Encaustic Progress

Ann Wilson and Patty Picco have recently facilitated my encaustic endeavors. Ann has agreed to rent me studio space in the garage at Ann's Coupe d'Art in Coupeville. This allows me to install a stove vent hood to exhaust the fumes from keeping a bunch of beeswax hot, and I can open the garage door to enjoy Penn Cove breezes.

Patty tutored me for the best part of a day in her own garage studio, introducing me to a variety of techniques and making me drool for a hot palette. Now I'm going to have to build another accessory! I completed one new painting.

The piece pictured above is 12x12" on braced panel. The background is hand made paper, with a layer of unfiltered beeswax under and over it. The photograph is a scene from Silver Lake, Ohio, printed on 55# kozo paper, which I like because the wax really soaks in. I used a steel brush to score the area where I next added the brown stripe mirroring the sidewalk in the photo. Using a clay sculpting tool, I scraped away some of the stripe. "Sprinkles" of the scraped brown wax were dispersed to carry that color throughout the painting. Finally I covered everything with clear medium (filtered beeswax with damar resin to make it harder), being sure to drip a lot over the sides.

The Tulips Are Coming! The Tulips Are Coming!

Does that remind you of an Alan Arkin movie? Well, although the Dutch "stole" tulips from the Turks, no foreign invasion is afoot here. Just a preview of Skagit Valley tulips that are coming up quite late this year. It looks like peak bloom will coincide with the last week of the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. Here are a few shots from April 20.

Dynamic Photo HDR, Part Deux

The bottom line here is that the Tone Mapped image looked pretty good in the preview, but once processed it was a dud. The sky looks good, but the windmill is quite flat. Here are the settings I used:

• Tone Mapping: Eye Catching
• Brightness: 17
• Color Saturation: .46
• Vivid Colors .22
• Dramatic Light Radius: 6.9
• Dramatic Light Strength: .72
• Surface Smoothness: .3
• Gamma: 1.73
• Add Clarity: checked
• De Haze: checked
• Noise Reduction: checked

One interesting thing I learned is that once I played with Light Tuner and clicked Apply, there was no going back. There is no Undo for that.
There is a fun function called Match Color that emulates the color balance of a variety of painting styles. I don't know that this is useful, but it shows some imagination. There are also a variety of ways to get other extreme looks: Curves, Color Equalizer, and Hue Shift. Perhaps more useful are the wide variety of color filter presets. These range from Mysterious Light, to Orton Sepia, to a really lame Watercolor.
Bottom line: Dynamic Photo HDR does a lot, but in my opinion it does little well.

Photomatix, Part Deux

PHOTOMATIX PROCESSED IMAGE100% DETAIL

Now that it is time to dig deeper into the two top candidates as my high dynamic range (HDR) image processor, I selected a different test image. This is the iconic windmill in Oak Harbor, Washington's Windjammer Park. Oh, the park name is part of the city's effort to rebrand itself as a tourist destination. In the same vein, the Pioneer Way shopping district (old downtown) is now known as Harborside Shops.
Anyway, I had a sequence of five images of the windmill taken with an interesting sunset behind it. This is an ideal challenge for HDR imaging since the subject is severely backlit. On my first attempt to use five images, Photomatix substantially misaligned one. I went back and used three images, with Reduce Noise turned on and Auto Align turned off. Success!
Then I turned to Tone Mapping the raw HDR image. It should be no surprise that the various settings interact with each other, but it did not take more than 2-3 minutes to bring out the best in this image. My Photomatix settings were:

• Details Enhancer
• Strength 94
• Color Saturation 73
• Luminosity 0
• Light Smoothing second strongest (second from right)
• White Point 1.799%
• Black Point 1.367%
• Gamma .81
• Temperature 6
• Saturation Highlights 5
• Saturation Shadows 1
• Micro Smoothing 3
• Highlight Smoothing 5
• Shadow Smoothing 13
• Shadow Clipping 42

I saved the resulting 16-bit TIFF, then opened it in Adobe Camera Raw. Here I made some small tweaks to maximize the histogram and reduce color noise, then reduced the size, sharpened, and saved a JPEG.
Pretty nice result, eh? The sky is reasonably free of noise. Halos are well controlled. And there is none of the "find edges" extreme look. I think this is very close to what one would want in an HDR image: you can tell if you know, but it's not freakish.
When I went back and created the 100% detail shot above, I realized that ACR could not eliminate all of the chromatic aberration evident along edges in the HDR-processed image. I suspect that the ideal workflow will involve processing the NEF images in ACR, then in Photomatix. That way when I return to Photoshop there will be less to clean up.
I would probably do some additional post-processing in Photoshop to optimize this image for printing. For example, I'd mask the windmill blades and give them a bit more snap. But I am quite happy with this Photomatix-processed image.