Comparison Report

Comparing Gold Fibre and Duo Lustre was not without its problems. Scanning in the Gold Fibre silk became problematic as we kept getting holes in the profile. It was however due to user error, and the problem was resolved to an acceptable standard.

Visually you can see the Gold silk is lot lower in contrast than the Duo Lustre. It can't cope with vivid colours and loses a lot of micro contrast in black and white areas. This is because the paper is not designed to encompass a wide gamut but more of a style one might wish to use. It possess' a colour to its matte finish which effects the whites and blacks by slightly discoloring them and flattening them out. Though the purpose of this task was to compare the two profiles and papers it seems unfair to pin Gold Fibre against Duo Lustre as they are two very different papers. None the less we can see from the overlayed profiles below and the visual difference in the prints that Duo Lustre technically outperforms Gold Fibre.

However unless you are printing a particular subject such as a landscape or high composite image there is no reason you shouldn't consider Gold Fibre, it would work very nicely with portraits and has a style that would appeal to many. For me it is perhaps a little too coloured. After working in the black and white darkroom I came to really love clean white paper and achieving the richness in the blacks. For this reason when I print digitally I still prefer my whites to be whites and would therefore not use this paper.

Lustre Duo Report

Below is the comparison with the Smooth Lustre Duo and Adobe RGB (1998). Again Adobe has the way more gamut as expected, but how do the two papers compare?

Gold Fibre Silk Report

Below is the comparison between Adobe RGB 1998 and Gold Fibre Silk. Clearly Adobe has the edge in terms of gamut.

Printer Calibration

HDR Submission

Below are my HDR source image and final result. Shooting conditions were early morning so had a long shutter speed with a back lit subject. Use of a polarizer increased the shutter speed but eliminated the reflections in the water and saturated the sky. A subtle HDR however a successful one technically.

Calibration Report

Panorama Submission

 Panorama

This panorama was taken in Leura up in the blue mountains. Shot at 200mm the vertical stitch was a favorite of mine across three morning shoots. I choose to have the aesthetic quite underexposed because the feel of the image suited it. I stitched the image in photoshop after processing in Camera Raw. It was stitched using auto align and auto blend because both photomerge and ptgui refused to stitch the image. PTGUI had issues with the repetitious trees and soft graduated sky. Photomerge i have always had troubles with.

After the image was stitched i created  +1 and -1 exposure jpgs and used photomatix to extract some detail from the trees. Overall i am happy with the image, it is an example of straight landscape photography but has an abstract element due to the soft lines and colours. I believe the image would print well as it has a high megapixel count and it isn't over processed.

 Below are the source files.

Cinemagraph Presentation

Cinemagraph

I decided to do a Cinemagraph for my presentation in Tech 3. A cinemagraph is made from a clip or short movie and has its heritage in internet gifs, It was created by one Jaimie Beck. A still is extracted from the movie while a particular part of the clip continues on loop. At first as I assumed it would be a fairly easy exercise i assigned myself the task of creating a moving clip solely from a still image. However as it turn out making a cinemagraph is very time consuming and I only found a few shortcuts after making my first.


Here are some great examples of cinemagraphs.

Clip from1951Darnell user with link:
 http://youtu.be/U9KiIjyCTpI

To create a Cinemagraph I had to locate several tutorials and follow their instructions. I also looked up some youtube videos, though the ones featured on youtube did not have any of the shortcuts and featured long tedious steps I knew where not necessary for final output. Below are the links to the tutorials i both used and reference

http://blog.spoongraphics.co.uk/tutorials/how-to-make-a-cool-cinemagraph-image-in-photoshop

http://www.tested.com/tech/2253-how-to-make-your-own-cinemagraphs-a-new-take-on-gifs/

http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-russell-brown-show/cinemagraphs/

http://cinemagraphs.com/

I used the above video to troubleshoot against the websites.

What NOT TO DO. Way too long and very tedious. 

My Cinemagraph

http://youtu.be/Gy_1_bk2-7w

Panorama

Panorama - It can fail be showing a bunch of nothingness or succeed by expanding interest in the image. A successful panorama demands a few key techniques.

