Café Ludwig

Vignettes

2012-01-18T18:24:00.001-05:00

There are several meanings to the word “vignette”. One sense is a decorative design. In optics, vignetting means incomplete coverage of an image and the subsequent darkening of edges.

Many photo editing applications provide a collection of effects that can be applied. “Vignette” is one of those effects. Picasa includes this effect.

Having spent a good share of my working career in the photography industry, I have great resistance to applying this effect to a photo. I have admired the lengths optical designers have gone to to reduce or eliminate vignetting and been astonished at the optical tricks – pardon the expression – that have been employed. It seems heretical to undo their hard work intentionally.

Yet, some photos lend themselves to manipulation to bring out the feeling of the image that the straight photo cannot relate as well. I applied other effects to reduce the detail and bring out just form and color to the images here. Primarily these were “painting” effects. Turns out that the additional use of vignettes to darken the edges seemed rather pleasing. The blending into darkness of the edges seems to bring out the light and make the images more luminous and more inviting than the straight photos.

The images are more impressive when displayed large. Click on the images to see them in a post on Silver Canvas.

My Way

Flower

Fallen Leaves

Fall Bossoms

Time of Plenty

.:.

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital images,effects,artistic effects,image manipulation,vignetting,vignette

SkyDrive Slide Shows once more

2012-01-09T17:49:00.001-05:00

SkyDrive continues to get improved, sometimes large steps with fanfare, at other times small incremental upgrades. Self-running slide shows are once again available.
Last July I lamented the loss of self-running slide shows in SkyDrive (Slideshows and the new SkyDrive). The upgrade in November 2011 restored that feature. It is now not quite as nice. The old Silverlight version provided pleasant surround shades and could be launched from the link. The current version is plainer looking and requires the viewer to click on a “Play slide show” link.
Here, to test the present implementation, is a photo collage that links to an album with these photos. Be sure to click the “Play slide show” link in the upper right area to start the show. This post, coming just after the holidays in early January 2011, uses food photos – what else? They have been accumulated over the past months for another project, but seemed just yummy for this post illustrating the SkyDrive slide show feature.
Note: Some of the photos load faster than others – there is a mix of resolutions for testing quality and speed.

By the way, the little bug demonstrated in my video in that July post has also been corrected. Thank you Microsoft!
For other recent improvement to SkyDrive, please see SkyDrive improves file and folder management (over at This ‘n That).

.:.

Technorati Tags: photography,digital photography,digital imaging,slide show,SkyDrive,Windows Live SkyDrive

Happy Holidays!

2011-12-07T11:53:00.001-05:00

Once again this year I prepared an image to share, and to wish all my friends and readers a joyful holiday season. You have already seen it in the post Image Trickery, but click it again here for a larger view in Gallery Ludwig.

One card just is not enough, so here is another version that I used in a Senior Academy workshop article.

Happy holidays and all the best to you!

Ludwig

.:.

Image Trickery

2011-12-03T20:33:00.001-05:00

Pictures don’t lie, but they sure can tell tales! They can also serve as the basis for interesting, personal art. “Artistic effects” – tools offered in Microsoft Office 20110 applications – can transform otherwise uninspiring photographs into amazing images.
In other posts I described a number of these tools, in this article I want to take up some of the more unusual effects that are available and further show how you can combine effects for even more effects.
To start here is a mosaic, or “tiled”, picture of a robin. The pixelation effect is called “Light Screen” in “Picture Tools”. It is very dependent on the size of the original image, to get just the right tile spacing may require scaling the photo before inserting it into a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document. This effect was not very impressive when applied to the original photo, so I first used another effect, “Plastic Wrap”. I saved that effect (right-click > “Save as picture…”). “Plastic Wrap” is a rather neat effect, but doing this to a robin might get me in trouble with the animal protection folks. Really, no creature war harmed!
Let’s turn to a less controversial photo subject, a bunch of leaves. Here I applied “Mosaic Bubbles”. The illustration here is a small portion to show the bubbles better. Now, how about a plastic wrap on this one?
Again a cutout is used to show the effect better in this small blog.
This makes for a totally different look, the bubbles are still there but now they look collapsed and the whole surface is shiny.
How can you use this effect, or effect combination? Well, that all depends on you, the artist. If you like it, it is good.
Now, let’s continue with the trickery. I will stick to my leaves and add a twist.
First some posterizing using the “Cutout” effect. Then, to make it more like a drawing, I add edges with the “Photo Copy” tool. In an earlier article I demonstrated the “Photo Copy” effect – like a very old-fashion copy machine from decades ago. With a good bit of transparency this gives a nice print, or wall paper, effect.

