Color When There Is No Light

The conventional wisdom of course is that it takes sunny days to get good color pictures. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Rainy days often make for great color photography, because the very flat and "wet" light tends to saturate what color there is by eliminating bright hotspots and deep shadows.

These three pictures, taken a few years ago along the edge of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation where it borders South Dakota's famous Badlands, illustrate this point. As a disclaimer, all three pictures are Photoshopped a bit, because camera light meters often don't register the midtones well under less than "normal" lighting conditions.

The first picture is taken in driving rain looking out over the Badlands; the second picture, also taken in the rain, is of an abandoned church at the edge of the Badlands where they roll into the Pine Ridge Reservation; and the third is of the infamous bar – the only within many miles of the Reservation, at Scenic, SD. Notice particularly in the bar picture how the absence of much other color accentuates the color on the Budweiser sign. The rain makes the church picture practically glow. And the Badlands are subtly awash with spring color, even in the driving rain.

The final two pictures below are taken in rain squalls at Sandy Bay, a remote Miskito Indian village accessible only by boat along Nicaragua's Atlantic coast. Notice how the rain seems to make what color there is practically glow.

“Environmental” Portraits

Portrait photography, of course, was one of the earliest forms of the craft, taking after the artists at the time, following the development of the albumen coated paper process to record light images. Today's modern "environmental" portraiture is not much different, although sometimes considerably edgier, in that it seeks to portray the subject in a controlled setting that speaks directly to the nature of the subject or which dramatically thrusts the subject into the forefront of the picture. Four of my photographs posted here illustrate this concept.

In the example of the young woman above, the background landscape is "pulled up," so to speak by a telephoto lens which removes the sky and which provides a dark yet still interesting natural backdrop for the subject.

In the second illustration, the woman's face is pushed towards the viewer by the out of focus yet still distinct background.

In the third illustration, this young Nicaraguan child is sitting in front of a shop open to the street – those are strands of fresh garlic and a display of kettles hanging in the background. Because they are out of focus, yet can still be made out, they provide some context for the photo, yet the background also serves to thrust the child towards the viewer. I took the latter two of these pictures with a 105 mm lens on a Nikon film camera. The first is with a 200mm lens.

And in the fourth illustration, below, the "environment" tells the story, as Meiu, nude herself, is a painter of nude portraits.

Photo Ethics

A serious topic, this musing though is not about Photoshop. Rather it's about trespassing.

Responsible photographers need to always remember that unless they are invited to take a photograph or are on public property at a public event, there's a good chance their efforts to take pictures, particularly of people, may not be greeted in a friendly fashion. 

Sometimes the reasons are cultural (the Mayan Indians of Mexico and Guatemala), sometimes spiritual (Native Americans), sometimes because the setting is just not appropriate (a religious ceremony perhaps), sometimes because people think it is rude (think tourists taking pictures of "natives") and other times because the people being photographed are doing something they may not want others to see.

Most of us don't get into the later situation too often, fortunately, but the other situations described above take a special sensitivity not easily covered in this short space. The bottom line is that a serious photographer should be thoroughly acquainted with the history and the cultural preferences of the people he or she is photographing. Even as a casual tourist, anything short of this is just plain rude – and could be dangerous: numerous stories abound of tourists with cameras being thrashed with sticks in the great Mayan Church at San Juan Chamúla (pictured above).

We avoided that problem by hiring a guide in nearby San Cristóbal de las Casas – an experience which allowed us to obtain photographs, such as the one below of Mayan weavers in their home in Zinacantán, which could not have been captured otherwise.

Sometimes, though as a working journalist, you find yourself in situations where you have to rely on your own snap judgment, such as when I joined a human rights group on an earlier trip to Chiapas in 1996 to document activities of the Mexican Army in the aftermath of the Zapatista rebellion which rocked Mexico in 1994. The Army was accused of terrorizing remote Mayan Indian villages in the jungles along the Guatemalan border.

