Recipe for great vacation photos

What makes a great vacation photo?

What makes a photograph so great it will stand out of the crowd? If you’re looking for the answer here, I must disappoint you – I don’t know. No one knows. Best I can do is to lead into the right direction. Everyone is able to recognize a great photo when they see it, but it´s impossible to make a “recipe” from it. What one can do is to follow some guidelines and common denominators which are common for great photos, which in turn will raise the possibility to catch a great picture.

Great picture today means different things today what it did for 50 years ago, there’s many reasons for it. Most of the old “iconic” photos are iconic because they have a notable documentary value. Only few people – mostly press photographers had cameras back then and it was a stroke of luck to be in the right spot at the right time. The aesthetical value wasn’t crucial. Only thing that mattered was if you could document the ongoing situation and put a stamp in the history.

Nowadays everyone is carrying a camera and there’s no know way a “professional” photographer will be the first one on the spot to witness the soon to be historical event. This is the reason why photojournalism is dead, well not dead but it´s not an exclusivity for the real photographers anymore.

In the era of film photography everything was harder. The amount of film was limited, you didn’t see the result right away and if you wanted to be sure that your picture was good you were forced to shoot multiple pictures from the same scene, which in turn limited the film supply even more. Film was slow and colors were correct only in daylight. When the film was developed your changes to “photoshop” it further was very limited.

Nowadays everything is different. You can take as many pictures you like and the results will be visible instantly. If you don’t like the results you can make magical thing in the post processing.

The growth in the number of photos taken each year is exponential. 90% of all photos are taken with a smartphone. 99.99 % of all taken photos are crap. The ratio of crappy/good photos have also grown exponentially and that’s sensible – why bother if it´s free. Most of the snaps wasn’t meant to be good in the first place. With the exception of documentary photography, the same rule applies to great photography today what it did in the past and that’s the focus in this post.

For a good picture, you have to make the effort

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain" - Dolly Parton

If all your pictures are taken in bright daylight from a well-known/photographed subject with your wife/husband/children/pets in the front, you will end up with crap. There’s already enough of bad photos of Eiffel tower taken in harsh daylight with sunburn tourist in the front of it. This is a zero-effort photo.

There’s nothing wrong shooting common tourist attractions – usually they are very photogenic, but try to find an angle where most people haven’t seen them before and never try to combine landscape and portrait photography into the same frame. Make the golden hour and twilight work for you. Get out the bed before anyone else and get out with your camera. Move, move and move around to find the right spot and light. Do a proper tactical intelligence from the area before. A dull object in daylight can be photogenic when the light is in your favor. This is what I mean with the effort.

Big Ben early Sunday morning. The light was great and the town was empty

Colosseum early morning. No queues or tourists to interfere with. Perfect situation for photography.

Know you gear

Frequently heard common phrase is that camera doesn´t matter, the one who operates the camera does. Well, that’s correct – and incorrect. It´s totally possible to take great photos with a smartphone, especially today when their technical quality is par excellence. But smartphones have their limitations, your bonded to a fixed lens which will take in your possibilities. A proper digital camera with interchangeable lenses will give you so many more opportunities to frame your shot, but only when you know your gear. A top notch professional DSLR won´t gain anything to a smartphone if you just shoot automatic.

This kind of picture is of course a cliche, but it demonstrates a photograph you can´t take with a smartphone. 

Learn the photographic basics: Aperture, focal length, field of view, DOF, shutter speed, ISO etc. and how they affect the picture. Then you will know which lens to choose, when to use flash or tripod etc. Understanding the basic science of photography doesn´t necessarily make you a great photographer, but the lack of understanding will definitely limit you. Then there are things like lens sharpness, dynamic range, noise floor and some other “pixel beeping” stuff you will bump into while reading camera forums – forget it. Every digital camera and lens sold today are good enough. I´m using mostly 30-40-year old manual lenses and their superb.

Post processing

Man and a woman, Roma Termini

Road to Mount Teide, Tenerife

When you press the shutter, your only on half way from your final photograph. Almost every photo needs at least some post processing. If you know your gear you shoot RAW. If you shoot JPEG, you’re bounded to camera manufacturers interpretation of the scene. Sometimes it´s perfect sometimes less so. There’s no reason to chain yourselves to that.



Post processing is skill to master and just like camera gear, it´s always good to know your tools. There’s no right or wrong in post processing. Some people like saturated colors and HDR, some more muted or B&W. There are some puritans who doesn´t accept if anything is removed or added. It´s totally up to you what to do. If you and even better your audience like the results, then you’re on right track. My opinion is that photography is an art, not necessarily a perception of reality. If you send your picture to a photography contest, they will provide the rules what is allowed and not in the post. With your own photos you’re the master.