The three images here show the progression so far. Remember, after each effect is applied, the image is saved. The image is then replaced in Word with the saved one. This is the way to add effect upon effect.
Now I will roll out the canvas and use the “Texturizer” effect. To continue the trickery I load another image, this one of a small snake, and remove everything but the snake with the “Remove Background” tool. Setting both images to “Text Wrap – Tight” allows one image to be freely dragged over the other one. Here is the result:

One final trick. In Word not only can you superimpose one image on another, you can do the same with text. A picture of an old cabin serves as the base, I won’t tell you all of the effects applied because I lost count, trying one, then another until I was happy with the result. However, the last and predominant effect is “Glow Edges”. Text uses a “Text Effect” to put the glow around the letters.

My best wishes to all for a joyous and happy Holiday Season!
Hope you can spare some time to take some great photos, and maybe use these tools to have fun with your pictures.
“Artistic Effects” in the Microsoft Office 2010 applications were demonstrated in these other articles:

Painting with Word – the “Paint Brush”, “Marker”, and “ Watercolor Sponge” effects.
Doodling in Office – pencil and drawing effects.
Excel in Art – the effects called “Cement”, “Glass”, “Glow Edges”, and “Cutout”.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office 2010,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

Excel in Art

2011-11-07T20:10:00.001-05:00

Of course, you can! But this is not about helping you to the pinnacle as an artist, this article is really about “Art in Excel”, Microsoft Office 2010 Excel to be a little more specific. Like Word and PowerPoint, Excel provides the same “Picture Tools” with, among many other options, “Artistic Effects”.
Painting and drawing transformations were discussed in earlier posts (see bottom of article). Here I wish to take up a few of the more unusual and interesting effects.
Before I dive in, there are some technical details I must cover. When applying the artistic effects in Office application only one can be used. So you select the one you want and that’s it. There is also the question of how you get your masterwork out of the program. There is a bit of bad news, but first the good news. In Word 2010 just right-click the modified image. The new menu has an option “Save as Picture…” with permits you to save the image in its original size – full resolution.
This option is not available in either Excel 2010 or PowerPoint 2010. In those applications you can use only “Copy”. This command is like doing a screen capture of just the picture, the copied image is just the displayed size. So you must make sure that you have displayed the image in a sufficient size on your monitor to get adequate resolution.
Many of the effects are sensitive to the size of the inserted picture. The effects typically are less effective on large photos and show up much more noticeably on smaller images.

The illustration above uses the “Glass” effect on the photo of the flower. The effect is adjustable in “Scaling” which was set to 100 for both the larger image (inserted from the original size) and the smaller image which was reduced in size prior to being inserted. You can see the marked difference. This does provide you with wider options for creating your art.
Lets look at a different effect on this same set of photos: “Glow Edges”.

Once again you can see the different “effectiveness'’. Both images use the default setting of “Smoothness” of 3 (scale ranges to 10) with 15% transparency.
An effect that I find particularly appealing and useful is “Cutout” which is more commonly known as “posterizing”. This effect translates a photo into graphic areas as they might be used in a poster painting. Here is a picture that shows that effect well. You can select “Number of shades” from 0 to 6. This image uses 3 “shades”.
A little higher up, I slipped in one other effect, “Cement”. That effect makes a photo look like it was printed on a rough cement surface. There is also a canvas type “Texturizer” surface offered.
Now with all these art tools in Excel is there any reason to think that you cannot excel in art?
Some of the other “artistic effects” available in the Office programs are discussed in other posts in this small series:

Painting with Word – the “Paint Brush”, “Marker”, and “ Watercolor Sponge” effects.
Doodling in Office – pencil and drawing effects
Image Trickery – effects “light Screen”, “Mosaic Bubbles”, “Plastic Wrap”, “Texturizer”, and combining of effects.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

Doodling in Office

2011-10-24T18:04:00.001-04:00

Like many others I have spent way too much time in boring meetings and my pencil – instead of taking notes – “pursued artistic license”. Maybe that is the reason for the neat “artistic effects” provided in Microsoft Office 2010 products like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Several of these effects transform a photo or other inserted picture, into renderings that look as if they were done in pencil, pastel, or chalk. These media and one other effect, “Photo copy”, are the topic of this article.

Let me use one of my hawk pictures to illustrate some of the effects.

Here, in order from left to right, is a “Pastels Smooth”, “Pencil Grayscale”, “Line Drawing”, and “Pencil Sketch”. The effects can be adjusted, for example in pencil size in the “Pencil Grayscale” effect can be set from “0” to “100”. The four examples in the composite here were made with settings of 1, 11, 20, and 100 from left to right.

