of an overstatement. You would probably have better results using a flashlight. A little trial and error will give you an idea of what dark conditions work best for your phone.

Tip 2: Don’t move.

This is a no-brainer, but seriously, don’t move. Try to position the shot so you have something solid to brace yourself against, like a wall or a tree. Trying to freehand a night shot (or any low-light shot) is hard enough – doing it with a camera phone is nearly impossible.

Tip 3: Avoid extreme light/dark situations.

If your camera phone isn’t that great, chances are good that two extremes of light will confound it to no end. The shot becomes under or over exposed, depending on how the camera feels at that moment. Instead, try to go with a middle ground to achieve decent results. (Note: In my experience, this problem is not nearly as bad in the daytime.)

Tip 4: Even in darkness, there are shadows.

Work with as much as the night is willing to give you. In many cases, there will be a light source somewhere, which means that shadows will probably be present. Use them to your advantage. Shadows add mystique any photo, but night shadows are even more mysterious.

Tip 5: Don’t auto correct in Photoshop.

Once you get the photos into your favorite editing software (Photoshop in my case), don’t reach for the “Auto Levels” adjustment. If you do, Photoshop will compensate way too much, thinking the photo is underexposed. Instead, take it into manual and try various level adjustments yourself until you find a happy medium. You took the photo at night for a reason, so don’t let Photoshop try to make it daytime.

Tip 6: Desaturate.

Since most of the color will be lost with a night shot, you might find it easier to manipulate the photo after desaturating it or changing the color mode to grayscale. Doing this turns the editing job into a simpler brightness/contrast edit and eliminates any poorly resolved color in the photo. We are talking about a camera phone, so simplifying the editing process makes for a better final product.

I’m speaking from a 2 mega-pixel camera perspective, so if you’ve got a better camera phone, try some night photos and let me know how they turn out. Now get out there and shoot!

Yesterday’s Wordless Wednesday featured an abstract negative image created with two other images, both negative to fit the theme. This technique is nothing new on this blog, but it’s fun and a great way to produce something completely different than the original images. Today, I’ll show you how easy it is to make a cool abstract of your own.

The source images were nothing special, but the negative effect gave them an interesting quality and feel. Additionally, they were two totally different things. One is the light diffuser in the elevator I take to my office every day:

and the other is a shot of a cool poster I got in the mail from Veer (which hangs on the wall behind my desk):

Combining these two images works for me because the grid pattern combines nicely with the graphic design of the poster. As Fred pointed out in the comments, it looked like a glass-brick wall. The white on the edge of the diffuser also gave me the idea of a fading edge without having to use any Photoshop tools. Now that the idea is there, let’s get to putting the two images together.

Step 1: Open the source images in the photo editing tool of your choice. I used Photoshop CS2 for this process.

Step 2: Drag the poster layer over to the diffuser image. Click and hold the poster image, drag it over to the diffuser image and then release. This should create a new layer in the diffuser image, hopefully above the background layer. If the new poster layer ends up below the diffuser layer for some reason, move it up above the diffuser layer.

Step 3: Close the poster image. You won’t be needing it anymore.

Step 4: Change the blending mode on the poster layer to Lighten. This will allow the diffuser layer below to come through.

Step 5: Duplicate the background layer and move it above the poster layer. Now you’ve got an image of the diffuser again, with none of the underlying layers showing through. At this point, the layer order should be diffuser, poster, diffuser.

Step 6: With the top layer selected, go to the Edit menu, then Transform and Rotate 180°. Now you’ve got the same image but flipped over. Let’s get the bottom layers to shine through.

Step 7: With the top layer still selected, change the blending mode to Screen. The bottom layers should now be visible, blended nicely with the top layer. Almost done.

Step 8: Rotate and crop the image. To rotate the entire canvas, go to the Image menu, select Rotate Canvas, then 90° CCW. Once rotated, crop the image with the crop tool to eliminate the squareness it now has due to the white sides. I also wanted to frame the word “fancy” in the middle of the image, so the crop I chose eliminated some of the top and bottom noise, focusing more on the center. The light edges lead the eye to the center more, now that the height has been taken down through cropping.

Step 9: Save the image. To save an optimized image for the web, select the file menu, then Save for Web. Personally, I like to save at about 60-90 quality, depending on the file size and quality. It’s up to you.

Step 10: Sit back and enjoy your new image!

Dan posted a negative image of a moth on his blog. You should go check it out. But will he try blending two images together? I guess we’ll have to wait. Until then, give it a shot yourself and post a link to your image in the comments.

First, thank you to all of my visitors yesterday, especially those of you who commented. I’m enjoying posting an abstract image followed up by a how-to post, so if you want to be sure not to miss anything, please subscribe to my RSS feed (really, it only takes a second!).

There were some great guesses as to how I captured this photo, ranging from colored cellophane to on-board photo filters, but the magic was performed by Photoshop CS2 and a little extra something. I actually posted two photos yesterday. They just happened to be one on top of the other.

Some time ago, I posted an image using a similar technique but I used nearly identical source images. This time around, I used two completely different images – one of a cloudy sky and another close-in shot of a painting (taken by my daughter, hence the partial photo credit). Here’s how it works.

In Photoshop, open two photos and make them equal sizes. It works best to have more contrast between the photos, but I’m sure it will work with anything. Then drag one layer on to the other image. In this case, I dragged the clouds over to the painting image. This should create another layer in that image. Close the image that you just dragged from.

I left the bottom layer (the painting) set to 100% opacity and kept the blending mode at normal. (The layer blending mode selector can be found on the layers palette next to the opacity setting.) The top layer of clouds is obviously going to block out the bottom layer, so we need to make it more see-through. Here’s where I adjusted the opacity to 75% and then changed the layer blending mode to luminosity. And that’s it.

Try experimenting with blending modes and opacity percentages in general and you’ll see a lot of interesting things happen. Just remember that you probably won’t see anything exciting happen with a single layer. Add another image or text layer and then adjust the blending mode of the top layer. Some modes will lighten, some will darken and some will cause a ghosting effect. Any way you slice it, blending modes are worth a look and can amplify the effect of your images significantly.