timeimmortal

I apologize that the pictures are getting a little disjointed; usually there is something akin to a narrative flow to the series in the Pics of the Day, but in this case things are jumping around a bit. I’ve been having trouble finding time to edit all the pictures I took in Vancouver, and this is doubly true of panoramic images, which is the reason that things are a bit out of order.

I’m very happy with this picture; I just didn’t get around to finishing it until after I’d posted a picture taken from the ferry that Grace and I caught the following day.

Anyhow, this is Coal Harbour, which is located just off of downtown Vancouver, a bit west of Stanley Park. It’s a pretty nice area, actually, and it’s easy to see why it and other parts of Vancouver get used in a variety of different television shows and movies.

As has become fairly standard for the panoramic images I compose, I took each of the six shots that comprise this image and matched the exposure levels in each, in addition to applying my usual calibration/Punch preset to each. I re-thought the Clarity setting that is a part of the Punch preset though, and set it back to 0 (from 50), because I intended to mess with the Clarity of the finished panoramic.

I also applied noise reduction and chromatic aberration correction to each image, before exporting the lot of them as TIFF files. I then loaded the images into Hugin and defined…quite a lot of control points between each image and its neighbour (on the order of 15 per image pair, which is high for me). Hugin took about ten minutes to render the finished image, which I loaded back into Lightroom for further adjustment. Specifically, I set the Clarity to -100, giving the image that “diffusion print” look again which, in the harbour setting, really worked out well (it gave a slightly misty quality to the boats and the rest of the background).

That image is what the good Reader sees here now.

Of course, since we were in the vicinity of Coal Harbour, I had to stop and take a picture of some of the boats. Luckily, there were three rather colourful houseboats moored side-by-side in the harbour, which provided an easy subject.

Edit-wise, this picture actually presented me with a bit of a challenge. In particular, the background was a bit overexposed, and highlight reduction wasn’t reducing that as much as I might have liked. Playing with the shadow clipping helped somewhat, but even then left much to be desired. I applied the calibration/Punch preset, some noise reduction (I had the camera set at ISO 400, as it was getting a bit darker outside due to the rain), and some sharpening, all of which helped to improve the image in small ways.

But for the life of me I just couldn’t get the image to where I wanted it to be.

So I began to experiment. First, I tried applying some vignetting — that helped, somewhat, and made the overexposed parts of the border areas of the image more subdued. It also forced the viewer’s attention on to the boats themselves (a good side effect). But the background still flummoxed me.

So I tried shifting the Clarity of the image around a bit, finally ratcheting it all the way down to -100. This once again applied the “diffusion print” effect to the image…and made it just about perfect. The background suddenly looked good for its overexposure, because the details therein were a little less distinct in a hazy, ethereal sort of way.

I’m glad I read about that Clarity tool — it affords one a small toolset of handy tricks.

The cherry blossoms were in bloom in Vancouver while we were there, although I have to wonder whether they are still doing so well in the wake of the snow Vancouver just got. Then, too, that snow apparently cleared up rather quickly.

It was raining when I took this picture, and two drops of water found their way on to the lens (or, rather, the filter in front of the lens) before I could get the shot off. That’s kind of a pity, although I think the picture still works in spite of them. This is an apartment tower in downtown Vancouver, near Coal Harbour, and it provides a nice backdrop indeed for the pink cherry blossoms.

Edit-wise, I actually wound up reducing the purple and magenta saturations to -100, effectively cutting them out of the scene in order to reduce some very harsh chromatic aberration on the parts of the tree that have the sky as a backdrop. The sky required a lot of highlight reduction as well, although to be fair there wasn’t much detail in it that needed to be recovered — sometimes a grey cloud is just a grey cloud.

I applied the usual calibration/Punch preset that I always used, and also boosted the red and aqua saturations — the red, of course, comes out in the cherry blossoms, while the aqua comes out in the apartment (or, more likely, condominium) windows.

Now, if only there were some way to keep rain off of a camera lens when said lens is pointed straight up!