sirfrogsworth

[sirfrogsworth]

Peter McKinnon did a video with a photographer named Garrett King. And he just went on a very long rant about lazy photographers who use Photoshop and "fixing it in post."

He continues... "You can't do that in film. You can't just make a bad decision and say "Oh, I'll fix it in post." (Not true. There was plenty of editing in dark rooms in the past. And now you can scan a film photo and literally manipulate it like a digital photo.) Fix it in post drives me nuts. That statement is so played out. It drives me nuts that people say that. Cuz dude, I don't work that way."

He also says that choosing film is the "hard path" and keeps talking about how lazy photographers who photoshop are.

I love film photography. I have an old Minolta that my mom gave me that I hope to restore and use someday.

But film photographers drive *me* nuts sometimes.

IT'S NOT A COMPETITION!

BOTH THINGS ARE COOL!

This idea that their way of making art is more valid or authentic than my way of making art is just a continuation of an old school mentality that really needs to die. There are still some photographers who will bully people because they use autofocus or aperture priority mode.

I actually think learning to be really good at Photoshop is much more challenging than learning to be good at photography. Sure, there are fields like photographic microscopy and product photography that require years to master, but I've been learning Photoshop for 20 years and I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of what is possible.

I have seen people with near 0 experience take an amazing picture.

I have seen people who barely know how their camera works take consistently good photos. It's the "using only power chords" version of photography.

But I have never seen someone with 0 experience photoshop something artistically impressive.

When people say "that looks Photoshopped" as if that is an insult, it really breaks my heart. Photoshop was a huge reason for my success. My ability to lay in bed and make funny things was essential to building my blog.

My post on Karl Taylor's Clinque photoshoot had so many comments saying his work "looked photoshopped" and it was a little frustrating.

Firstly because he actually sculpts with light and isn't actually very good at Photoshop. When he takes a picture, it pretty much looks like that from the start. The rest is just minor compositing work and blemish removal.

And secondly, because that kind of product photography predates Photoshop. Karl was doing this when Photoshop was just a baby.

In fact, still life photography was inspired by Dutch paintings of fruit and shit.

They were all, "I cannot stand sitting with another yappy model for days on end. I'm sick of people. I'm just going to paint *stuff* but with really amazing lighting."

But it is also frustrating because there is this mentality that digital tools are lesser. As if digital artists just press a few buttons and cheat-code their way into good images.

It's the same mentality people have about CGI. CG artists are the modern day sculpturists. They do the same thing as Michaelangelo or Rodin, just with different tools and in a different medium. Oh, but they also animate their sculptures in thousands of frames in multiple dynamic lighting environments all while maintaining photorealism.

To me, Thanos is just as artistically impressive as the statue of David or The Thinker.

Blair Bunting is a very talented photographer who mixes incredible photographic technique and lighting with his amazing photo manipulation skills.

And while these photos may not be as "authentic" as that film photographer's picture of a dude sitting on a truck...

I can assure you no laziness was involved in Blair's process.

Also, I really didn't want to bring up disability. But it is really difficult for me to do the physical process of photography. Sometimes I do not have the energy to get the perfect "in camera" exposure. Sometimes I won't even check my settings and I will snap a picture knowing that I can make it cool with editing. I just look at the histogram, make sure the data I need is there, and do the rest on my computer.

During my adventure to photograph a bridge in Alton, I was only able to take 6 photos. Usually I will take hundreds in a session. My fatigue got the better of me and I nearly had to go to the hospital after walking up a hill. (I was having a bad day. I'm better now.) I didn't get the photos I wanted to get. And on the way down that hill, as I was out of breath, I pulled out my phone and tried to snap a pic of something cool I saw in front of me. The phone had been set 2 stops underexposed from a previous shot and so the picture was pretty much all in shadow. And because I was walking super slow, I had just missed the sun over the horizon.

But it's a RAW file. And I knew I could probably do something with it. I could "fix it in post." Not because I was being lazy. Mostly because I was trying not to hyperventilate. Apparently, my body can't handle slight inclines any longer.

And this is what I came up with.

I'm not saying this is an amazing photo. And it would have been really cool if I hadn't missed the sun. But this is what my eyes saw as I came down the hill and I was able to recreate that with digital tools.

I think that is pretty cool.

