Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

I saw this wall by Shepard Fairey of Obey Giant and the Obama Hope poster fame whlie killing time before the NYC.js meeting last Thursday. Check all the detail in the large size photo

There’s been lots of buzz surrounding Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5 but I’ve seen a bit less about the updates to the photo merge and HDR features. These were the tools I was most interested in taking for a spin when I installed the upgraded applications. If they delivered at making it easy to create High Dynamic Range Photographs, particularly that are more photorealistic then fantastical and candied looking, then it would save me from buying other apps to do that processing or forgetting the genre existed all together.

After watching a video of the new HDR Pro features and some desire to play with new toys firmly seeded I decided to rattle off a few bracketed exposures while in Central Park earlier this week and give the new HDR Pro a spin. I hadn’t gone out intending to shot for HDR and without a tripod the handheld, roughly steadied and quickly taken photos aren’t the best platform to use for an analysis of the application. Still, I have to say I was really happy with the results and the lack of manual input and fighting in the process. Features like image alignment and the new ghost removal features performed better then expected and gave me passable results.

I’ll leave the in depth analysis and comparison between tools to other people, but I thought it would be helpful to others to see a quick rundown of my proces to create the two photographs featured.

Input & Setup

I wasn’t really out expecting to shoot photos for use as HDRs, I was just walking around Central Park between meetings with a Nikon D90 [3 shot bracketing], 10-20mm lens and no tripod. So as the lighting got rough for the wider landscapes I did my best steady shooting and fired off a few image sequences in different parts of the park. Once back in Lightroom I processed the images with a pretty flat baseline setting [killing sharpening, flattening curves & black point, etc.] and then followed the workflow Matt outlined from there to process 2 sets of images — a 3 shot sequence and a 5 shot sequence.

HDR Pro Workflow

After chugging along a little while importing the files I poked around the presets to see what could be done with the HDR app. the range of presets covers all the bases – from way over processed and stylized to far too flat, but none were right for more then a starting point for my style and photos. Picking the photorealistic preset I got to work adjusting sliders and the tone curve. Turning on Ghost Removal and cycling through the images in the sequence made a big difference and help remove some weird artifacts in the fast moving clouds.

Sliders were tweaked until I had a clean and somewhat flat image — for these images raising the Exposure up and then bringing the Highlights back down seemed to result in the most desirable and even overall exposure. After getting a result I liked I closed the HDR Pro dialog and saved the image as a TIFF and switched back to Lightroom to finish processing the photograph.

Finishing back in Lightroom 3 Beta 2

Since I started with unprocessed photos and didn’t take the stylizing of the image very far in Photoshop I was left with a bit of a boring image when I was done. Turning back to Lightroom [or you can use Camera Raw] I made some final tweaks to the image adjusting the saturation, tone curve, sharpening and all the normal processing I’d do to a single image coming off my camera.

Results

While seasoned HDR vets may have other styles of working or a need for additional settings the HDR Pro updates in Photoshop CS5 are enough to make this particular landscape photographer happy and keep me from looking for other options. That’s something I can’t say for the CS4 offerings.

Learn More

• Adobe Photoshop CS5 Learning Center
• HDR – Lightroom, Photoshop CS5 & Photomatix? at Inside Lightroom
• What’s new in Photoshop CS5 at Adobe.com

Computers are built to perform repetitive & tedious tasks. But as users of the computers we’re never exposed to all the tools that are provided to help, and when we are the balance between familiarizing ourselves the given tool and learning to make it do what we need it to do is a larger endever then just doing the thing manually once or twice a day.

Along these lines Apple has long had the ability to script application and operating system tasks via the AppleScript language — powerful, but not the easiest thing to pick up. However, since OS X 10.4 Apple has shipped a free visual workflow tool called Automator that can do some quite powerful things with just a few clicks or drags of a mouse. Creating complex workflows via Automator still has a learning curve and takes some trial and error, but to get it to do some simple things is easy, will take you 5 minutes, and save you time every day.

60 Second Automator Overview

Automator is a visual macro tool that allows you to string together a series actions associated with single tasks in applications like Finder, Keynote, iPhoto, Transmit & Photoshop and create workflows that you can run via the Finder, Services Menu, standalone Application [Droplet] or iCal event item. Each action takes some input [text, URL, selected files], performs a task and then passes the output onto the next item you’ve placed in the chain.

To create a task in Automator for Snow Leopard you first pick the type of workflow you want to build [1], then select different actions from the Library on the left [2], dragging them into the workflow area [3] on the right as you go. Each action can then be dragged up and down in the workflow area and you are able to set options. You’ll note actions can be connected [4] which means the output of an action is passed to the next . An action description, input types and output types are all listed in the action description areas [5].

MacOSXAutomation.com has some useful introductory videos if you want to learn a bit more.

There are many actions that ship with OS X, but you will also find actions that ship with 3rd party apps like the FTP app Transmit or the RSS reader NetNewsWire, and in some cases, like for Adobe Photoshop, other users have built actions for you.

3 Easy Sample Automator Tools

Here are 3 different examples of tools that routinely save me 2 clicks here or 8 clicks there and took almost no time or investment into learning Automator to create.

Add as Keynote Slide

This single action service allows me to right click on an image file in Finder and add to a new “Blank” slide at the end of the Keynote presentation I’m currently working on.

Resize Image for Mail (or Web)

Whether you’re working with photos or web page designs or other image samples you have probably needed to scale down the resolution of an image so it’s not too large to send in an email or post on the web to Facebook or a discussion forum. This little service makes a copy of the selected image files then resizes the duplicate.

Adding the “Add Attachments to Front Message” action at the end of this process will take things even further and automatically add the resized image to the email you’re composing.

Send to FTP Site Folder Action

I have a temp folder on my web server for placing files to pass to clients or to quickly share with friends. Using the Actions that ship with Transmit this Folder Action automatically uploads a copy of the items placed in the folder to my site and then launches a specified web page [using a variable] so that I can grab the link to the newly uploaded file.

For More Automator Information

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what can be done with Automator, but the tip as a great effort to payback ratio. Without getting into scripting or much more complex tasks you can search Apple’s download site or elsewhere the web for 3rd party actions for your favorite apps or combine other automation tools that you already know like Adobe Photoshop Droplets with Automator workflows to see more benefits from automation. Here are a few more sites and articles to dig into:

• Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide by Ben Waldie at Amazon.com
• MacOSXAutomation.com has some basic video and written tutorials
• Apple’s Automator Actions Download Site
• Peachpit Blog’s “Five Automator Services Tips in Five Days” by Ben Waldie: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5
• How To Create Your Own Services Menu Options on Mac by Bakari Chavanu

Download Sample Services

You can download and install the first 2 sample Automator services described above. To install the services, unzip the archive then copy the two files into the ~/Library/Services folder. The services will then be available when you right click an image file in Finder.