Other effects are similarly adjustable. As you would expect, some settings are more appealing than others depending on the original picture.
All of the effects offer “transparency”. The transparency setting allows more or less of the original picture to show through. The illustrations above were all made with the setting at zero.Letting some of the original show works better for some effects than others.
I particularly like the “Photo copy” effect with some transparency. This effect emulates photo copies of days gone by when copies of photos showed just strong outlines in black or white. Here is the original photo, a couple of “photo copies” with no transparency and “detail” of 2 and 6, and the last one at detail set to 10 (the maximum setting) and transparency at 60 (percent).

Another effect is “Chalk Sketch”. I am showing here the effect with the Pressure” set at 3 (the range is 0 to 4) and transparencies of 0, 30, 50, and 70.

You can see how this wide range of possibilities can help you get an illustration just right for what you would like to do.
Some of the other “artistic effects” available in the Office programs are discussed in other posts in this small series:

Painting with Word – the “Paint Brush”, “Marker”, and “ Watercolor Sponge” effects.
Excel in Art – the effects called “Cement”, “Glass”, “Glow Edges”, and “Cutout”.
Image Trickery – effects “Light Screen”, “Mosaic Bubbles”, “Plastic Wrap”, “Texturizer”, and combining of effects.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images.,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

Painting with Word

2011-10-07T16:20:00.001-04:00

Poets paint glorious pictures with words. Here, however, I am talking about painting with Microsoft Office Word 2010. Word, and other Office apps, Excel, PowerPoint, offer over twenty “Artistic Effects” for manipulating pictures. I have had a lot of fun recently transforming a number of my photos in a variety of ways, see my “Café Art collection”, and used these effect on many of the images.
Here I wish to share some of the way these tools work as seen from an engineering or teaching perspective rather than an artist’s view. Specifically in this article I will discuss just three of the effects: “Marker”, “Paint Brush”, and “Watercolor Sponge”. Other effects I will discuss in other posts.
All of the effects permit a range of options such as “brush size”, and the effect also varies with the resolution of the picture.

Paint Brush

As the name implies, “Paint Brush” simulates the effect of a brush painted picture. For some images this can be a very pleasant and effective treatment. Here I am using a photo of a hawk in flight.
This first image, using a brush size of 4 on a medium resolution (1145 pixel wide) photo provides the “painted” feel that I like best. Larger brush sizes cause too much detail to be lost in this image, smaller ones do not provide enough of the painted look. Here are a couple of extremes:

The left image used brush size 2 on the 1145 pixel photo, the right one brush size 10 on a 400 pixel photo.

Marker

Marker is an unusual effect tool. The size of the marker “dab” is not adjustable, but the density is. This is illustrated in the two images here. The first one uses a “size” of 97, the second of 20. You can see that the “20” image has just a few dabs, while the “97” looks more like a marker dabbed painting.
With this effect I did not notice much difference in the appearance when using low or high resolution images.
Clearly the lower size does not look like a painting. It looks like a photo with smudges.
Since the brush size is not adjustable this effect will work well with images that have large graphic forms, less so with photos that have a lot of detail.

Watercolor Sponge

For this last effect I will again use a flower picture. Here is a matrix of results. The top row image has a resolution of 600 pixels, middle row is 1200 pixels, and the bottom row 2400 pixels. The left images use a “Watercolor Sponge” of size 1, the middle use size 5, and the right images use a size 10.

The artistic effects provided by Word 2010 may not have as wide a flexibility as one might like, but they allow sufficient manipulation to achieve some interesting results. As you can see from the illustrations here, the resolution of the starting photo determines the how the effect will appear.

Technical Details

If you are not familiar with the Picture Tools in the Office 2010 applications here is a very quick overview of how to get to them.

Insert a photo from the Insert tab (Illustration – Picture). The inserted photo will be selected. Click on an image to select it. The Picture Tools tab is only shown when an image is selected. The Artistic Effects are in the Adjust group as shown in the illustration here. The adjustment options are brought up with the bottom item “Artistic Effects Options …”. As you can see here, the selection is made using thumbnails showing the effects on the selected image.
Some of the other effects are discussed in other posts on this topic:

Doodling in Office – pencil and drawing effects.
Excel in Art – effects “Cement”, “Glass”, “Glow Edges”, and “Cutout”.
Image Trickery – effects “Light Screen”, “Mosaic Bubbles”, “Plastic Wrap”, Texturizer”, and effect combinations.

.:.

Technorati Tags: Digital images,photography,image manipulation,artistic effects,Microsoft Office,Word 2010,Excel 2010,PowerPoint 2010

Blogger offers new designs, improved performance

2011-09-27T22:01:00.001-04:00

Blogger took a major step today with a rebuild and modernization using the latest web technologies, HTML5 and CSS3. If your blog is hosted on Blogger be sure to check out what is new. You just may want to restyle the looks of your blog.

There are seven new designs with plenty of ways to customize the look and feel.

You owe it to yourself to explore the possibilities. Be sure to check out the backgrounds and other features.