Converting negative film into positive in Photoshop and Lightroom

Back in the days I worked in a photo lab where we developed negative film to color prints. The developing method (C41) was calibrated to a certain film. If you tried to develop film the machine was not calibrated for, your prints ended wrong.

The reason for this was that the negative film consists of three layers of dyes; yellow, cyan and magenta. In ideal situation every layer would only react to its own color, but the dyes are impure, failing to absorb light frequencies they should for good color reproduction. To correct this the film has an orange (yellow, magenta) layer which was corrected during the development process.

If you just invert the picture in Photoshop it will end with a strong cyan tint which must be corrected.

Negative film with heavy cyan color cast after the inversion in Photoshop

There’s many ways to do the conversion in Photoshop and I’m not tell if any of them are correct. What’s common for all my methods are that while scanning, you must get a small section of the unexposed part of the film into the scan, it’ll be for great help.

The old analog way to remove the color cast was based on analog color filters. This is something that would logically be the most “correct” method and it is also easy to accomplish with Photoshop.

Analog way

1. Convert your image to CMYK (Edit -> Convert to Profile -> CMYK)

2. Use the color sampler tool and pick an unexposed part of the film and observe the percentage values of magenta and yellow

The marker shows an unexposed part of the film

3. Open the color mixer and reduce the constant of yellow and magenta according to the values of color sampler tool so that they remain 0%

4. Flatten image

5. Convert back to RGB color space and invert the image

However, while this should be a sound method, I have never succeeded without extra tweaking of levels and curves to get it right.

Good proven method

This is a method that yields the best results in my opinion. I’m going to adjust the black and white points individually for every color (RGB) channel separately.

1. Invert the image

2. Open level adjustment layer

3. In the levels tool adjust the gray point from a unexposed part of the image

4. Move the black and white point adjustment sliders individually for every color channel approximately to the point where the histogram begins. More precisely you can hold the alt-key pressed and stop where the pixels start to show. Don’t overdo it, otherwise the great dynamic range of the film will go to waste.

Lightroom method

You can also invert negatives in the Lightroom, even if it´s not mentioned for that and the results may vary.



1. Open the tone(point) curve and individual RGB curves

2. Flip all the color curves by grabbing them from the end of the curve so that they will start from the upper left corner.

3. By holding from the end of the curve drag each curve to the point where the histogram begins/stops

4. If there’s any visible color cast left, modify the color balance from the middle of the curve into the desired direction.

 

Image after conversion in Lightroom only

Conversion done in Photoshop

Emulating analog film digitally Part 2 - Emulation process

There’s lot to choose from both free and commercial tools on the market who claims to mimic the look and feel of analog film. I have tested couple of them and the results are not too reassuring.


I tested one product and its emulation of Fuji Velvia 100. Picture on the left is a scan of real Fuji Velvia 100, second one is exactly the same scene shot with Sony A7 with default settings. The third one is interpretation of Velvia 100 from a commercial software. I don't know how their emulation was derived, but it´s quite clear they've never seen a picture of Fuji Velvia before. interpretation is not even close. I was able to do just the same by only editing the contrast in the RGB-curve

                     Velvia 100                                                      Sony A7                                                    Velvia 100 Emulation

At this stage it´s quite clear if I want the look of film digitally I have to do it myself, I can´t afford to buy every piece of software and test them separately if someone happens to get it right. For the process of film emulation I need the following tools:

• Proper digital camera
• Old analog SLR (mine is Olympus OM 20) with a lens without color cast, some older lenses develop a color cast while ageing.
• Film you want to emulate. Shoot the same scene with digital and analog. Different scenes, lighting, high contrast, low contrast, color targets etc.
• Color checker and many shot of it 
• possibility to scan the film with unaltered colors. I wrote about this in my previous post.
• Software to tweak colors. I used Adobe Photoshop and Camera Raw (Lightroom) and my recipe is based on these tools. 

The process

Proper emulation of the film involves emulation of:

• Dynamic latitude and contrast (tone curve)
• color response (RGB curves, white balance and color balance)
• Details (grain and sharpness)
• Scratches and dust (optionally) 

Start with a pictures taken both with film and digital camera from the color target in a daylight illumination or flash. Both pictures shall have the exact same exposure. Read the color values in all patches from the analog picture, It´s easy with Photoshop or Camera Raw. You need both RGB-values and Lab-values. Both pictures must be in the same color space; sRGB, Adobe RGB or ProPhoto. It doesn't matter which color space, but the color space must always be identical in all pictures. RGB values are different in different color spaces. Film is hardcoded to the daylight white balance (5500 K), so the digital picture must be adjusted according to that. We're trying to emulate the look of the film, not the scene. 

