Two "topazed" shots from my HDR folder - a blast from the past

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I was going through my photo archives (and I have thousands of photos from shooting digital and film the last 9 years) and came across a folder marked "Topazed". This was when HDR photography was a newly discovered technique used to "jazz" up contrast and saturation of a shot. I had downloaded a trial version of the software from Topaz Labs and added it to the Lightroom to experiment with it. To achieve an HDR effect, one brackets the shot, +1, 0 and -1 or +2, 0 and -2 as intended, it is important that the camera is on a tripod, a good sturdy tripod, otherwise the results would not be very pleasing. Today HDR photography is a thing of the past, replaced by smart photo filters that can correct, alter, render more beautiful than real one's images in a thousand ways. I am exaggerating, but you get the point.

Both of these shots are HDR images. I like the fact that they were not taken to extreme, that the images closely represent what I saw and wanted to capture with my camera. The black and white landscape image below was of a park in Palo Alto late afternoon, shooting into the sun intentionally for the effect. Three bracketed shots taken in succession were then combined and converted into gray scale in Lightroom.

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The picture below of the Baskin-Robbins joint in San Jose at the corner of The Alameda and Race Street was a HDR in color. This iconic Baskin-Robbins hang out was somewhat out of place because its diner looking neon lit facade did not quite fit this part of San Jose. a mile long at best, The Alameda had a little of everything, the new and the old, a church, a Chinese take out, a fancy Thai restaurant, New York Pizza, offices and Starbucks strategically located from Coffee Bean, yes, two nemesis, diagonally from each other, separated only by the only street. A little out of place to me, I remember wondering when it might give way to something more popular with the Gen Y, or the Gen X and the Millennials, perhaps a Pinkberry. Well, it did finally give way to a burger joint - a popular joint named Five Guys Burgers and Fries that serves up finger licking good burgers, grilled fresh, variety of ways one could order one's salad, beers and sodas. Its interior decor hints of a no frills college town eatery with a hint of a pub. On most nights, parking is hard to find with patrons trying for a spot on nearby residential streets. Looking at this picture of Baskin-Robbins basking in its old glory brings back a little nostalgia, a little sadness. I feel for an iconic eatery whose time has come to pass.

RawShooter software and a trip to the coast

Over the weekend, while on my second visit to Santa Cruz and Capitola, I made a series of shots of classic cars parked in the city square in Capitola. The end of the pier next to the Fish and Tackle shop were a dozen or so wooden canoes painted in red and blue....a colorful sight and I clicked my shutter away. A perfect day to be spending time in the popular seaside town, temperature was in the low 70s and light breeze in the air and sailboats in the harbor. We looked at each other and concluded that a glass of wine and lunch was in order. We proceeded to a restaurant with a view of the ocean and had a sumptuous lunch, the day could not be more perfect!!!


Softwares such as Photoshop, RawShooter, Topaz and Photomatix offer the creative photographer a mirade of tools to explore the boundaries of art and photography. (Click here to read my blog on HDR photography) A new software I recently added to my photo tool box is RawShooter. A standalone freeware that has sped up my post processing workflow tremendously. RAW files are displayed as thumbnails for quick preview and one can further group them into various priority folders for post processing or to send to Recycle Bin. Post processing has never been easier and adjustments made are saved as settings under "RW Settings" folder, leaving your original RAW files untouched. There is the usual "slide ruler" adjustment on exposure, saturation, highlight, shadow, saturation, hue, color temperature, tint much like in Photoshop. When you are done post processing the image, go to the "Batch Convert" tab and add your selected photos to the list. RawShooter will then apply your post processing settings to a copy of the RAW file and store the the processed image in a "Converted" folder in tiff format. Any changes you made are made to a copy of the RAW files and not the original which remains in your folder unaltered.


What a great software and it is FREE!! I have started reviewing all my old photo RAW files, giving it a spring cleaning and freezing up some much needed space on my external photo hard drive. Anyone who shoots RAW know how tedious post processing workflow can be, I highly recommend downloading Rawshooter as an alternative to Photoshop to speed up your workflow.

Topazed!!!

Found a new tool to keep my creative juice going :) there is always something new to explore on my day off and find your groove as they say it. This time it is the Topaz plug in for Photoshop (I use CS2). I am using a 30 day trial and so far so good. It is certainly very arty, resulting in very dramatic image if you have a good starting image that is correctly exposed image or a fun image to dabble with.

For those who are learning about Topaz plug in for the first time. Topaz is a very similar to Photomatix HDR software, but offers a few quick adjustments on details, exposure, contrast, highlight by easily dragging a ruler slider on the menu. It is really for those who are drawn to Photography art or arty photography.

Here are a couple of my topazed images I like:

"Expansive wild mustard field and an old barn house in Milpitas

"The wooden gate of the wetlands in Alvioso. Compare this image with the tone mapped HDR image in my original posting if you scroll down to the bottom of the entire page"

"The famed Malibu fishing pier, slightly topazed"

Finally there is the purple daisy field taken last spring along a bike path in Marina del rey, CA. It is one of my stock photos transformed....

Daisy field "topazed"
If you are a photography traditionalist, please pardon me for pushing the limits here. I am always exploring the possibilities of a new creative tool. Guess you could say I am more of an arty photographer...frequently tipping my toes in the creative arty world to see what else is possible and then take three steps back - my own way of finding my own limits.

A word of caution: Topaz is not always stable, and does hang or refuse to process images from time to time forcing me to reboot my computer. From what I gathered from the many postings on the web, it is a known problem. So keep that in mind



Update on March 1st 2009: the Topaz Adjust trial plug in I downloaded has been unstable, frequently showing an error message that it cannot process due to program error. I had uninstalled and re-installed a few times and it would work only once or twice and the same error message would re-appear. So as of now, I have uninstalled it from PS CS2. This is a known program and widely reported on the web. There does not seem to be a bug free version at this point as the problem persists for those with lots of RAM space and those using the 2.6 version.