Salvage Week 1/21/2024 - 1/28/2024

[Douglas Sherman]

This week I thought I would show you how I do the mineral images. Please pile on with your salvaged images.

First, I set the mineral to be photographed on a stand and place it on a black piece of posterboard. I do this near a window for the ambient light and use either overhead light or side light from the window based on the position of the sun. I shoot it at f22 and ISO 100 for greatest DOF. I use the window shade as a diffuser.

Original image.

I then select the object selection tool to isolate the mineral specimen. I then go to the brightness tool and move the slider all the way to the left to darken the surrounding area in order to turn it black. I probably have to do that at least three times. I then process the mineral in Lightroom and edit it some more in Photoshop. Here is the final image.

 

[AlanLichty]

I like the How To on creating these images - The results are fantastic.

 

[AlanLichty]

I have a salvage job effort working on smoky images captured last August during wildfire season. This was one such morning that had some nice looking clouds to the extent you could see them through the smoke layers.

Here is the original capture from my drone:

I might have pushed the processing pretty close to the edge but here is what I teased out of the original. I used a combination of DxO PhotoLab 7 and Lightroom for most of the edits with some final touches in Photoshop. I cropped this down to a 2x3 aspect ration in LR.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice work on the salvage Alan.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

This week I thought I would show you how I do the mineral images. Please pile on with your salvaged images.

First, I set the mineral to be photographed on a stand and place it on a black piece of posterboard. I do this near a window for the ambient light and use either overhead light or side light from the window based on the position of the sun. I shoot it at f22 and ISO 100 for greatest DOF. I use the window shade as a diffuser.

Original image.

View attachment 69107

I then select the object selection tool to isolate the mineral specimen. I then go to the brightness tool and move the slider all the way to the left to darken the surrounding area in order to turn it black. I probably have to do that at least three times. I then process the mineral in Lightroom and edit it some more in Photoshop. Here is the final image.

View attachment 69108

Very nice technique and the result stands out. Do you do this in ACR or in PS/LR? I am surprised that you have do this more than once. In ACR it should be possible to do in with a single mask.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

I was going through some of my images from Lower Antelope a couple of days ago and this I hadn't processed before. The reason was mainly the red channel which needed to be tamed quite a bit to get the details. Here is the result.

 

[AlanLichty]

I like this scene from the lower canyon Jameel. Not hard to end up with over saturated reds in that place.

 

[Roger Bailey]

This week I thought I would show you how I do the mineral images. Please pile on with your salvaged images.

First, I set the mineral to be photographed on a stand and place it on a black piece of posterboard. I do this near a window for the ambient light and use either overhead light or side light from the window based on the position of the sun. I shoot it at f22 and ISO 100 for greatest DOF. I use the window shade as a diffuser.

Original image.

View attachment 69107

I then select the object selection tool to isolate the mineral specimen. I then go to the brightness tool and move the slider all the way to the left to darken the surrounding area in order to turn it black. I probably have to do that at least three times. I then process the mineral in Lightroom and edit it some more in Photoshop. Here is the final image.

This week I thought I would show you how I do the mineral images. Please pile on with your salvaged images.

First, I set the mineral to be photographed on a stand and place it on a black piece of posterboard. I do this near a window for the ambient light and use either overhead light or side light from the window based on the position of the sun. I shoot it at f22 and ISO 100 for greatest DOF. I use the window shade as a diffuser.

Original image.

View attachment 69107

I then select the object selection tool to isolate the mineral specimen. I then go to the brightness tool and move the slider all the way to the left to darken the surrounding area in order to turn it black. I probably have to do that at least three times. I then process the mineral in Lightroom and edit it some more in Photoshop. Here is the final image.

View attachment 69108

Awesome work Doug, never thought of processing it several times to get to black.

 

[JimFox]

This week I thought I would show you how I do the mineral images. Please pile on with your salvaged images.

First, I set the mineral to be photographed on a stand and place it on a black piece of posterboard. I do this near a window for the ambient light and use either overhead light or side light from the window based on the position of the sun. I shoot it at f22 and ISO 100 for greatest DOF. I use the window shade as a diffuser.

Original image.

View attachment 69107

I then select the object selection tool to isolate the mineral specimen. I then go to the brightness tool and move the slider all the way to the left to darken the surrounding area in order to turn it black. I probably have to do that at least three times. I then process the mineral in Lightroom and edit it some more in Photoshop. Here is the final image.

View attachment 69108

Doug, that's so awesome to see! Thanks for the behind the scenes. And a great way to salvage a setup where you might think things would show in the background, but here the end result is flawless.

 

[JimFox]

I have a salvage job effort working on smoky images captured last August during wildfire season. This was one such morning that had some nice looking clouds to the extent you could see them through the smoke layers.

Here is the original capture from my drone:

View attachment 69110

I might have pushed the processing pretty close to the edge but here is what I teased out of the original. I used a combination of DxO PhotoLab 7 and Lightroom for most of the edits with some final touches in Photoshop. I cropped this down to a 2x3 aspect ration in LR.