[sirfrogsworth]

Grammarly, you are drunk.

[sirfrogsworth]

This comment gave me the warm fuzzies.

I think this is why teachers don't quit their jobs despite *gestures at everything wrong with US education*

I really like teaching. And I am hoping I can be successful at photography education. I swear once I get my house situation sorted I will have more bandwidth to work on that.

[sirfrogsworth]

Photo Restoration: Adventures in Upscaling - Part 2

Next up we have Mr. Katrina's Dad taking the kids out to see some Christmas decorations.

I was worried about the text on the shirt, but it seems as long as there is enough detail, the A.I. doesn't get confused.

Crops...

I don't feel it rendered the background blur very well, but I don't think it hurts the overall photo.

I just realized I can make this photo better.

Hang on...

After all of my lecturing about removing distractions I miss a giant one.

Last one...

Crops...

Again, I still wasn't crazy about how the upscaler rendered the bokeh of the lights, so I went in and added some bright hot spots and I think that helped.

I am really happy with these results and I think this is going to help me restore a lot of precious memories. And now I can even offer the option to make new prints of photos. Low resolution photos do not hold up well to printing.

I still have a lot to learn about this tool. I've done some other interesting tests that did not give me the same level of results. The other photos I restored had a weird texture in all of them—possibly from how they were scanned. And they did not work well with this tool.

I also tried a few of my recent photos and the results were nowhere near as drastic. Weirdly, I think the higher the quality of the original photo is, the less effective this tool is. But I may not be using it correctly.

Though I think it might be because the tool is trying its best not to alter the nature of the photo if it doesn't have to. With these super low resolution photos it has no choice but to go full beans to get a good result. Whereas on high quality photos it tries to be more subtle and dials it back.

But that is just a theory.

Still... holy crap this is cool.

Photo Restoration: Adventures in Upscaling - Part 1

After finishing my big photo restoration for Katrina's family I was organizing my files and noticed a scan I missed.

The scan was fairly low resolution and the photos were only 400x700 pixels.

But I was bored and restoring photos helps me relax, so I decided to fix them up anyway—even if they did not have great fidelity.

I did my thing, and it worked pretty well.

But I have been interested in a set of photo tools made by Topaz Labs. They are known for their noise removal and upscaling apps and are praised by many photographers I follow.

Before I jumped into this A.I. suite of tools I wanted to make sure it was trained ethically with licensed images—same as how Adobe operates.

So that made me feel better about that aspect. Plus I feel this is exactly the kind of thing A.I. is great for. A tool to help artists rather than displace them.

I have used a few upscalers in the past and have had varying degrees of success. Typically they just implore various sharpening tools and try to control the chunky artifacts with denoising tools—trying to find the best balance between the two.

Two opposites trying to reach a compromise.

But I was not expecting the results I got. This is way beyond anything I have ever tried before and I had no idea the technology had improved this much.

Here are the results...

All photos will be displayed in order of original, my edit, Topaz upscale followed by extremely zoomed in crops to help you better see the effects.

Crops...

Topaz has a specific "face recovery" algorithm and I was curious if these results were only because of that.

But then I looked at this little guy and he seemed pretty sharp as well.

I was stunned at how well this was working. I was able to upscale these photos so they could be printed as an 8x10 with 300ppi resolution.

Maybe that first photo was just a fluke, so I proceeded with the others.

Santa's face was mostly obscured, but it was still able to work its magic despite that.

Crops...

At this point I felt like I was a caveman discovering fire for the first time.

This next photo is interesting because it has a very creepy clown clearly plotting to kill baby Katrina. And the clown has on full makeup, which could confuse the face recovery.

Crops...

The clown face looked great, but there were two interesting artifacts involving text.

First, there was not nearly enough information on the clown's button. So the A.I. did its thing and rendered nonsense. I found a smiley face button and just did some classic compositing.

There was also a bottle of Elmer's glue on the table and even though I felt there was enough detail to make out the words, the A.I. still struggled. So I found a bottle of vintage glue with the same label and replaced it.

And it kinda feels nice that A.I. can't do everything yet and I still have to use my problem solving skills to make the best photo possible.

On to part 2!

