Creating panoramas

I usually merge the images manually when making panoramas, but in this case I used Photoshop’s Photomerge tool (File > Automate > Photomerge). I was pleasantly surprised with the results, the blends were near seamless. This image is a composite of five RAW files.

The trick to making these kind of panoramic composites is to master the exposure. It is important to set Mode > Manual, resist the temptation to use any of the program modes. Program modes will take a different exposure with each shot, leaving you with a post production nightmare. Choosing manual allow you to choose one average exposure for all images. In this case I metered (averaged metering) from the center of the scene and used these settings for all five images. Unless light conditions are changing rapidly, this will guarantee that all exposures will match up. It also helped that I allowed a large degree of overlap between each image.

You can see a larger version here.

NOTES

24mm, Polarising filter, tripod mounted, 5 exposures @ 5 seconds, f13
I used the cameras self timer to eliminate any camera shake.
The final image is 110cm x 33cm @ 240 ppi. (10,441 x 3086 pixels)
Important: If your camera or lens has IS (Image stabilisation) switch it off, it will interpret natural scene movement as camera shake and attempt to correct.

Motion Graphics at LYIT

This is the second year of our MA in Motion Graphics and I’m pleased to say it’s progressing very well. Our students are exploring topics as diverse as Transmedia and interactivity in the environment. I’ve posted some previous exercises and projects on designlyit.

Belated update

It’s been a while since I posted, so here’s an update. The new semester has started and a new cohort of students are taking their first steps in the design world. The La Maison website is in testing, and I’ve started a new series of Twilight images of Ramelton. Here’s one to whet the appetite. I’ll post again when the series is a bit more substantial.

Is the typographic desert that is the internet about to flourish? Typekit launches

I’ve just signed up to a new and highly anticipated service called Typekit. Web designers have been severely limited to date in their choice of typefaces because of the need to apply the lowest common denominator, in this case the ubiquity of a font. Typekit aims to change that by using a central library of fonts which are called up using the @fontface CSS declaration.

Typekit is offering a free trial along with 3 payment plans, Personal, Portfolio and Corporate. The trial gives you access to the site and the use of two fonts on one website.

• Personal ($24.99 per annum) offers five fonts on one website
• Portfolio ($49.99 per annum) unlimited fonts on one site
• Corporate ($49.99 per month), which offers unlimited fonts on ten websites

Each pack also offers font libraries of ascending size.

Font selection
The Trial has 45 fonts available in a number of styles, mostly regular, italic, bold and bold italic, but no full families (including light condensed and extended typefaces).
I didn’t count the numbers in the other packs, suffice it to say that there are plenty to choose from.

Font Quality
The trial fonts look good in the sample images (24pt approx), but there is no way to judge body text – Typekit should really add an untweaked preview image of a paragraph. I say untweaked, because it’s vital to see how well the letters space is real use. I’m also conscious that I’m viewing an image on a mac. I’m curious to see how well the fonts display across different systems. I’ll report back on that later.
Many familiar foundries appear, eg: Fonthead and Chank, but I didn’t see ITC, Linotype, Monotype or Adobe. It would be encouraging to see some of the big type foundries coming on board.

Pricing
I think Typekit are off target with their pricing structure, particularly the Corporate. Ten websites is just not enough, imo. I suspect that most designers will opt for the Personal plan and pass the billing onto the client.
Five fonts is more than enough for any site.

Last word
Typekit is a service that’s been long been on every web designer’s wishlist. So far it looks promising, but I think to really flourish it needs some of the big boys to come on board and extend the quality of the range.
They should also offer support for more websites in the more expensive packages. There’s also the issue of support. Currently the @fontface selector is only supported by the most recent browsers. Typekit offers some support for Microsoft’s WEFT system, but not all fonts are supported.

Canon EOS 5D Mk II: First impressions

The Camera
The Mk II is the recently revised version of Canon’s professional level EOS 5D. It combines a full frame sensor with HD video capability.
The 5D is a substantial beast, particularly with the 24-105mm f.4 IS lens attached. Having said that it feels comfortable and well balanced. The control layout is more akin to the 20Ds and 30Ds I’ve used previously, than to my older 300D. I’ve always thought that system (also shared with the 350 and 400 models) is a little more responsive/intuitive than that used on the more expensive models. Perhaps I just need some more time to get used to it.
The camera starts up instantaneously and saves to CF cards. RAW file sizes are large – 26-27MB each, so high capacity CF cards are a must.

The Lens : 24-104mm IS f4 L
Without doing an involved comparison, I can tell you that the lens is very sharp. It has a useful focal range from true wide angle at the 24mm end to medium telephoto at 105mm. Sharpness seems good, right into the corners, particularly when stopped down. F4 might seem a little slow for such a lens, but its constant across the zoom range, and the IS (image stabilisation) effectively adds about 2 stops of light, meaning you can take handheld shots in lower light conditions. There is some evidence of chromatic aberration, but it’s minimal and easily corrected in Photoshop.
The lens is probably not quite fast enough for sports/wildlife photography. Photographers working in these areas should probably look elsewhere. For all other purposes, however, I think its an excellent versatile lens.

Caveats
The only real problem I’ve run into so far is CS3’s lack of support for the 5D’s RAW file format. You can install Adobe’s free DNG app, which will convert the RAW files to Adobe’s Digital Negative format, which can then be read by Photoshop.
This adds another process to the workflow, however, it’s not an ideal solution.
The other alternative is to upgrade to CS4 and install the Adobe RAW update. This is the route I took, but obviously its not an option for everyone.

