Sunday, January 27, 2013

A Slow Sunday Sigma DP1 wide post process

Yesterday I did a wide capture of sunrise using a fisheye. It's misty this morning and a bit of a challenge to get an interesting capture. I just sold the DP2 and shipped it last week. I had to remove the gaffer tape from it as the new owner wanted it pristine. I still have the DP1 covered in it to facilitate holding it. Makes a big difference. Anyway the Sigma takes a very detailed photo that's easily post processed. Yesterday I said using the fisheye simplified a really wide shot and it did. But I did crop its top and bottom which negated some of the fisheye effect. So the mission this morning was to do a detailed wide of out back in misty conditions. The following shows the steps. Take two side by side captures (hold the camera steady aimed at one side of what will be wide, capture, then gradually pan over to the other side of the capture and take it. This was taken with a 28mm lens which is why only two were needed. Merge the two captures in Photoshop using File, Automate, Photomerge - then load (browse) in the two captures and tell PS to do the merge. After it's finished, the shot will need to be cropped a bit - it sets you up with the dotted line, just drag the dotted line around the outside of the final photo and then select: Image - Crop. Then File, Save As and tell it you want a JPG not a Photoshop file format. I sharpened it a bit using Topaz Tools, which is an aftermarket add on to PS. You can do something similar using PS itself. Topaz just makes it easier and offers some other ways to making the shot interesting. I then loaded it into Picasa, added the text and the frame and some vignetting (which you can do in PS but Picasa makes it brain dead simple) and it was where I started out to be. I have a couple of useable outputs to keep. I like the final color shot too. Here's are the step by step photographs beginning with the side by side captures from the DP1 (I shot Aperture priority using f4 - it's not very light out) and in RAW and I did run it through Sigma's photo pro to create the two jpegs. I just used standard output for the jpegs. You have three options from Sigma to use to save the jpeg. Anyway here they are (I loaded the final product full size so you'll have to click it to see it all):
left half
right half


Merged, then cropped (didn't have even border after the merge w/o cropping).

Punched up a bit using Topaz. I also then made it B&W before final save (shown below).

Made mono in PS, then added text, borders and vignetting in Picasa (click on it to see the whole shot)

No comments:

Post a Comment