#photography #photo restoration #long post

[sirfrogsworth]

Photo Restoration: Adventures in Upscaling - Part 1

After finishing my big photo restoration for Katrina's family I was organizing my files and noticed a scan I missed.

The scan was fairly low resolution and the photos were only 400x700 pixels.

But I was bored and restoring photos helps me relax, so I decided to fix them up anyway—even if they did not have great fidelity.

I did my thing, and it worked pretty well.

But I have been interested in a set of photo tools made by Topaz Labs. They are known for their noise removal and upscaling apps and are praised by many photographers I follow.

Before I jumped into this A.I. suite of tools I wanted to make sure it was trained ethically with licensed images—same as how Adobe operates.

So that made me feel better about that aspect. Plus I feel this is exactly the kind of thing A.I. is great for. A tool to help artists rather than displace them.

I have used a few upscalers in the past and have had varying degrees of success. Typically they just implore various sharpening tools and try to control the chunky artifacts with denoising tools—trying to find the best balance between the two.

Two opposites trying to reach a compromise.

But I was not expecting the results I got. This is way beyond anything I have ever tried before and I had no idea the technology had improved this much.

Here are the results...

All photos will be displayed in order of original, my edit, Topaz upscale followed by extremely zoomed in crops to help you better see the effects.

Crops...

Topaz has a specific "face recovery" algorithm and I was curious if these results were only because of that.

But then I looked at this little guy and he seemed pretty sharp as well.

I was stunned at how well this was working. I was able to upscale these photos so they could be printed as an 8x10 with 300ppi resolution.

Maybe that first photo was just a fluke, so I proceeded with the others.

Santa's face was mostly obscured, but it was still able to work its magic despite that.

Crops...

At this point I felt like I was a caveman discovering fire for the first time.

This next photo is interesting because it has a very creepy clown clearly plotting to kill baby Katrina. And the clown has on full makeup, which could confuse the face recovery.

Crops...

The clown face looked great, but there were two interesting artifacts involving text.

First, there was not nearly enough information on the clown's button. So the A.I. did its thing and rendered nonsense. I found a smiley face button and just did some classic compositing.

There was also a bottle of Elmer's glue on the table and even though I felt there was enough detail to make out the words, the A.I. still struggled. So I found a bottle of vintage glue with the same label and replaced it.

And it kinda feels nice that A.I. can't do everything yet and I still have to use my problem solving skills to make the best photo possible.

On to part 2!

#photography #photo restoration #long post

[sirfrogsworth]

I feel like I'm pretty good at research but sometimes you folks outdo my Google Fu and it is impressive.

Thank you for finding all of this wonderful info.

I do think I was right to be skeptical. The "thousands of years" seemed difficult to verify from an archeological perspective. But your links say it is only "hundreds of years" which sounds much more likely. And it's nice to be able to narrow it down to a city rather than a 660,000 square mile landmass.

Also, here is a bonus Pride Albert.

I tried to find more information about Albert here. There is an article in The Mirror, but some of the reporting seems dubious. Which I believe is standard operating procedure for that particular news outlet.

But according to the article, "Fat Albert" lives in the very specific area of "Alaska, USA" and is believed to be the fattest polar bear in the world. And they claim he got fat because the townspeople of "Alaska, USA" are following an ancient tradition that dates back "thousands of years."

"The locals throw out large amounts of whale blubber to the bears as a sign of 'respect'. They would cut a large portion of the whale and blubber, and drag it four miles out of town for the bears to find. This stops the bears from travelling into town to harvest and disrupting the process. In other words, it's a way to stop a group of hungry bears coming towards you in a hurry."

From supplemental research there is precedent for folks in Russia and Alaska to leave whale carcasses for polar bears, but I could not find any corroborating evidence about Albert specifically.

So, I rate this myth...

In any case, when I saw this picture of Albert, it seemed like a good opportunity to practice my Photoshop skills. He has clearly been rolling around in some mud and his beautiful white coat has been obscured.

It is very easy to change the color of something to red, blue, or green and every color in between. Just hit that hue/saturation and check colorize and you've got Pride Albert in a jiffy.

However, it is much more challenging to change things to white or black. This is the bane of graphic designers who have to take the same picture of a t-shirt and digitally alter it to be every available color including black and white.

So I challenged myself to give Fat Albert a bath.

And then I challenged myself again to make him a distant relative.

