Lately I’ve become more and more interested in capturing subtle color in my work. Unfortunately, one of the great frustrations of digital photography is getting color to display accurately, especially on the web where web browsers can’t be trusted to read the color profiles embedded in image files. To get around web browser colorblindness, the convention is to use the sRGB color profile, which is older and more universal. Of course using sRGB is like trying to recreat a Rothko with paint by number, there just aren’t enough shades of color to pick from…

Anyways, here is a test to see how color works in different web browsers.

For the past couple of years I’ve had the great pleasure of photographing special events for Elizabeth Spencer wines in St. Helena, California. Here are a few photos I shot Saturday during their annual Harvest party. Be sure to check out Elizabeth Spencer at their website and on Facebook.

 

Click here to see more of my photos from the event.

 

I’ll be Photographing Cop Sound (formerly known as Average Height Children) at The Stork Club this Saturday. I had a blast shooting them at Blake’s in Berkeley a few months ago and I’m really looking forward to see them perform again. They’re a great group of guys that have a lot of fun.

Come check them out along with Treehouse Orchestra and Citabria this Saturday, April 9th at 8pm at the Stork Club on 2330 Telegraph, Oakland.

I’m currently working on an overhaul of my website – something a bit cleaner and to the point. Someday, I might put something more elaborate up again, but for now I need something that is better suited for infrequent updates.

Here are a few snaps I managed to grab in between helping students during last weeks sunrise photoshoot with The Image Flow. These are taken with my trusty Canon 30D, because my 5D2 was at the canon doctor. I’ll be out again tomorrow, bright and early. It looks like a we’ll have a lot more fog this time.

 

These are some shots I took while teaching a weekend long photography workshop at The Image Flow based in Mill Valley, Ca. Our next workshop will start April 30th!

I just want to give a shout out to Mima Cataldo and her work being shown at The O’Hanlon Center for the Arts in Mill Valley. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Mima and watching her work progress for the past few Months at The Image Flow. See more of Mima’s work at her website.

Mima is a long time B&W photographer now transitioning from the dark room to a more digital process. While all of the images are shot on a Leica with B&W film, Mima says her “color photographs are hand-colored using Marshall Oils, then re-photographed, adjusted in Photoshop and printed digitally.”

Recently, a client showed interest in using one of my photos to fill a large 10ft+ space. Awesome, right? Turns out the lucky photo would be a crop of an 8mp jpg, which is not so awesome for two reasons: pixelation and jpg artifacts. So how do we fix this?

The big blocky pixels as well as the grid pattern of jpg artifacts is noticeable even at viewing distance and is absolutely not acceptable. Fortunately, we can clean this image up in 3 quick steps. First, let’s get rid of the blocky grid of jpg artifacts. Its important to do this step first before we resample/ enlarge the image, so it doesn’t look worse.

To remove the jpg artifacts go to the menu bar and choose: Filter>>Noise>>Reduce Noise. This is a very powerful and potentially destructive tool if used with a heavy hand. We are only interested in the bottom check box “Remove JPEG Artifacts.” You can experiment with the “Remove Color Noise” slider, but make sure everything else is set to “0″.

The second step is to resample or enlarge the image so that it has higher ppi/ resolution. Ideal resolution for an inkjet print is 300 pixels per inch, which is a 1500% enlargement from a 20ppi image. That’s overkill. If we enlarged it that much, all we would get is a big blurry mess that will really slow down your computer. We just need to enlarge it enough so that the blockiness of the pixels disappears (Image>>Image Size).

Sure, if you stick your nose up to the print you’ll notice it starts to fall apart, especially if its a detail critical shot like a portrait. But, its impossible to create more detail. The trick is to fool the eye by giving the appearance of detail or sharpness. So, the final step is to add a subtle layer of film grain or noise.

If we’re going to add noise we want to do it to a separate layer so that we have the most control over how it blends with the image. In your menu bar, go to: Layer>>New>>Layer. Change “Mode” to “Overlay” and check “Fill with Overlay-neutral color”. This will create a new layer in your layer stack filled with solid gray and set to the Overlay blending mode. Now go to Filter>>Noise>>Add Noise in the menu bar. The amount that you add depends on the ppi you set in the previous step. For my image at 100ppi an amount of 9.6 did the trick. You want the noise to be visible, but not so much that it obscures the image. For most images Gaussian and Monochromatic noise looks best, but feel free to experiment. If the noise looks a little too intense you can lower the layer opacity in your layers palette.

I hope this was helpful, though I’m not sure how many people actually want to make prints this large. This process is useful for printing at smaller sizes as well when ever a significant enlargement from the digital file is needed. Also, because this is my first tutorial on here, I’d love to hear any and all feed back. Thanks!

Last summer I had serious printing withdrawal. The racing season at Golden Gate Fields ended in June and I was looking forward to a summer where I could focus on my portfolio and print some of the work I’d done since graduating in ’08.  At Santa Cruz I had essentially unlimited access to the digital lab. I loaded my own roll of paper, checked the color profiles and made any necessary adjustments. It was pretty sweet. Unfortunately, Santa Cruz is almost a 2 hour drive from Berkeley and getting prints done in the real world is not so fun.

I started trying out online printing services and then a couple local places, which were just as unpredictable. The first problem I ran into was no one would print the custom sizes my panoramic shots require and I can’t afford to pay for wasted inches. Next, paper choices were always a gamble and color, of course, was all over the place. I heard from some folks at the Marin Photo Club that a little studio in Mill Valley, CA called The Image Flow was becoming the place to do high end digital printing. One 8×10 later I found myself @ The Image Flow.

Stuart and Damien understood my frustrations with printing and their enthusiasm for the creative process was refreshing. They both come from the world of professional photography where every detail matters and the perfect print is the norm, not a magically random occurrence. I guess they realized I knew a thing or two about digital photography and asked if I wanted to help out at the studio. So, now I’m @ The Image Flow and having a great time, retouching, printing, teaching photoshop, and of course learning a lot. Though it’s still a little odd that I’m commuting everyday to the town I grew up in.

My goal now is to do some cross-blogging here and on The Image Flow blog. I’ll be writing about the projects I’m working on and any tips and tricks we discover. Stay tuned for more!