117 — Noise Halos and Chromatic Aberration — Interview with Royce Howland

On the Rocks, Moraine Lake by Royce Howland — An HDR example where Royce controlled the settings to make sure no halos appeared in the sky or water.

Fall at Abraham Lake by Royce Howland — Another HDR example where Royce left the haloing in the sky, and in fact accentuated it a bit more via a Photoshop Curves adjustment, to give a sense of glow over the mountains. So sometimes halos are not a flaw, they’re a creative choice.

Looming, Abraham Lake by Royce Howland — An HDR example involving a high contrast backlit scene. The trees were deeply shadowed. Even on a Pentax 645D medium format camera, there’s noise in those trees in a normal single exposure. Bottom left — A 100% crop of a single exposure that went into the image above showing the level of noise in the trees. Bottom right — A 100% crop of the final image. Using a combination of HDR technique and a touch of additional noise reduction, I was able to subtly boost the contrast in the deep shadows, preserve all of the genuine detail, and also virtually eliminate the digital noise. Without HDR technique, just using a noise reduction filter can take the digital noise down but generally also will sacrifice legitimate detail as well.

Ghost Of Server Present, Jerome by Royce Howland — An indoor shot taken with available light in somewhat dim conditions at a supposedly haunted hotel. I’m using a bunch of creative techniques here including shallow depth of field, a reflection in a mirror, subject motion blur and extra digital blurring. Despite the softening effects of all the techniques used in this image, I also wanted a bit of texture and bit of “vintage film grain” feel. So far from removing all digital noise, I actually controlled it and then added a uniform monochromatic grain layer on top of everything in Photoshop. In print up to 16x20 size it’s difficult to see this grain, but on a nice matte paper it gives a slight feeling of texture; whereas running noise reduction as I would normally do in fact makes the results looking flat and plastic. You can see the noise detail added in the bottom detailed part of the image.

Chromatic aberration example at f/3.5 by Royce Howland — It was a bit after noon so the sun was high, and I shot straight into the light. The tree branches against a darker background show extremely high contrast edges. I was using a Sony RX100 pocket camera, which is a very high quality point & shoot with a Carl Zeiss lens. So a quality piece of kit for a compact. The first composition was at medium lens zoom and the aperture wide open — f/3.5. Bottom left — A 100% crop of the shot shows a lot of green and purple fringes are visible along the branch edges. Even towards the center of the lens, the chromatic aberration is pretty bad. This is a file converted from RAW using the latest Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop CS6, no chromatic aberration removal. Bottom right — Now here’s the identical file, but using the green and purple fringe removal settings during RAW conversion. Quite strong settings were needed for the green fringes, not so strong for purple. Mostly the fringes were removed.

Chromatic aberration example at f/5.6 by Royce Howland — Now here is the same composition photographed again moments later in the same strong light, but stopping the lens down to f/5.6. Bottom left — Stopping the lens down just over 1 stop has actually gotten rid of many of the purple & green fringes without doing anything else. That’s because a slightly smaller aperture lets through less of the misaligned light rays that contribute to the chromatic aberration in the first place. This is a RAW file converted again with no chromatic aberration settings. Bottom right — And here’s the same file converted with a small amount of purple and green defringe settings, much less than needed in the first example and the results look better.