I wish I could tell you the exact process for how to do this, but this is one of those things you have to trial and error your way through and I honestly don't remember everything I did.

One thing I can tell you is that I definitely, absolutely, positively named all my layers properly—as that is best practice and I am a good Photoshop boy.

[sirfrogsworth]

I tried to find more information about Albert here. There is an article in The Mirror, but some of the reporting seems dubious. Which I believe is standard operating procedure for that particular news outlet.

But according to the article, "Fat Albert" lives in the very specific area of "Alaska, USA" and is believed to be the fattest polar bear in the world. And they claim he got fat because the townspeople of "Alaska, USA" are following an ancient tradition that dates back "thousands of years."

"The locals throw out large amounts of whale blubber to the bears as a sign of 'respect'. They would cut a large portion of the whale and blubber, and drag it four miles out of town for the bears to find. This stops the bears from travelling into town to harvest and disrupting the process. In other words, it's a way to stop a group of hungry bears coming towards you in a hurry."

From supplemental research there is precedent for folks in Russia and Alaska to leave whale carcasses for polar bears, but I could not find any corroborating evidence about Albert specifically.

So, I rate this myth...

In any case, when I saw this picture of Albert, it seemed like a good opportunity to practice my Photoshop skills. He has clearly been rolling around in some mud and his beautiful white coat has been obscured.

It is very easy to change the color of something to red, blue, or green and every color in between. Just hit that hue/saturation and check colorize and you've got Pride Albert in a jiffy.

However, it is much more challenging to change things to white or black. This is the bane of graphic designers who have to take the same picture of a t-shirt and digitally alter it to be every available color including black and white.

So I challenged myself to give Fat Albert a bath.

And then I challenged myself again to make him a distant relative.

I wish I could tell you the exact process for how to do this, but this is one of those things you have to trial and error your way through and I honestly don't remember everything I did.

One thing I can tell you is that I definitely, absolutely, positively named all my layers properly—as that is best practice and I am a good Photoshop boy.

#frogshop

[sirfrogsworth]

I got the purse for my photography class assignment.

These are just quick phone photos. I just wanted to see how light fell onto it so I could figure out what kind of lighting design it would require.

And I think I accidentally chose the hardest object to light in the existence of product photography.

I drew up a lighting mockup of what I think it would take to light this how I imagined it.

The smaller rectangle is the strip softbox light. And the big rectangle is about how big the diffusion panel will probably need to be. And the gradient is the falloff of light I would want to reflect into the purse.

And if you notice, that giant diffusion panel is right in front of where the camera would go.

This is going to require some problem solving.

I'm glad I have until July.

[sirfrogsworth]

So here are all the cards I found.

And they all had our names on the back.

And I don't know if they are actually our names or if this is one of those tattoo situations where they put a menu item on your shoulder and tell you it means fierce warrior.

When I tried to use Google Lens to translate, this is what it said.

I'm not sure what to make of that.

I found this card inside one of my mom's books. I think we got these on vacation, but I don't remember for sure.

Can anyone read this?

[sirfrogsworth]

I found this card inside one of my mom's books. I think we got these on vacation, but I don't remember for sure.

Can anyone read this?

[sirfrogsworth]

I spent way too much time trying to figure out what the hell this means. You could post this on "I'm 14 and this is deep" and people would not question it was written by a 14 year old.

I finally just had to break it down bit by bit to try and figure out what he was trying to say and why it was nonsense.

I think the big problem is that Elon is assuming direct opposites always exist.

He is assuming if people believe "might makes right" is bad then "weak makes right" must be good. Why is "weak makes right" the opposite? That phrase is commentary about the abuse of power and how the victors write history. The only opposite you could derive is that the weak are unheard.

He's inventing a position that I don't think exists. Sometimes strength is required to do what is right. But with great power comes great... you know the rest.

He then invents another position where the oppressed are good and the strong are bad.

Again, oppressed and strong are not opposites.

However...

You can be both mighty or weak and be in the wrong.

You can be oppressed and bad. (See: Caitlyn Jenner)

You can be strong and good.

But you cannot be both oppressor and good.

You cannot be a billionaire and not oppress.

The strong must try to protect the weak.

And the non-oppressed must help fight oppressors.