Target Reference - Velvia 100

Unedited picture from the same scene with digital camera

Read the Lab-values from the six gray patches in the digital picture. Adjust the tone of RGB channel in Camera Raw so that the L: in the Lab channel is identical with the analog picture. L: channel does not contain any color information only lightness. You should now have some kind of s-shaped tone curve. Then change the readings from Lab to RGB and adjust all the three channels individually so that all RGB channel values are identical to the analog picture. Much of the color information in analog film is "hidden" in the gray patches – film is never completely white balanced. When this step is completed, your digital picture should already be very close to the target. Color response should now be almost accurate and only some remaining colors may still need some extra tweaking, but you can leave it here if you want because curves responds to the light in a “right” way and won't twist colors in different lighting situations. 

Digital picture after the modification of RGB-curves

Next step is tweak with HSL sliders for the remaining colors to match. Most important is the hue. Hue tells what color the color is. This is a time consuming process and it´s impossible to get a 100 % match. More is not better here because too many/extreme corrections will only twist the colors and the preset will be less universal. Try to keep individual color modifications to the minimum. In theory you should be able to mimic the look of the film only by adjusting the RGB curves. Film is different from digital camera in way that the color response is not linear i.e. the hue of the individual color will change along with exposure.


I also tried to make camera specific DNG profiles with DNG profile editor but it didn’t gain any better results.


Then compare analog/digital shots from different scenes and lighting and tweak even more. This is rather an artistic process than scientific. But don't overdo it, every scene will not be picture-perfect no matter how you tweak it.


When the colors are ok you can add the film grain. In Lightoom/Camera Raw just inspect the grain in the analog picture and add grain so that the amount, size and roughness will match. Velvia 100 has the values: Amount: 12 Size: 42 Roughness: 76. If you want the perfection, you can copy the grain from a neutral area in the analog picture and blend it in a layer in Photoshop, but I don’t think anyone will see any difference and the process is time consuming. Graininess in film increases as density increases and film grain is not monochromatic. Too much artificial grain will tell it´s “photoshopped”.


My emulation of Velvia came across better than I expected and it works well in wide variety of lighting situations. It's no trick to fix one photo to match another, but automatizing the process is. Of course not every color is spot on because films response to light is not linear, but the feeling of Velvia shines through and it’s hard to tell difference especially if you don't have a reference to compare with.


It´s a mystery to me why these commercial film emulating products doesn´t perform any better than they do. Is it lack of skills or improper scanning or what?


Here are some examples I compared my interpretation of digital film with the original and a well known company who provides presets to mimic film:

Velvia                                Straight out of camera                   My version                                   Commercial version

I also did preset for Kodak Ektar negative film:

Kodak Ektar                                                My version                                                   Commercial version

In the last picture pair one is real Velvia and the other one is my simulation of it. It´s hard to tell the difference:

This is Velvia                              Or this?

Emulating analog film digitally Part 1 - Scanning the film

Pineapple Kodachrome 64
Scanned with Sony NEX-5N

When I started with photography, shooting film was the one and only option to make photographs. There are very few things I miss from that era. Photographing on film was slow, expensive and eager for all kind of errors. Change to get a good photo was 1 in 10 and the worst part was that you didn't know it before the film was developed. The film supply was also limited compared to digital where it is practically unlimited. You really had to know your film, gear and your limits as a photographer.

What I do miss in the film, are the colors and looks that a properly exposed film can give you. A digital camera is much more faithful to the source, that’s for sure, but the eclectic colors in film are irreplaceable.

I´m not the only one with this opinion, the popularity of Instagram is based on their filters trying to mimic film. Software which mimics film like DxO, VSCO, Replichrome, NIK etc. are very popular. The forte and problem with these are that you can freely try different kinds of styles and pick up the one you like. What you don´t know is how well they emulate the film and of course it doesn’t matter as long as you’re happy. Very few of these reveals any comparison between the real film and their outlook. Mastin Labs is the only one I’m aware of who shows film and emulated digital version side by side. I also pay respect to Totally Rads scientific approach in their creation process of film presets. All the movies older than 10 years and many of the fresher movies (http://motion.kodak.com/motion/customers/productions/default.htm) are shot on analog film. We´re used to the look of film.