Once you have decided on a new look and clicked “Apply to blog” on each option page, there is one more important step.

Open Windows Live Writer, click the Blog Account tab. Then click Update theme. Moments later you will see your Live Writer showing the new design, fonts, and sizes.

Here is how it looks for my Café Ludwig blog:

If you are reading this at Live Writer Basics click Café Ludwig to see this post over there – and vice versa.

Happy blogging!

.:.

Technorati Tags: blogging,Blogger,blog theme,blog design

Café Art

2011-09-06T17:29:00.001-04:00

It has taken me way too long to come up with a name for my collection of playful transformations of photos. Much of my free time at Case was spent at the Cleveland Museum of Art across the street from the school, so calling these images “art” seemed totally sacrilegious. The term “café art” for images that I would be willing to see hanging on a wall is, I hope, acceptable.
The collection is newly “curated” – as I dig out older ones I will add them, and there will be new ones from time to time. Enjoy!

Cafe Art

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

.:.

New photos from Stephen Blecher

2011-09-02T18:03:00.002-04:00

Stephen Blecher added photos to his “Visiting Artists” gallery at Café Ludwig. Here is one of the new ones:

Click on the image to view the Visiting Artists Gallery page.

.:.

When the photo isn’t good enough: create art

2011-08-15T21:17:00.001-04:00

Well, art is in the eye of the beholder. This wouldn’t be the first time that I have been turned away at an art show.
But here, for your viewing pleasure, my little moth: As it was on the wall.

And here, many hours later, as “Moth Balls”:

.:.

Background to the rescue?

2011-08-12T20:53:00.001-04:00

Have you ever tried to figure out what great photos have in common?
Sorry, but I don’t have a representative collection to share here and let you decide. So you will have to put up with my ideas, at least until there is sufficient feedback to this post to set me straight.
In looking through several albums of photos that are considered good either by their creators or others, it was easy for me to see that great photos are strongly oriented on their subject, have no extraneous details, that there is a strong visual design, snappy, often exaggerated, colors, and a simple but supportive background. The background sets off but supports the subject.
I came across a rather “blah” photo when looking through my most recent “catch” and I said to myself, this might work on a different background.
No sooner said than done.
And here, dear reader, is where you come in. Alongside is the photo on different solid backgrounds. The original is included, it should not take you but a few seconds to identify it.
Which, in your opinion, works best?
Why do you think so?
Would you hang any of these on a wall in your room?
Do any of the solid backgrounds improve the photo?
Can you think of some other background that would work better?
And lastly, but maybe most importantly, can a different background really make a difference?
Please let me know your thoughts, either with a comment on this post or any other means of communicating. I would love to hear from you.

.:.

Technorati Tags: photography,digital photography,backgrounds,great photos

Slideshows and the new SkyDrive

2011-07-01T20:57:00.001-04:00

For the most part we take pictures to preserve memories, and we enjoy reliving these moments by sharing the photos. In the early days of photography the rare and precious images were presented as prints, often elaborately framed. As the cost came down and cameras became accessible to everyday users, albums became a means of sharing. Then the thirty-five millimeter camera and Kodachrome ushered in the era of the slide show.
Albums are still very much with us, but the computer, the Internet and digital photography have given “slideshow” a totally new meaning. Online photo sharing sites are ubiquitous. One of the pleasant features everywhere is the self-running slideshow. So when Microsoft recently polished up their SkyDrive service and omitted the automated presentation feature, I and a whole lot of others cried foul (see my post: The new SkyDrive – Bouquets and Brickbats. The picture of the yellow flower here links to a small album so you can see the new look – Maybe the complaint has been corrected by the time you get to this album).
Here is a tongue-in-cheek look (just 50 seconds) at the new SkyDrive with its miniature slideshows in the album view and a light-hearted stab pointing out an unfortunate little bug:

A witty peek at the new SkyDrive

Things are never as dark as they seem, and the self-paced slideshow of SkyDrive albums is by no means gone for now. If you have Windows Live Messenger you can still get gorgeous, full-screen, self-running slideshows of your friends albums. To illustrate this other way to an automatic slideshow, view the movie clip below (this one is just over 2 minutes in length). This clip shows the desktop of my virtual friend “Student M”. He launches Live Messenger and sees some images. Moving the pointer to these starts a tiny slide show. Clicking on one opens a viewer with all of the expected slideshow features – even allowing full screen view.
This little movie is presented in HD for better enjoyment. You can double-click on the image to go to YouTube directly where you can see it in full-screen “high definition” (alas, high speed access to the Internet is required for best viewing).

Getting to a slideshow by way of Messenger

How do you share your albums? Are slideshows important to you? I would really like to see your comments.

.:.