There is no morality where oppression is justified. We must unburden people from their oppression no matter what. And whether they end up being good or bad, strong or weak... is up to them.

I think Elon has heard people saying all billionaires are evil and this is him trying to counter that. I don't think he succeeded and it's hilarious how many of his stans replied to this like, "Yeah, you are so right" even though this is an incomprehensible attempt at philosophizing.

[sirfrogsworth]

It might sound silly, but one of the most difficult aspects of taking care of my dad was... NCIS.

He had trouble concentrating near the end. And his tired brain just couldn't absorb new things very well. But all he was able to do was watch TV. He tried watching other shows he was familiar with, but they didn't have a lot of episodes and he would get through them very quickly. He loved The Mandalorian, but there were only 16 episodes at the time.

But NCIS had hundreds and hundreds of episodes. The main show (his favorite) was up near 400 at the time going all the way back to 2003. He could remember them well enough but by the time he got through the entire series, he could start over at the beginning and those episodes wouldn't be so fresh in his brain. So it didn't feel like he *just* watched something.

The thing is... I don't like NCIS.

At all.

My mom loved Law & Order and I found those much more tolerable. But NCIS is just narrative hell for me. Every episode followed a strict formula. The characters never developed. They never grow or change. If they experience a traumatic event they will take an episode to deal with it and then that event basically never happened.

It's like if "status quo" manifested as a television program.

I eventually convinced him to watch a movie in the evening. And then I would try to get in some extra naps when he watched NCIS. But when I couldn't stand watching any more episodes I bought some giant over-the-ear headphones and just watched YouTube videos on my laptop.

Sadly, my headphones still couldn't drown out that theme song—which has not changed one bit in 20 years. It's this horrible electronic music that was dated even in 2003. It sounded like one of the producers asked his nephew to whip something up in Fruity Loops.

My biggest relief was when the baseball season started. Finally we had something we could both watch and enjoy together. And when the Cardinals ended up losing I was more sad about NCIS returning than I was about the team failing.

[sirfrogsworth]

Can anyone spot the problem here?

#low effort conservative trolling #it's a book store

[sirfrogsworth]

Let's talk about vintage lenses.

Here is your cool samurai show with modern lenses.

Here is your cool samurai show with vintage lenses.

Hollywood is no stranger to fads.

We are currently in the middle of a "make everything too dark" fad. But that fad is starting to overlap with "let's use really old lenses on ridiculously high resolution cameras."

This is Zack Snyder with a Red Monstro 8K camera.

He is using a "rehoused" vintage 50mm f/0.95 Canon "Dream Lens" which was first manufactured in 1961.

This old lens is put inside a fancy new body that can fit onto modern cameras.

Which means Zack is getting nowhere near 8K worth of detail. These lenses are not even close to being sharp. Which is fine. I think the obsession with detail can get a bit silly and sometimes things can be "too sharp."

But it is a funny juxtaposition.

The dream lens is a cool lens. It has character. It has certain aberrations and defects that can actually be beneficial to making a cool photograph. It's a bit like vinyl records for photography.

[ Peter Thoeny ]

It has vignetting and distortion and a very strange swirly background blur.

[ Gabriel Binder ]

Optical engineers have been spending the last 60 years trying to eliminate these defects. And I sometimes wonder if they are confused by this fad.

"I WORKED 70 HOURS PER WEEK TO GET PERFECT CORNER SHARPNESS!"

And whether you prefer to work with a perfect optic or a vintage one... it is a valid aesthetic decision either way. I think vintage glass can really suit candid natural light photography. You can almost get abstract with these lenses.

[ Peter Theony ]

Personally I like to start with as close to perfect as possible and then add the character in later. That way I can dial in the effect and tweak how much of it I want. But even with modern image editing tools, some of these aberrations are difficult to recreate authentically.

That said, it can be very easy for the "character" of these lenses to become distracting. And just like when someone first finds the lens flares in Photoshop, it can be easy for people to overdo things.

Zack Snyder decided to be his own cameraman and used only vintage glass in his recent movies and it has led to some complaints about the imagery.

I mean, Zack Snyder overdoing something? I can't even imagine it.

Non camera people felt Army of the Dead was blurry and a bit weird but they couldn't quite explain why it felt that way.

