Pictures in the BRCC Hilly Time Trial Gallery

First these pictures were taken in the evening in not very bright light. To increase shutter speed and avoid camera shake the ISO (equivalent to Film Speed) was increased to 800. Noise produced as a result was reduced using software.

The pictures were taken as RAW files which is the basic image data which has much more detail available than a standard jpeg file which is essentially a processed file with some data lost. The images were opened in Photoshop with a RAW editor. Various changes were made to improve lighting and contrast.

If you have Photoshop this is the method for adding a zoom burst to increase the impression of speed –

1. Add a new layer by duplicating the background

2. Go to Filter-Blur-Radial Blur.

3. In the window choose Zoom not Spin. Use sliders to produce an amount. 26 with the Best setting seems to works well but will vary with each picture.

4 Move the centre of the Zoom Burst in the preview to about the position of your main subjects face. This is not clearly previewed on the picture so some trial and error will be required.

5. Choose the elliptical Marquee tool and draw this over the subjects face. Then go to edit and then cut. As we are working here on a layer this will remove the zoom effect from that part of the picture leaving a sharp area which is the background picture underneath the zoom layer.

6. With the zoom layer still highlighted  in the layer view go to layer-duplicate layer to produce a copy of the zoom layer.

7. Go to Filter-sharpen-unsharp mask. Adjust the settings so the amount is 100 and increase Radius to produce the required effect on the preview. The effect of this filter is to sharpen and emphasize the zoom lines.

8. Done

HDR Pictures

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. When you take a picture the camera cannot cope with the full range of light your eye sees. For example a bright sky and a shadowy area under trees or the inside of a room and the view through a window. An HDR picture is one where more than one picture is taken of the same scene (usually 3) at widely different exposures and then combined later using software.

A program called Photomatrix is generally acknowledged as the best software. Various adjustments can be made as the photos are combined to get the desired result. Further editing is necessary in Photoshop to increase contrast which can be a little flat and to remove noise. Layer masks are often used to make isolated changes to parts of a picture.