The two pictures, above, I took in pouring rain with no interference from a passing patrol. But the third picture tells a different story. Taken of me surreptitiously with one of my cameras by a colleague the following day when the Army sent out a special detail to see what we were up to, the picture shows the risks journalists can run into when they are taking pictures where they are not wanted. Needless to say I did not take the soldier's picture.

Timing

The three R's of photography are, of course, timing, location and lighting. Alright, I know these don't have any "R"s in them. Nonetheless, all three elements are critical to a good photograph. Photoshop may be able to fix the lighting, but it can't deal with location and timing issues.

In the above picture, all three elements come together nicely, without any help from Photoshop. Notice that I was in the right place at the right time, and that I snapped the shutter at just the precise moment (which takes a film camera or a high end digital camera to accomplish) when she was framed by the two large rectangles in the picture and yet was not covering up the location sign. Also note I was a little lucky in that one leg is fully extended and the other is bent at a nice angle that hikes her skirt high – a timing bonus, you might say. This is one of my favorite photographs, taken quite clearly in France, some 35 years ago.

Although luck is good, it does take concentration to get the timing in a photograph just right.

Which Tool to Use?

There's no good or easy answer to that question because it is not a good or easy question. Photoshop is a very subtle and complex image manipulation program, and your photographs deserve a subtle and complex approach.

The first step, though, to answering that question is to look at your photo as a collection of individual parts. Divide the photo in your mind into individual areas of interest, and decide what you like and what you don't like about each area. You might look at the highlights – are any too bright? Then you could look at the shadows – is there enough detail in the shadows? How about the colors? Do some areas have colors that are just right and others that are a little off? Another issue to examine is contrast – do the important elements of the picture differentiate themselves from each other enough – are your whites "bright" enough, or is there any overall gray cast to the picture? The final issue is sharpness – is the image "crisp"?

The picture above, of the 13^th century Anasazi cliff dwellings in Betatakin Canyon at the Navajo National Monument in Arizona, was a deep disappointment to me when I returned home from our 1996 Western trip. A rugged and hot hike to these remote ruins did not reveal the images I had hoped for, although I tried very hard to capture the historic and other-worldly feel of the culture that once thrived here. As you can see the image is very "flat," as my Nikon FM2 film camera was not able to record the full tonal range of what I was seeing with my eye at the time. Although I made a few prints initially of this image, using "dodging" and "burning" techniques, there were simply too many areas that failed to reproduce as the eye and brain could see them in their original state. The contrasts between the interior of the cave, which shadows the ruins all year long except for a brief period of several days when the sun is low in the winter sky, was simply too much for a 35mm negative to handle.

Enter Photoshop. I started with the Image>Adjustments>Levels tool, adjusting the three sliders until I got a sharper degree of contrast while darkening the sky a bit and still keeping some shadow detail in the ruins. Then with the "Quick Selection" tool I selected one area at a time, changing the contrast and brightness in multiple areas of the picture with the Image>Adjustments>Brightness/Contrast tool, working from the sky in the upper left first, then to the outside cliffs, then down to the ruins themselves. Finally I sharpened the image with the Filter>Sharpen>SmartSharpen tool.

The result is below – this is what I actually saw when I took the picture. Looking at my History palette, I see that I made at least seven separate adjustments to this picture.

To see a higher dpi of these pictures, click here.

The Smart Sharpen Tool

Most photographs can benefit from the Filter>Sharpen tool in Photoshop. The preferred tool among photojournalists is actually the Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen tool. As with many of Photoshop's Intelligent" tools, this way requires care and experimentation. The first step is to set the "Remove" drop down menu to "Lens Blur." Then you grab the image that's in the central image box and move it to an area that gives good detail. The final step is to slide the "Radius" bar back and forth – adding more pixels to the width of the sharpening effect generally makes the whole photo look sharper – but you can overdo this, to the point where your picture becomes very "grainy.