The dream lens has a very wide aperture and it lets in a lot of light. But it also has a very very shallow depth of field. Which means it is very difficult to nail focus.

[ Peter Thoeny ]

Her near eye is in focus and her far eye is soft. You literally can't get an entire face in focus.

There is no reason you have to use the dream lens at f/0.95 at all times. But just like those irresistible lens flares, Zack couldn't help himself.

Here is a blueprint that you can't really see.

Extreme close ups of faces without autofocus at f/0.95 is nearly impossible to pull critical focus on.

Looks like Zack nailed the area just above the eyebrow here.

Let's try to find the point of focus in this one.

Ummmm... she is just... blurry. Missed focus completely.

But Zack isn't the only one going vintage. I've been seeing this a lot recently.

Shogun is a beautiful show. And for the most part, I really enjoyed the cinematography. But they went the vintage lens route and it kept going from gorgeous to "I can't not see it" distracting. And perhaps because I am familiar with these lens defects I am more prone to noticing. But I do think it hurt the imagery in a few spots.

Vingetting is a darkening of the corners of the frame.

Light rays in the corners are much harder to control. A lot of modern lenses still have this problem, but they create software corrections to eliminate the issue. Some cameras do it automatically as you are recording the image.

Vintage lenses were built before lens corrections where a thing—before software was a thing. So you either have to live with them, try to remove them with VFX, or crop into your image and lose some resolution.

It's possible this is the aesthetic they wanted. They felt the vignetting added something to the image. But I just found my eyes darting to the corners and not focusing on the composition.

And then you have distortion.

In this case, barrel distortion.

This is mostly prominent in wide angle lenses. In order to get that wider field of view the lens has to accept light from some very steep angles. And that can be quite difficult to correct. So you kind have to sacrifice any straight lines.

And sometimes this was a positive contribution to the image.

I thought the curved lines matched the way they were sitting here.

But most of the time I just felt like I was looking at feudal Japan through a fish's eye.

It's a bit more tolerable as a still, but when all of these verticals are bowing in motion, I start to feel like I am developing tunnel vision.

I love that this is a tool that is available. Rehousing lenses is a really neat process and I'm glad this old glass is getting new life.

This documentary shows how lens rehousing is done and is quite fascinating if you are in to that sort of thing.

But I think we are in a "too much of a good thing" phase when it comes to these lenses. I think a balance between old and new can be found.

And I also think maybe Zack should see what f/2.8 looks like. He might like having more than an eyebrow in focus.

#photography #cinematography #lenses #vintage lenses #shogun #long post

[sirfrogsworth]

I ordered food for 5mg Mounjaro Froggie.

But I am now 10mg Mounjaro Froggie.

And now I have too much food.

I suppose that is a good thing in the end.

[sirfrogsworth]

I'm feeling it, but it is really subtle. Not sure if it will get worse or not, but this is much more tolerable than when I first started Mounjaro.

I guess we'll see if I spoke too soon.

#pukewatch2024

I finally got the next dose of Mounjaro. I've been trying to get this for about 4 months now but too many people wanted to use it for aesthetic reasons. My pharmacy had a single box and they put it aside for me. I have the best pharmacy in the world. They are so great.

It is double what I was taking. And I am a little worried I'm going to get sick. I'm hoping that I have a good tolerance from being on it for so long now. But it's hard to know if this drastic change will take some getting used to. I also skipped a step. I was supposed to go from 5 to 7.5. But they only had 10.

So I will either be puking tomorrow or I will be just fine. I guess we'll see which it is soon enough.

[sirfrogsworth]

I had to post some corrections on my eclipse post.

I've been even more diligent with fact checking ever since that John Wick gun magazine flip debacle.

I mean, I was pretty diligent before, but I made sure to double check pretty much everything from that point forward.

It sucks when you get things wrong. My heart sinks every single time. I try to track down how I got it wrong and make sure to learn from it.

But when something has been reblogged so many times and there is no way to reach everyone with the correction, it just feels like you let all those people down.

But the physics of light is incredibly complicated and I don't think my brain is working anywhere near 100% right now. It was probably a recipe for misunderstanding and then passing that misunderstanding along to others.

I don't know.

I think it is just going to feel bad until it doesn't and I'll move on and learn from it.

And try better in the future.