fred wobus . com

The Problem

A lot of people have noticed this problem when using Adobe Lightroom on Canon RAW files – During an import the thumbnails are initially shown with nice colours, and shortly after opening them the colours are changed.

Researching this phenomenon on internet forums I found that especially portrait photographers complain about wonky skin tones. I don’t do much portraiture, but noticed the issue with landscape and nature photos as well.

So why does Adobe change the colours after a short while during import? It all comes down to different processing of RAW data. A different algorithm and different colours profiles made by different manufacturers give different results. For those of you old enough to remember film just think how different brands of film resulted in variations in colour rendition back in the days of analogue photography.

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Oak Leaf

The coppermine gallery system that I use for my photos has a vanity feature that counts how many times an image was viewed in full-page mode (thumbnail views are not counted).

Today that counter passed the 10000 mark! Thanks for all your interest.

Check out the latest album of black and white images from the Vienna woods:

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Portrait

While I normally like to tramp around the countryside or bimble along a coral reef to take pictures I also had a go at some studio work. The new album shows a selection of shots from a recent portrait session with a friend of mine.

The session involved very little equipment, so just a tripod and two flashes in front of a white wall. But it was all the more fun playing with various pieces of jewellery, a few of changes of clothes (she did that) and old fashioned skin-smoothing flattery in Photoshop (that was me).

Nude

Playing with black and white effects was the most fun and the photo “Nude” (right) is my favourite. Here’s a little Photoshop cook-book of what I did to the original image to achieve the brushed steel effect.

Post-processing

Although the most obvious effect is created by Photoshop actions (see below), the image needs to be cleaned before applying any actions:

• healing brush for skin spots
• mask out the background and brighten
• invert the mask and clone out the model
• Gaussian blur on the model layer with radius 15
• mask the blur layer, selectively paint on mask to soften only legs/arms

This is all standard stuff and results in a nice colour shot.
The black and white effect is mainly courtesy of two Photoshop action sets:

• monochrome channel mixer layer at 80% transparency
• Nill’s Fake HDR action
• cange gradient in top layer in HDR copy to black-to-transparent
• NiKant’s Realistic film grain action
• play with layer transparencies to achieve the final effect

Especially the Fake HDR action is very good for this kind of geometric pose, but only after rigorous skin softening using the Gaussian blur layer and spot healing brush click orgies. This action tends to accentuate even the smallest of skin blemishes.

The Realistic film grain action is always good as a final layer as it smooths over sloppy post processing and creates a lovely film-like b&w effect.

See the whole Studio Portraits 2 album below:

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A selection of my best underwater photos is now online in a separate gallery:

Underwater photo portfolio

The gallery contains some of my best images from Indonesia (mostly Lembeh Straits) and the Red Sea.

Enjoy!

Castle Grafenegg (sunny)

They say photography is all about light, and they (whoever they are) couldn’t be more right. They will also tell you there is good and bad light and that you need to get up at 3am for the former of the two, but that is a different story.

Castle Grafenegg

I have uploaded a short album of photos that come in pairs taken in completely different light. Some were taken only minutes between them. In most cases it was overcast and I took a shot just for my memories. Then suddenly the sun burst through the clouds and I ran back to re-take the shot with a sprinkle of light.

The last two (River Mürz sunny and overcast) were particularly frustrating, because it happened the other way round. I had just set up the camera on the tripod, the sun was shining and I took a test shot (the sunny one). A couple of seconds later the sun went behind the clouds, never to appear again for the entire day.

See all photos in the Same place different light album:

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