The top image shows the negative as originally scanned and brightened up a bit. Below are the tools described above, and finally is the sharpened image – a photo I took at the great Mayan ruins of Palenque, Mexico, in 1996.

The Quick Selection Tool

Although the Lasso tool works well, the quick selection tool is a sophisticated, practically intelligent tool that selects areas of a photo within the same tonal range. As with the Clone Stamp tool (discussed in a previous post), when you click on this tool another menu across the top opens that lets you adjust the tool size, as well as to go back and forth between expanding the selection area, making it smaller, or adding a new selection area (see below).

In the above image, taken of my Taiwanese friend Meiu when I was a GI in Germany, I selected the painting on the left as well as the full shape of her body and the paint pots to the right, because I wanted to brighten just these areas of the photo to add a bit of a "glow" to the lighting. The image below shows the final results.

The Clone Stamp Tool

Because many of my negatives and slides are nearly four decades old, some are heavily damaged with dust and even mildew. Once again, enter Photoshop. I had been copying and pasting to cover dust and other damage, but this is a tedious task. Fortunately my son Ben was home this week on his spring break from teaching journalism at IU, and he showed me Photoshop's "Clone Stamp" tool. With this tool, simply "alt" left-click on a spot that you want to "clone," and then mouse over and left-click on the spot you want to clone to (your "target" area). It's a little tricky and takes some getting used to, and it helps to blow up the image quite a bit to get greater control. When you do, though, the tool gets larger too, so you have to go into the "Brush" menu (shown below) to select the width of the brush you want to use for the cloning.

Below is the final (cropped) version, after various adjustments (discussed in previous posts and including some more attention to the "Hue/Saturation" tool) and with most of the damage "cloned" out of the image.

Fine Tuning Photoshop

The real trick to adjusting images in Photoshop is to select precisely the area you want to specifically work on. One can use the lasso tool for this or the quick selection tool (both in the vertical menu bar on the left). However, a key element of using these tools successfully is to "feather" the outline – this allows you to use the lasso tool in a rather 'rough" and not so precise fashion, and even with the quick selection tool it "bleeds" the boundaries between what you are adjusting and the surrounding areas so that you don't have sharp lines of demarcation.

The feather tool is found after you make your selection by going to "Select>Modify>Feather…." At this point you have to make a judgment – you must set the "pixels" of the feather radius. As a rule of thumb, if you have selected a very small area, try ten pixels. For a large area, try 100. You can tell by the amount of "halo" or demarcation you get if you've not used enough pixels or gone too far.

The picture at the beginning of this post is the original image I took on the island of Crete, of the Greek coast, many years ago – an image with which I've always been disappointed, although I knew at the time I took it that this "portrait" had a lot of potential. Below is the adjusted image. The adjustments included lassoing the man's face and hand, feathering the borders (around 70 pixels), adjusting the brightness and contrast to the selected areas, and then using the sharpen command (in the filter menu).

The Power of Light

The three fundamentals of any good picture are simple: timing, location, and light. In other words, good photographs are made by being in the right place, at the right time, with the right light. When those three elements are lined up perfectly, all the photographer has to do at that point is frame the picture and shoot. However, none of these elements are terribly easy to manipulate on their own, not to mention getting them together at just the right point in time. I've awoken before dawn and driven at high speed a hundred miles to get just the right light on the famous Ship Rock Peak in New Mexico, only to have the sunrise obscured by clouds at the last moment.

And I've driven past this old gold stamping mill on I-70 just outside of Idaho Springs a dozen times and not liked the light. Because the mill is in a gulch, it is either in the shadows most of the time, or glaringly flat at high noon when the sun can shine straight down, hardly ideal lighting conditions for the rich color that the rusted old hulk deserves.

But once again, Photoshop comes to the rescue. Above is my version after playing with the color balance and brightness/contrast controls. Below is the original version.

And just so you know what I missed, here is the shot I did get of Ship Rock, although it's not the one I had in mind when I broke camp at Canyon de Chelly much earlier that morning.