• Panorama Head - For easy of stitching and reduces parallax error
• Interesting compositon - I found it more pleasing to stick to 'straight' landscape for my panoramas.
• Superlative Stitching - Failure here can ruin the image.
• Straight horizon - In a lot of pano's featuring a horizon is it imperative it stays straight and undistorted. 

Below are a few examples of the pano's I completed before submission, all were merged with photoshops photomerge. now to choose...

Night Pano. A bit too much sky in my opinion, a successful stitch and interesting buildings though

Middle of the day was a bad time to shoot bit the composition and subject matter are good in this one.

This is an example of a lot of boring space. It was also HDR'd and had potential, just incorrect composition

One of my favourites for colour and the composition, works in an abstract way.

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Below are my source files for the chosen panorama submission.

HDR Choices.

The HDR realm is much like a hole, a place you can get stuck for a very long time. I have been experimenting with HDR for quiet a long time using mostly photoshops HDR Pro. It has developed over the years but still remains in my opinion one of the worst ways to create a HDR. Perhaps i should rephrase. HDR Pro in photoshop has never had a very powerful deghost tool. If any clouds move, which they often do, you can be left with horrible artifacts you have to clone out later. I do not know if these problems were fixed in cs6 but my cs5 definitely displays them. I also experience severe darkening of my exposures. I was not impressed with its engine.

For this assignment i was hoping to get my hands on a new wide angled lens for my new camera body and photomatix. I had used the trial version of photomatix and found it to be superlative. As for the new lens, HDR's can look very striking when a lot of sky and a prominent foreground dominate the image. As i sold my old crop sensore wide angle lens and crop sensor body i was left with little choice to shoot this assignment. Unfortunately my lens didn't arrive on time and photomatix proved hard to get (for a student). So i used the technique we were shown in class using layers in conjunction with HDR Pro. Below are a few of my results.

Shot at about 200mm this is 7 exposures. The composition isn't great on this one but the colours are nice while not feeling overcooked. This was done completely manually in photoshop using layers. A very long process.

Looks like a pano but its just a HDR with the bottom and top cropped for more interesting compositions. It's subtle and works as per the brief, just have to get another persons opinion.

Another 7 exposure image. This one i used HDR pro for the sky and manually masked in the foreground. I like this image, it is a far off subject so the long tele focal length works and it was a great moment with the weather. David Flannigan suggested i amp up the colours a bit more but was still impressed with the overall subtleness of the hdr effect.

Using layer in photoshop this image took a very long time to create. Many ghosting issues and shooting into the sun made things very difficult. However i wanted the tree and the web in the image so was left with no choice. 

Yet another tele image (already explained) this image was don mainly using HDR Pro with a few tweaks in photoshop to get the whites looking nice. More about line and shape I do like the simplicity of this image.

I am happy with how this image turned out. Colours are vibrant without being in your face. Detail is good and a fairly nice composition. A combination of HDR Pro and layers was used to achieve total tonal range.

I hope to gain a little more technique with newer software as well as some advice on which image is the strongest to submit. Had fun doing this assignment!

Final Screen Calibration

This calibration was done at the correct white point of d65. I had to redo it five times because it kept coming up with an LUT error. However after double and triple checking i was doing the right thing and all the correct boxes were checked or unchecked, I just relaunched the program and it seemed to work.
The screen didn't look any different from d75 however the line graph indicates the blacks or shadows are slightly off with the new calibration. I will check to see if it needs to be redone, running into so many technical issues must be part of screen calibrating, a tedious part of workflow.

Screen Calibration Laptop

This calibrator (Display Pro by Xrite) actually worked on my laptop, here are some screen grabs, found the software very easy to use and much easier than my first attempt. I intend on redoing my laptop as well and setting the white point to native to see the results.

Screen Calibration

Seem to have had a lot more success with the EIZO than my mac with the screen calibrator. Here are the screen shots below.
The white point was set to d75 as per the elearn link. ill be sure to redo this with d65 for a better result.