Technorati Tags: photography,digital photography,slide show,SkyDrive in HTLM5,SkyDrive,Messenger,Live Messenger

“Arborists at Work” – telling a picture story

2011-06-18T16:37:00.001-04:00

We had some tree work done and I decided to do “the story”. A picture story, like any other, should have an introduction, the main part and an ending. With photos there are some additional considerations. First: Take lots of pictures. With a large number of images the “just right” ones are much easier to pick.

The “title” photo

Picking the right image to illustrate the story needs care. It is not only the first picture the reader sees, unless it is captivating, it might be the only one. This picture should tell a good part, if not all of the story. It also will be introducing the story in places like Facebook. So it needs to work even when reduced to a 50 by 50 pixel square icon.

The introduction

Consider the layout and presentation. In a blog like this one, there is limited horizontal space. Although vertically the story can go on a long way, when first visited the reader sees just the top part. In a newspaper the lead stories vie for space “above the fold”. Browsers too, have a “fold”, the part that shows without need of scrolling. The trick is, of course, to captivate the reader and have a picture that will be just partially shown – but interesting enough for the reader to want to scroll down to see it all.

Now the reader is into the story.

The story

This particular story lends itself to being told in sequential order.

Some of the images follow in rapid order and can be shown as an array. Some need no explanations, while some are more meaningful with explanatory text.

Selection of the photos can be agonizing, that is especially true when you have several hundred to select from as I did. Then the images need to be carefully edited to show only what is truly part of the story. Anything not relating to it should be ruthlessly cropped away.

The wrap-up or ending

Even picture stories need and end. For this story two images work for me: The departure of the work crew and the stump – the only remaining evidence of the work.

These are my thoughts on photo essays. You can see my picture story over in Gallery Ludwig – it has its own page “Arborists at work”.

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital pictures,digital images,photo story,photo essay,arborist

.:.

Gallery Pages

2011-06-08T16:32:00.001-04:00

Just a reminder to my readers that the gallery page has been modified and a new page added. The “Gallery – Visiting Artists” may seem a familiar “static” page, but the links lead to very dynamic galleries. These are frequently updated and well worth repeat visits.

The page “Ludwig’s Galleries” is just getting underway with more additions to come.

Also extensively reworked and expanded is Gallery Ludwig – my showplace of images – little chatter, lots of pictures.

Enjoy the images!

“Green” - a photo theme

2011-05-13T14:16:00.001-04:00

Over in the Photo-Focus group the theme for May 2011 is simply “green”. Each month the group sets a theme on which members can contribute two photos on the group’s photo sharing site.

Setting a theme, whether by a group, or just on a personal basis, has the effect of stimulating thinking and seeing. Sometimes we grow stale in our hobby of photography. Having a little challenge helps us to strive and to work a bit harder.

On a morning walk through our favorite local park, I tried to see “green”. Not at all hard, now that spring is about to turn into summer here in the South. In fact, there was very little that was not green. The challenge was to see things that would be enjoyable, even meaningful, to another viewer.

So did I limit myself to green subjects? Of course not. One should never pass up a pleasant view in a quest for something specific. There were plenty of pretty flowers, a butterfly on a thistle, a passing hawk, my favorite rock in good light. In all, I came how with 55 exposures, not a bad haul for a short stroll. That should yield a handful that I can share.

My routine for importing to the computer is to first use Windows Live Photo Gallery for the transfer process. This allows assigning tags to groups of photos. Next I add some additional meta data, rename all the photos and then move the folders to my “photo store” drive. Only then do I open Photo Gallery and have a look. Some quick post-processing to bring out the best, then resizing before uploading to my photo sharing sites.

You can see some of my photos here. Click the images for a larger view.

Enjoy!

.:.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Photo Gallery,Photo Gallery,photography,digital pictures,digital images

Shared blogging with Live Writer

2011-04-24T15:10:00.001-04:00

It all started as a long awaited get-together in Savannah, Georgia, Tom and I have been friends since our college days but don’t get to visit very often, as we live on opposite ends of the country. We had a great time seeing and photographing the sights. When we compared some of our pictures, our different ways of seeing and capturing the world became strikingly apparent. We decided on a joint blog to share some of our photos side-by-side so others could enjoy the diverse approaches possible in photography.

With three time zones and over 2500 miles between us, working on a joint post is a challenge. Windows Live Writer to the rescue!

We use WordPress, but it works just the same with Blogger or other blogging services. One of us starts a post in Live Writer, then uploads it as a draft.

The draft can be easily accessed by the other partner. The process is just a few clicks: Click the “blue tab”, as the pointer is moved down to “Open recent post” the list of published posts is displayed. But instead of clicking on a post, clicking on Open recent posts brings up a new dialog.

The “Open” dialog shows the folders of drafts and recent posts. It also lists the blog accounts that are installed.