When reading photography forums about the subject of mimicking film digitally there’s always few wise guys claiming that you can’t – if you want the look then shoot film. If the digital capture contains more information than the comparable film, then you CAN replicate the look, no debate here. How its done, is a totally different topic altogether.

Because I’m very fond of the look of film and I got lots and lots of film in my depot, I decided that I have to do it myself - my very own version of digital film.

Before one can impersonate film, one needs to know how does the film look. It’s not as straightforward as you may think. To make things simple, there’s two types of color film; negative and positive(slide) transparent film. Negative film is the more common “consumer” film. Positive is the one used by professionals, all the pictures you will see in National Geographic where exposed to a positive transparency film. Negative film is more forgiving for incorrect exposure but will give you more washed out colors compared to positive film (in general). Positive film is very picky about correct exposure, but will give you brilliant spectrum of vivid colors. I used to underexpose positive transparency film by ½ stop to tune down the luminosity with a result of even deeper colors. Positive film is “ready” when developed through the chemicals. Just look at the film through an open window and what you see is what you get. Negative film is supposed to end as prints and needs an inversion correction with some adjustments to remove the orange cast layer to correct impure dyes. The “real” look of the negative film is thus unknown.



My first attempt was to transfer the authentic look of the film to my computer screen. Proper equipment is a necessity. Screens, cameras and scanners and the quality of light must be calibrated to the point of perfection. Nothing can be neglected in this workflow. 

My setup for scanning film. With 1:1 Macro i was able to get 16 Mp files which is more than enough to squeeze all the details out.

The film has to be scanned first. My scanner is Epson Perfection V750 PRO flatbed scanner and Sony NEX-5N camera with Olympus OM Zuiko 50 mm 3.5 Macro lens extended with 24mm extension tube. Both systems profiled and calibrated. As a light table I used a 20 W high cri led floodlight with a neutral photographic paper on top to make the light even. Copying film with the camera gave me better results in sharpness and color control, however the scanner handled the high density of slide film better. Theoretically speaking a 35mm film contains more information compared to any digital camera today, but the problem is that there’s no practical way to squeeze it out. successful snapshot with film needs perfect circumstances; film is slow, try to walk around with your digital camera and shoot only with ISO 100 or even less, you’ll miss many of the opportunities. I Managed to squeeze out information from a 35 mm film compared to 6 Mpix digital camera, give or take.

Scanning the film

Positive film

Many scans of those legendary slide films like Kodachrome and Velvia are ruined with a heavy blue/magenta cast. These films are supposed to be watched with a slide projector casted against a white/silver wall. Slide projectors were equipped with a 3000 K tungsten lamp which addressed the color cast. Film itself is daylight balanced and daylight should be your white balance target. You don´t want to correct the white balance for each frame as in digital photography. My approach was that I measured the white balance and tint from the light table directly. If the film itself has a slight tint you will get it on the scans too which is desirable. When you look at the slide against a high quality neutral light (through the window on an overcast day) and if you notice any color cast, then it’s a characteristic of the film and should not be “corrected”.

The scan should be as close as possible compared to the original. The slight color cast here is due the wrong hue in computer screen.

Negative film

Negative film is trickier. The scanner software has some kind of algorithm to convert it to a positive but the result is not even near what I looked for. My approach was to scan it as a positive film and do the conversion in Photoshop which gives a more linear tonal response and greater latitude for editing. After the initial inversion in Photoshop the picture has a cyan cast (originally orange before inversion) which must be corrected. The color cast can easily be removed by adjusting the black and white points individually for each color channel. I also tried to separate the cast to its own layer and set the blend mode to divide. Outcome was almost the same, but I prefer the first method. I’m not sure if I succeeded to reveal the “real” look of the negative film, because every method I used ended up with slightly different outcome, but used the best attempt as a reference. I will write a separate article how do the conversion for negative film – it´s complicated.

Should I calibrate my camera?

All cameras produce slightly different colors and if shooting RAW, then different RAW developing software will interpret colors in a slightly different way. Virtually all camera sensors today are somewhat similar CMOS-type with Bayer RGB-filters which will guarantee that the colors from different cameras are very close to each other. There are some differences, but they’re very subtle compared to differences between films. If shooting JPEG, every camera manufacturer has their own recipe how they express colors. You may also choose between the color style e.g. Portrait, Landscape, Neutral etc.

There’s an ever going debate between gear holics on which camera has the best color; Canon or Nikon? Olympus produces best colors they say, Sonys colors are bland. Capture One has better colors compared to Lightroom and so on.