View attachment 69112

That recovery totally rocks!

 

[JimFox]

I was going through some of my images from Lower Antelope a couple of days ago and this I hadn't processed before. The reason was mainly the red channel which needed to be tamed quite a bit to get the details. Here is the result.

View attachment 69113

Jameel, it is crazy just how red the color red can get! We tend to get used to adding saturation in our images, but a place like Antelope, it's not uncommon to have to do the opposite and remove saturation instead.

 

[dan swiger]

 

[JimFox]

This is from about 15 years ago in Havasu Falls in Arizona. It was a really fun trip, but at times I made some really questionable imaging choices. I was bracketing a lot because there could be a lot of difference with the light and shadows in the scenes, and back then the shadow/highlight recovery isn't what it was today. So I ended up with many of my waterfall images being shot at too fast of a shutter speed. My thinking was to just stack them and do a median blend on them. But the reality ended up being I didn't shoot enough images to actually blur out the water and make it silky enough compared to just shooting at 1/5th to 1/2 of a second.

So today, I took the original 6 images of this, stacked it, made a smart object and then changed the stack mode to Mean as it looked smoother then Median. That helped, but still looked like I had used too fast of a shutter speed. So what I then did was take this first stacked and flattened image, and then duplicated and moved it down 1 pixel, duplicated that layer and moved it down 1 pixel. I did that 7 times, did the Smart Object and Mean blend. Still not enough. I repeated that 3 more times. Then I took those 4 groups, and stacked them and did the Smart Object Median blend. Finally it had the look I had wanted. So now I went back to the original stack where the image was sharp, and then used a layer mask and painted the result of the blended groups in the water to my taste.

The end I think looks good. But man, it took a bit of work on a Sunday to Salvage this.

#1 Final Result

#2 The original Base layer

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Nice result Jim. The hard work paid off. One other approach is to use motion blur on the fall with motion vertically down. After that do a Gaussian blur or surface blur.

 

[JimFox]

Nice result Jim. The hard work paid off. One other approach is to use motion blur on the fall with motion vertically down. After that do a Gaussian blur or surface blur.

Thanks Jameel, I had thought about blur, but had forgotten about Motion Blur it's been so long since I have used it.

 

[AlanLichty]

Quite the effort to get this one Jim - nice result. Not sure I would have thought to try the pixel shift to smooth the water out but it worked. I like Jameel's recipe for something like this.

 

[Douglas Sherman]

Very nice technique and the result stands out. Do you do this in ACR or in PS/LR? I am surprised that you have do this more than once. In ACR it should be possible to do in with a single mask.

I actually process the whole image in Lightroom first then transfer it to Photoshop which is where I convert the surrounding background to black and then do any final adjustments.

 

[Douglas Sherman]

I have a salvage job effort working on smoky images captured last August during wildfire season. This was one such morning that had some nice looking clouds to the extent you could see them through the smoke layers.

Here is the original capture from my drone:

View attachment 69110

I might have pushed the processing pretty close to the edge but here is what I teased out of the original. I used a combination of DxO PhotoLab 7 and Lightroom for most of the edits with some final touches in Photoshop. I cropped this down to a 2x3 aspect ration in LR.

View attachment 69112

That is very impressive, Alan.

 

[Douglas Sherman]

I was going through some of my images from Lower Antelope a couple of days ago and this I hadn't processed before. The reason was mainly the red channel which needed to be tamed quite a bit to get the details. Here is the result.

View attachment 69113

That is really a nice job, Jameel. Lots of great detail.

 

[Douglas Sherman]

This is from about 15 years ago in Havasu Falls in Arizona. It was a really fun trip, but at times I made some really questionable imaging choices. I was bracketing a lot because there could be a lot of difference with the light and shadows in the scenes, and back then the shadow/highlight recovery isn't what it was today. So I ended up with many of my waterfall images being shot at too fast of a shutter speed. My thinking was to just stack them and do a median blend on them. But the reality ended up being I didn't shoot enough images to actually blur out the water and make it silky enough compared to just shooting at 1/5th to 1/2 of a second.

So today, I took the original 6 images of this, stacked it, made a smart object and then changed the stack mode to Mean as it looked smoother then Median. That helped, but still looked like I had used too fast of a shutter speed. So what I then did was take this first stacked and flattened image, and then duplicated and moved it down 1 pixel, duplicated that layer and moved it down 1 pixel. I did that 7 times, did the Smart Object and Mean blend. Still not enough. I repeated that 3 more times. Then I took those 4 groups, and stacked them and did the Smart Object Median blend. Finally it had the look I had wanted. So now I went back to the original stack where the image was sharp, and then used a layer mask and painted the result of the blended groups in the water to my taste.

The end I think looks good. But man, it took a bit of work on a Sunday to Salvage this.

#1 Final Result
View attachment 69138

#2 The original Base layer
View attachment 69137

Actually, I could go with either one of these, Jim. However, I am impressed with the amount of work that you put into the first one to get it the way you wanted.