Clicking on the blog name causes Live Writer to connect to the blog site and to download the titles of the posts – or the pages if you are using WordPress.

Clicking on the post title selects it and then OK starts Live Writer to download the post. This way you always have the most current material. A really nice Live Writer feature.

Now I can see exactly what my partner has proposed in text, pictures, and layout. I can just add my additions, or change what is already there. I can upload it again as a draft. Once we are agreed on the post it is just a matter of publishing in the normal way by clicking Publish.

“Shared blogging” using Live Writer in a slightly unusual way is easy, quick, and fun to do.

Click on the image above to see the blog “Two Cameras – Two Views”.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live Writer, Live Writer, blogging, shared blogging

Technorati Tags: Windows Live Writer,blogging,shared blogging

The gateway to my blogs and galleries is Café Ludwig

.:.

My Photo Gallery blogs - a progress report

2011-04-09T22:15:00.001-04:00

My enthusiasm about using a blog to build a photo gallery continues. The ease of putting a page together with links to enhance the viewers experience and arranging the layout in a pleasing way is just immensely satisfying and enjoyable.

My galleries are still very much under construction. There are some misplaced images – not everything works on the sites exactly as it looked in Windows Live Writer. There are also differences in the way browsers present the sites.

Still, perfection is a but a journey, so here some previews:

Click the images here to go to the sites.

Your comments and suggestions are most welcome.

The gateway to my blogs and galleries is Café Ludwig

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital pictures,blogging,Windows Live Writer,photo gallries,slide shows,photo albums

.:.

Spring - Albums and Slide Shows

2011-03-26T17:27:00.001-04:00

It is springtime once again. We all enjoy sharing the delightful images from gardens, parks, and just around town. Here are some of mine:

The photos link to albums and slide shows. In part to illustrate different ways of sharing photos and also to introduce a couple new sites for displaying my images.

You will have a chance to try Silverlight to present a slide show from my SkyDrive – and to view it another way if your browser can’t handle it.

I welcome your comments and feedback.

Enjoy!

Please also visit my blog on computer tips: This ‘n That

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live, Photos, Photo Gallery, photography, digital pictures, digital images, SkyDrive show, slide show, albums

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Photos,Photo Gallery,photography,digital pictures,digital images,SkyDrive show,slide show,albums,Windows Live Photo Gallery

.:.

A Gallery NEWS Page

2011-03-15T17:36:00.001-04:00

In another post (“The best sharing site? How about a combination”) I presented my views on building a gallery site just the way I like by using a blog as the basis. Also mentioned was the idea of using blog posts to announce the latest additions. Here is an illustration of that idea as seen in the new Internet Explorer 9:

This is a really neat way to present the newest photos and other “gallery news”. My “news” page is prepared using Windows Live Writer, as are the other pages of the “gallery”. That is an easy and flexible way to prepare the material. The few glitches, like varying ways that browsers interpret the photo locations, are easily taken care of. I am quite happy with the technique.

Here the link to the gallery: http://galleryludwig.wordpress.com/

And to the news page: http://galleryludwig.wordpress.com/news/

Enjoy!

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live, Live Writer, Windows Live Writer, Photos, blogging, photography, digital pictures, sharing

.:.

Technorati Tags: Photography,Windows Live,Live Writer,Windows Live Writer,Photos,blogging,digital pictures,sharing

.:.

Please also visit my blog on computer tips: This ‘n That

The best sharing site? How about a combination

2011-03-07T21:19:00.001-05:00

There are many photo sharing sites, and each has some desirable features. For me none offered all that I wanted, that includes a personalized look and feel, access to slide shows, panoramas, and more. My solution is a combination of several with the “entrance” based on a blog.

This allows using the “photo album” feature in Windows Live Writer to create the page layout I like and to link to my SkyDrive albums.

Another advantage of using a blog is the use of posts for the “latest additions” announcements.

Linking to various photo sharing sites, Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, Shutterfly, and others makes the site fun to use and easy to maintain. Live Writer is my maintenance and update tool.

I can add to my SkyDrive, Flicker or Picasa Web Albums right from Windows Live Photo Gallery. With the links on my “gallery site” already in place, I need do nothing more. The photos will show up in the slide shows.

Other tools, particularly Microsoft Image Composite Editor, can be used to make panoramas or extra large images. These can be hosted on SkyDrive and displayed with “Zoom.it”. You will also find a 360 degree Photosynth image. All that is made possible by using a blog – no single photo sharing site can do all this.

My “Gallery Ludwig” blog is a work in progress. I will be adding more pages and links and, of course, photos. Enjoy. The photos here link to two of the pages.

.:.

Please also visit my blog on computer tips: This ‘n That

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Photo Gallery, Photos, digital pictures, Photosynth, Zoom.it, Live Writer, blogging, blog, photo sharing, SkyDrive, slide show

.:.

