My goal in creating an image is to convey as much of my experience as is possible.

In the real world there are some things that cant be captured, touch, smell, heat, humidity, insects /slap!

Many other parts of the experience can be captured and if you are patient enough to stick with a given image for a few minutes you often find a rich varience of events unfurling in the image. I call this time compression because if you wait and keep shooting you can capture several temporaly based events that can be woven into a more richly detailed story.

Procedurally I tend to frame the image, lock down my tripod, select a proper exposure, tape my focus and zoom to prevent drift and use a remote release.

I dont put my head to the camera at all rather I look at the scene in front of me having noted the left, right, top and bottom extents when I set it up.

When you make a sequence of images from a fixed camera position like this they will be close to registered and composite together smoothly because the tones are all very similar.

I have pulled this off handheld and made it work. When doing that anticipate a little more work aligning the images. Often you can get away with murder on white water because of the action of the Lighten Blend Mode.The Lighten blend mode will show that layer if it  is lighter then the layer behind it. In the case of the splash the spray of the wave is lighter then the dark water behind it and so the transform renders the white water and not the darker rocks. This is also a great way to bulk up or add texture to a waterfall.

In my example I selected one frame as the background of the image, its on the bottom of the stack in the layers palette. This frame has a hiker who appeared for a few minutes, when he was there no waves were breaking. You know all too well how this works :)

I then took three frames that had good splashes on the various rocks and added them above the background layer. I selected the layers and used Edit->Auto Align Layers.

I then checked the alignment by turning on the background in Normal Blend Mode and one of the splash layers at a time with the splash set to Difference Blend Mode. If needed I would have nudged the splash layer to get it in line using the Move tool and the cursor keys with the image zoomed in on the rock in question.

This is the magic part. I set the splash layers to Lighten blend mode and added a black alpha mask to each. Then I took a opaque (100:100) white brush and brushed in each splash. You can pretty much see on the black alpha masks which splashes were added... all of them.

While I was shooting some birds came by so they were incorporated. I stripped the sky to get that to composite smoothly. I also stroked the waves on the Haze layer with a gentle (30:50) brush loaded with the color of the transilluminated spume.

Here is the same chop on an image of Pt Lobos...

It was a pretty flat day so I had to wait out several sets of waves before I got anything. The birds were there in force so capturing them was not a problem.

I tend to shoot seascapes at a high shutter speed, 250 or 500, with a wide angle lens which makes my birds sharp and easy to mask. I usually mask birds with the magic wand and adjust the Tolerance to control how much it bites into the edge. 

When you start to think of a photograph as a group of temporal events bound by their locale and then have the ability to smoothly integrate them order emerges from the chaos of nature. 

Tags: hollow,bean,splash,infinite,photoshop,tutorial

Take the file to be targeted and add a levels adjustment layer to the top of the stack in the Layers pane click OK without making any changes. This will be used to target the highlights and shadows.

Add a Threshold layer above the Levels layer. Your image will appear in high contrast black and white. Set the threshold to 245 and click ok.

Turn off the threshold layer and observe the image. This targeting method is easy in images that have white values present.

A detailed white value, Zone 7, should have a digital density of 245-249 and a white without detail, Zone 8, should have a density of 250-254.

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First… Target the highlights:

• Turn the Threshold layer on, it is set to 245.
• If the image is all black it is too dark, open the levels layer and adjust the Input Levels:high slider downwards until you see some white dots appear in the thresholded image.
• Close the levels layer and turn off the threshold.
• Evaluate the highlight areas that are white in the thresholded version.
• If you think these should be Zone 8 whites with no detail then reset the Threshold layer to 250 and readjust the levels layer.

If the image is too light then you will need to work on the underlying adjustment layers that are making the highlights too light.

I try to avoid having more then a few pixels of value 255 in an image. If you set the Threshold to 255 and see significant areas of white things will need to be done or that area will be blown out in the print.

In an image with sunlight clouds I have the highest highlights on the clouds between 250-254 with a few pixels of 255.

Then… Target the Shadows:

If you are looking for a full range image with nice whites and snappy blacks then you want a low value around 10-20. I find that if you go below 10 you may be killing important shadow details.

• Adjust the Threshold layer to 10 and hit OK.
• If you don’t see any black spots in the white field then your image is flat.
• Open the levels control and adjust the Input Levels:Low slider upwards until black spots appear in the thresholded image.

Turn off the Threshold layer and you are now ready to make a print that will have good exposure and contrast.

By working with the threshold layer to positively identify values in your file you can map them to the proper digital output densities and get a well exposed print on the first try everytime.

This method will often help you to identify the pesty hot spots that are preventing you from getting more light into your image. If one small highlight pops right up and there are other similar values in the image that are not popping then you can make a mask for the one spot that is too hot to hold it back allowing you to make the image overall lighter.

Give it a try, I am sure you will save some time and money on paper and ink.

Tags: printing,threshold,density