In addition to over 150 full-color images I've shot over the last six years, my new book, Window Seat: The Art of Digital Photography and Creative Thinking (O'Reilly Media, February 2006), also includes my suggestions for thinking creatively, as well as detailed information about how to make great-looking images of clouds, mountains, farmland, and water, while photographing through airplane windows. Here is an explanation of a few of the techniques I used to transform the images I captured with my camera into the final images that appear in the book.

A note on exposures: When capturing images, I usually try to open the aperture as far as I can. This allows me to focus on the clouds or landscape while minimizing the appearance of dirt, scratches, or ice on the multilayered window pane.

Image 1. Wide-angle view of clouds

Technical Data

• Camera: Nikon N90s with a 28-70mm lens.
• Film: Fujichrome Velvia (ISO 50) daylight film.
• Scanner: Imacon Flextight Precision
• Image size: 7650 by 5200 pixels, 16-bit, 227MB file.
• Image processing: Adobe Photoshop CS2

Technique

In this case, the original image was quite flat (lacking in contrast); it had a color cast in the highlights, and the left side was a lot lighter than the right (Figure 1-1). To create the final image, I had to do a lot of dodging and burning. The best way to do this is to use adjustment layers--they're flexible, non-destructive, and offer optimal control when making selective and global adjustments.

To begin, I selected the top and bottom corners of the left side of the image with the Lasso tool. I didn't worry about adding a feather to the selection because I knew that after I added the adjustment layer I would be able to soften the edge. I added a Curves adjustment layer (which automatically creates a mask from the selection). I pulled the curve down to darken the left side of the image until it matched the right. Then I blurred the mask of the adjustment layer (Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur), changing the hard edge of the selection to a soft edge, so it was impossible to for anyone to tell which areas were adjusted.

To brighten the highlights of the clouds, I selected them with the Magic Wand tool, created a Curves adjustment layer, and brightened them by moving the curve up. I blurred the adjustment layer's mask to soften the edges, as above. To remove the color cast in the highlights of the clouds, I chose Select -> Color Range, and sampled the highlights. Then I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and decreased the saturation. To further decrease the saturation in the center of the image, I added a second Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and desaturated the entire image.

Since I didn't want the top clouds and bottom ocean to lose any saturation, I used the Gradient tool (set to Reflective), with the foreground color set to black and the background set to white, and drew a gradient from the center of the image to the bottom. This neutralized the saturation adjustment from the black areas at the top and bottom of the mask, while allowing the adjustment to affect the image in the center (where the mask was white). I repeated this process with a Curves adjustment layer to lighten the center of the image.

When I was done making my adjustments (Figure 1-3), I saved the file as a layered PSD file so that I could return to it at any time to make further changes if I wanted to. (Note: I add an "L" to the end of the filenames of layered PSD files so I can easily find the layered versions of the files on my hard drive.)

Pages: 1, 2

Next Page