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Windows Live Photo Gallery,Photo Gallery,Photos,digital pictures,Photosynth,Zoom.it,Live Writer,blogging,blog,photo sharing,SkyDrive show,slide show

Distortion and Perspective – tilting buildings

2011-02-20T20:39:00.001-05:00

Especially when using a wide-angle lens, or wide-angle setting, photographing tall buildings, trees, or other structures, causes the resulting photos to show the structures “falling in on themselves”. What causes that distortion, can it be avoided, and can it be fixed?
The situation is illustrated here in an exaggerated manner to show the problem. This is not distortion, although we may commonly call it “perspective distortion”. This is really how the world – optics, physics, and geometry – really work. When we look at the scene we seem not to see this distortion. Our brains take care of what comes through our eyes, instantly process the view, and present us with an “internal model of the world”. We know the buildings are vertical, and that is what we think we see.
Here is a view looking up at a building. Again there is much perspective distortion, but in this view it does not seem to bother us. When we look up, this is what we see also, and we accept this perspective as natural.
Why the difference? In the wide-angle view we think we are farther away then was actually the case. The camera covered a wider field of view than we would see. From an actual distance where we could take in that view with our eyes, we would not see the same perspective. So the image does not jive with our normal experience. Can that problem be avoided or corrected?
Yes, the perspective distortion can be avoided: Do not tilt the camera upwards. It is as simple as that. When the camera is horizontal, more specifically when the sensor plane is parallel with the vertical surfaces, the resulting photo will show all the vertical lines indeed parallel and vertical. That comes from the optics and geometry, but let’s not get into the science.
But, you say, I can’t get all of the building into the picture, and besides, that gets a lot of uninteresting foreground into the photo. So my first suggestion is rotate the camera to take vertical pictures. Now you can’t get in all that you want to show. So take several pictures. Here are a series of photos that were taken with the camera pretty much horizontal and rotated for vertical pictures.

Note that I took a series of photos that overlap the scene. The reason is so that I can let Windows Live Photo Gallery combine the photos into a panorama. Here it is. Now I have a wide-angle photo of this streetscape in Buckhead, Atlanta, Georgia, that looks pretty good. With some cropping and less of the monotonous foreground I get a nice photo.

Can Photo Gallery do such a nice stitching job with photos if I tilt the camera up a bit as I take the shots so that more of the buildings shows?
You may have seen claims that you can do that (see my post “Distortion and Perspective”). Unfortunately when you ask Photo Gallery to stich such a set it works out differently.
Here again is a set of five shots, this time with the camera tilted up to eliminate the foreground pavement.

Now hand them to the Panorama tool in Photo Gallery. Does it correct the perspective distortion? Take a look. The simple Panorama tool in Windows Live Photo Gallery does a fine job when you hold the camera to shoot horizontally. With photos that were taken aiming up, or down, the resulting stich will be more like part of a circular fish-eye image.
But there is a solution even for this set of photos. Photo Gallery, under the Create > More Tools command offers Create Image Composite… – if you have Microsoft Image Composite Editor installed. (It is a free download, you can get it here).
ICE, as I like to call it, is a very powerful and versatile stitching and perspective control program. It permits control over the projection of the resulting image – in this case I set it to Cylinder (Horizontal) because that matches the situation. The resulting image can be controlled in real time – you see exactly what you get as you drag the image with pointer. You can also crop the image right in ICE.
Here is a resulting picture from ICE with a horizontal view of over 100 degrees.

Notice that I have not completely eliminated the “tilting” – note the tall building at the left – it looks more natural this way.
So you see, perspective distortion is readily overcome. A bit of planning ahead and you can get the pictures you envision.
Good shooting to you!
For another post on perspective correction using ICE, see Perspective Correction using Image Composite Editor.

Please also visit my blog on computer tips: This ‘n That

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live, Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery, Photography, Photos, digital pictures, digital photography, digital imaging, ICE, Image Composite Editor, perspective correction, perspective control, perspective distortion, panorama

Technorati Tags: Photography,Photos,Windows Live,Photo Gallery,Windows Live Photo Gallery,digital pictures,digital photography,digital imaging,ICE,Image Composite Editor,perspective correction,perspective control,perspective distortion,panorama

Distortion and Perspective

2011-02-06T14:06:00.001-05:00

A while back a colleague posted:

Eliminate wide angle distortion with Panoramic photosHave you ever wished that you could capture a whole scene in one frame without having the trees/light poles/buildings slant towards the center? You can!

And then, unthinkingly, proceeded to confuse perspective and distortion as well as the readers.
In this post I would like to take up the first part: distortion.
Most of tzoom lenses on popular cameras present some barrel distortion on the low end of the focal length range. What is barrel distortion? Here is a photo taken with the lens covering about 76 degrees, the equivalent of a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera.