I shoot a lot of food photos where accurate color reproduction is to be expected. My main cameras are Sony A7 and Canon EOS 5D Mark II. My subjective judgment is that Canon has more pleasing colors to the eye compared to Sony, both in JPEG and through Lightrooms mangle. Sony’s colors are harsh, where Canon has some kind of pleasant warmth in its colors. Here I must stress, that accurate and pleasing colors have nothing to do with each other. Accuracy is an objective term and pleasing is most subjective. You can´t measure how pleasing colors are, but you can measure accuracy which I will do here.

Calibration

If you shoot raw, you can calibrate your camera for accuracy or even get two cameras of different brands to produce colors alike. Because I use Adobe Lightroom, I will discuss about DNG profiles. Other raw converter will read ICC profiles. Concepts are the same in both.

Camera JPEG

When you shoot JPEG or RAW converted with camera manufacturers own RAW-converter you will get colors the manufacturer intended them to be in the first place. Because the manufacturer knows its camera best, you could expect best results here. If the colors are off, it’s not by accident.

Adobe Standard profile

When you import your RAW-photos into Lightroom, photos will be converted into the Adobe Standard profile. The RAW file has to undergo demosaicing and other adjustments before you can call it a photograph. Lightroom must recognize the RAW-format of your camera, otherwise it can’t read them at all.

Own custom profiles

If you’re not happy with the Adobes interpretation of colors, you can make your own profiles. There are several ways to create a desired profile and the methodology is same for them all: Shoot a standard illuminated color calibration target and compare the results to the reference values and you will get a calibrated camera with authentic color reproduction, at least in theory. I tested to create profiles with Adobe own DNG Editor, Xrite editor and QPCard. Adobe DNG Editor and XRite both uses the Color Checker as reference. QPCard has their own reference target which they claim to be more suitable for camera profiling than Color Checker thus giving better results.

Color errors

I did my test in sRGB color space which is the narrowest, but virtually every photograph will be converted to sRGB in the end, so this is justified and the colors are comparable in the web browser.

Color consists of hue, saturation and lightness. Hue is the most important, because it will tell what color the color is. Saturation indicates the degree to which the hue differs from a neutral gray. Usually cameras will exaggerate the saturation. Luminosity is the brightness of the color and will change with brightness and contrast and can easily be corrected in post. If the hues are wrong, the colors are wrong.
Methodology

I created my own (single illuminant) camera profiles as thorough I was able to. Then I shot a color checker target in standard illuminant (D50, daylight) and compared the results to the reference values provided by Babelcolor. Color patch C6 is not within sRGB color gamut and will be ignored.
Results


As I said my primary interest is in hues, if hues are wrong colors are wrong. I’m not the person to decide if it’s better that one color is vastly off when all the other colors are in line or when every color is slightly off. I´m sensitive for hue errors, other might be sensitive for saturation errors even if they are more easy to correct. It´s hard to pick a winner and this is no contest after all. I´m relying here on calculated CIEDE2000 Delta E errors. It´s a complex color difference algorithm and I won’t go any deeper into it, but it´s good to know that errors <1 are not perceptible by human eye and 100 when colors are exact opposite.

Sony A7 JPEG

Average Delta Error = 3,9
Worst color: A1 dark skin DE= 6,7

Authentic colors 

Sony A7 Adobe Standard Profile

Average Delta Error = 2,5

Worst color: B4 purple DE= 6,9

Saturation closest to reference values.

Sony A7 Profile made with Adobe DNG Editor

Average Delta Error = 3,0

Worst color: C3 Red DE= 3,9

Unsaturated yellow.

Sony A7 Profile made with QPCard

Average Delta Error = 3,4

Worst color: B4 purple DE= 8,8

Sony A7 Profile made with XRite

Average Delta Error = 4,4

Worst color: B4 purple DE= 12,0

Canon EOS 5D Mark II JPEG

Average Delta Error = 7,2

Worst color: A1 dark skin DE= 10,9

Compared to Sony more saturated and less bright colors. 

Canon EOS 5D Mark II Adobe Standard Profile

Average Delta Error = 3,3

Worst color: B4 purple DE= 7,1

Canon EOS 5D Mark II Profile made with Adobe DNG Editor

Average Delta Error = 2,9

Worst color: C3 Red DE= 7,1

Smallest hue deviation of the whole group, saturation also among the best.

Canon EOS 5D Mark II Profile made with QPCard

Average Delta Error = 3,7

Worst color: B4 purple DE= 9,4

Canon EOS 5D Mark II Profile made with XRite

Average Delta Error = 4,7

Worst color: B4 purple DE= 12,2