I also noticed slight vignetting at 24mm with a polarising filter attached. Those shooting with filters should probably shoot no wider than 26-28mm.

Something else worth considering is lens compatibility, particularly if, like me, you are upgrading from one of the Canon’s with a smaller image sensor. Many lenses were designed specifically for these cameras – they won’t work on the 5D as it’s mirror will make contact with the back of the lens during shooting.

Conclusion
So far, I’m impressed with the camera and lens combination. It’s tough, versatile and well built. The lens is sharp and bright enough for most situations. The sticking point for many will be the lack of support in CS3, but to be honest, that is more a critisism of Adobe than of Canon.

Landscapes: Post processing

I’ve been shooting landscapes a lot lately, so I thought I’d post this little example of my work process. The scene is Ardara waterfall, about an hours drive from where I live. The day was bright, and I’d neglected to pack a Neutral Density filter, so getting shutter speeds slow enough to get effective blurring of the water was going to be difficult. Even with the lens fully stopped down (f22, ISO 100), and a polarising filter fitted, I was still getting shutter speeds og 1/15 sec, not slow enough. My solution was to overexpose by a few stops and sacrifice the highlights.

This gave me the following result.

As you can see it’s very washed out. However,because it was shot as a RAW file, there was a considerable amount of detail captured. The “Open RAW dialog” in CS4 as seen below has a number of useful sliders, the most important being the exposure slider.

In this case I moved the exposure to -2.0. This improves the tonal range considerably and reveals a lot of detail even in the highlights. I usually give the contrast and saturation settings a small boost also.

Once the image has opened in Photoshop, I convert the Image mode to 16 bit/channel. This gives me a much larger colour space to work in. It means that even though the final image will be downsampled to 8 bit/channel, much more image data will be retained. Minimal spiking and no gaps will appear in the final histogram if done correctly (if you don’t know what this means, don’t worry, it’s not vital).

While the foreground is well exposed, the top of the image still looks slightly washed out. By duplicating the background layer and setting the new layers blending mode to multiply I can easily darken the top. I then used a very large soft eraser to remove the lower section of the new layer, revealing the original below.

Compare the difference below.

Cropping the image is almost as important as the initial composition. I chose the crop below to remove some softness at the edges of the frame, and also the foot of my tripod, which strayed into the frame.

My final steps were a bit of cloning to remove the small patch of sky in the top right and some final levels, curves and saturation tweaks.

Weighing in on the IE6 debate

The push to relegate it to the Recycle bin stepped up a notch when Google announced that YouTube would no longer support Internet Explorer 6. The ageing browser stubbernly persists, despite many campaigns to kill it. It’s lack of support for web standards requires extra development and maintenance times. From a designer and developers point of view, the sooner it dies, the better, especially when you consider all the freely available modern browsers, including IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera.

W3Cschols report IE6 having a market share of 14.9% in June (I suspect a Firefox skew in the W3C stats, which stand at 44%). Many of these users are reportedly in administrations and business, where IT managers are reluctant to upgrade. (If anyone thinks I’m taking a snipe at our IT managers, I’m not. The College uses the latest browsers, usually with multiple browsers on each machine).

Hopefully more large influential sites will follow suit and stop supporting the dinosaur that is IE6. Then we can finally consign IE6 to history.

Photography update

I added a new series of images from South Donegal to the site. They were shot on and around Sliabh League and Glencolmcille.  You can see them here.

On another note, these will be among the final images shot with my current setup based on Canons EOS 350D. While a great consumer digitalSLR and a good entry into the Canon family of lenses, it was getting a bit limited in terms of resolution compared with newer models, and the lack of a full frame sensor made lens selection a little limited, especially at the wide end.

My wallet now considerably lighter, I eagerly await delivery of a shiny new EOS 5D Mk II. This will become the core of my new system. It features a full frame sensor, which means true wide angle shots with less distortion, and less noise, even at higher ISO settings. The camera ships with a 24-100mm f4 lens, which has garnered great reviews. The addition of IS (image stabilisation) will be an added boon, particularly as many of my images are taken handheld. That lenses range will be extended by the addition of the 100-400mm f4.5-5.6, also with IS. It’s a heavy beast, but very stable when tripod mounted.

I’ll post a report and some comparison images once I get my grubby mitts on them.

Back from holidays

I’m just back from a fortnight in Praia des Macas, Portugal. Situated at the edge of Sintra National Park, it provided a great base from which to explore the surrounding beaches, forests and villages. And bars and resteraunts of course. The spectular Pena Palace and Moorish Castle were less than 15 minutes drive away, and could be seen for miles, perched as they are on a high forested ridge above Sintra town.

I half filled a 4gb card with photos, many of my one year old niece (who was on her first sun holiday) splashing in the pool, but mainly with shots of the stunning surroundings.

You can see some more images here >>>

DesignLYIT & Inkwell update

I haven’t posted for a while, so I figured it was time for an update. The LYIT design departments end of year exhibitions were a resounding success, with graduates showing work in Graphic Design, Product design, Digital media and Motion Graphics. We are particularly pleased with the Motion Graphics MA graduates, as they are our first from our MA in Motion Graphics course. Applicant numbers for next September look good, so the program should be secure, which is comforting, considering these economic times.

I’ve uploaded the new stylesheet for Inkwell, and it seems to be working well. I’ve also added some content to the photography section, but the print section still needs to be added.

It remains a work in progress.