This is the inside of the famous Grill in Athens, Georgia. There was no way to step back far enough so I used the shortest focal length setting – 18mm. Note the curved ceiling. This is distortion. Here an exaggerated version with more barrel distortion to illustrate the effect.
The lens barrel distortion is pretty well gone at longer focal length settings. So I took several overlapping exposures of the same wall and stitched them into a panorama with Windows Live Photo Gallery. To show the stitching I did no cropping:

Well the barrel distortion is well reduced but now there is obvious perspective distortion. Live Photo Gallery does not provide any controls for the stitching process, but Microsoft Image Composite Editor, “ICE”, does. ICE allows shifting the combined image to achieve perspective control. I will have more on this in another post. For now here is the resulting image, again without cropping from ICE:

So it is possible to reduce wide-angle lens barrel distortion by using tiled exposures obtained at focal length settings that do not show the distortion.
The slanting tress/light poles/buildings is, however, a perspective problem. More on that in another post.

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Windows Live, Photo Gallery, ICE, Image Composite Editor, Photos, pictures, distortion, perspective, panorama, stitching photos

Technorati Tags: Windows Live,Windows Live Photo Gallery,Photo Gallery,ICE,Image Composite Editor,Photos,pictures,distortion,perspective,panorama,stitching photos

Happy Holidays! Word 2010 as my Art Studio

2010-12-02T17:37:00.001-05:00

Wishing you all the best for the Holiday season and the Coming Year!

This card has been in the works for well over a year. Last December I prepared decorations as I remember them from way back in Europe some seven decades ago: Home-made cookies and candy and real candles, of course.

Then came the photo session. The shot I finally settled on was this: You can see some of my set and how the lights were set up. File conversion, touch-up and cropping was done in Windows Live Photo Gallery. For the final picture editing and manipulation, I used Microsoft Office Word 2010 and the marvelous Picture Tools it provides. The image was converted using Artistic effects – Cutout, set to 6 shades. I added three shapes – a black box to define the background, a gradient for the glow around the candle and a four-point star for the light spikes. It is nice how images can be stacked with specific colors picked as the transparent layer. Cropping and the greeting text, with Text effects applied, finished it to my satisfaction.

Sure, I have image editing programs that can do all that, and better. But I enjoyed using the simple tools in Word, Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Paint, to create just what I wanted to share with you. We all enjoy making and receiving home-made gifts. This one I made for you!

Technorati Tags: Photography,photos,digital pictures,digital imaging,image effects,Windows Live,Windows Live Photo Gallery,Microsoft Word 2010,Paint,text effects

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, Photography, photos, digital pictures, digital imaging, image effects, Windows Live, Photo Gallery, Microsoft Word 2010, Paint, text effects

Noise reduction in photos

2010-11-17T18:35:00.001-05:00

In another post I showed how to lighten shadow detail in photos with strong lighting contrasts (Coping with harsh sunlight). The price one pays for lightening dark areas is making noise much more noticeable. Although there is no free lunch, it is possible to reduce the price. “Noise Reduction” to the rescue.

Here is an example photo, one that was taken in direct sunlight, with deep shadows in the subjects face. The strip shows a section of the original with the same section from heavily post-processed versions.

The left-most image is a crop from the original – clearly too dark to even recognize the child. Processing was done using Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011. In the second image the Adjust Exposure – Shadows slider was set full right, the edit mode closed to save the file and the process repeated. This just about eliminated the shadows. You can see the effect better by clicking on the image strip for a larger view. Noise became very prominent in the areas that had been dark.

Next I aggressively reduced noise, see third image. You can see that the image is “smoother” but has some ugly artifacts. In the “lighten shadows” operation the dark area was lightened by a factor of about six. See the histogram of a small area (original on top). The noise was also increased by this factor and was too high to be effectively eliminated by the noise reduction step.

How about doing the noise reduction first then the lighten shadows operation? The result is shown in the fourth image. Smoother, but notice how small detail (hair in front of hat) has been blurred.

The fifth, right-most, image was produced by reducing noise, but less aggressively, then lightening the shadows, followed by another noise reduction step. This last procedure produced the most acceptable result.

Still no free lunch, but using all the editing tools available in Photo Gallery can go a long way to getting results you can share with pride.

Please also visit my blog on computer tips: This ‘n That

Technorati Tags: Photography,digital imaging,photos,enhance,editing,lighten shadows,reduce noise,Windows Live,Photo Gallery,Windows Live Photo Gallery

Clubhouse Tags: Clubhouse, story, how-to, Photography, digital imaging, photos, enhance, editing, lighten shadows, reduce noise, Windows Live, Photo Gallery, Windows Live Photo Gallery