FOCUSNewsletter of the Mayslake Nature and Photography ClubHosted by the Forest Preserve District of DuPage County

Visit our website at www.naturecameraclub.com

NOVEMBER

November 2 Lloyd and Mary McCarthy Andean Peeks

November 16 Competition (Prints & Digital)

DECEMBER

December 7 Bill Glass Darwin’s Enchanted Islands

December 21 Christmas Social

November 2 Program

The McCarthy’s new nature log focuses on two areas of the long narrow South American country of Chile: the far north Atacama Desert and the far south Tor-res del Paine National Park region. Each has its own unique flora and fauna and its own spectacular scen-ery along the Andean mountain chain. The program travels from north to south, from flamingos to pen-guins, from cacti to orchids, from geysers to glaciers. The adventure took place last December in the ideal weather of the southern hemisphere’s spring.

The McCarthy’s are long time members of our club.

YELLOWSTONE’S GRIZZLIES WIN BACK ENDANGERED

SPECIES PROTECTIONRay Kammer

A Federal District Court in Montana recently re-stored endangered species protection for Grizzlies in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The judge ruled that the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service violated the law when it removed Yellowstone’s grizzlies from the endangered species list in 2007. Among other issues the Service failed to consider how the drastic decline in white bark pine trees, a major food source for the grizzlies, would affect the area’s grizzly population. This information was just published in the “BioGem News” by the Natural Resource Defense Council whose mis-sion is the legal defense for the environment and wildlife.

COMPETITIONFred Drury

Our first competition of the ’09-10 Club year was held on October 5. Participation was down considerably from the final competition last year, perhaps indicating that a lot of members were planning to take advantage of our unlimited make-up policy.Many thanks to our judges Joe Falout, Ray Kam-mer and Lou Petkus who did a great job. Many

thanks as well to all of the folks who helped with the competition. I am writing this column from my second home in northern Ontario and unfortunately did not bring the Print results with me; they will be included in next month’s report. Honors in the Digital competition went to the following:

Digital – Class B Award: Bill Dixon for ‘Bloodroot’ Pat McPherren for ‘Intermingled Cone Flowers’ HM: Pat McPherren for ‘3 Pale Pink Cone Flowers’ Bill Dixon for ‘TrillimGrand’

Digital – Class C Award: Gary Saunders for ‘Monarch Mosaic’ Sue Gajda for ‘White Tree’ HM: John Fan for ‘Catch’ Janice Henry for ‘White Trillium’

Our next competition will be on November 16 and I expect will include an increased number of competi-tors. Future competition dates are as follows: January 4 – Non Competitive Critique, February 1 – Regular Print & Digital Competition, and April 5 – Regular Print & Digital Competition. Please mark your cal-endars accordingly.

OUTINGS UPDATE

A FALL DAY AT VOLO BOG STATE PRESERVE

SATURDAY OCTOBER 24TH

Six brave photographers,Marie, Fran, Diane, Pat, Don and Jon journeyed north to Volo Bog on a cold wet morning for fun and excitement.

Waiting for the rain to stop, we spent some time in the visitor’s center and also cast our ballots for a photo contest being displayed there. The rain did stop and we all ventured into the bog via the boardwalk for some great photography.As usual, good fun and image making was had by all.Remember - you snooze, you loose. Thanks again for attending and making this event another club Success. Jon

In NOVEMBER we will once again journey to Jasper Pulaski Wildlife Preserve in Indiana to celebrate the fall migration of the Sandhill Cranes. This will be a very early am event and is tentatively scheduled for Saturday the 28th. Remember, if anyone has a suggestion of a location you would like to see as a future club outing, please let me know and I will do my best to arrange it. Have a wonderful fall, Jon Snyder………..

CACCA NEWS Jean Atkins

The following are the upcoming competitions that our club members usually enter. See the CACCA web-site, www.chicameraclubs.org for the schedule of the individual Alteration of Reality, Photojournalism, and Portrait competitions if interested.OCTOBER COMPETITIONSInterclub Small Color Prints

Images provided by Larry Buttimer, Bill Dixon, John Fan, and Bob LaBarre represented our club in the Small Color Print competition.

Interclub Digital Projected Images (DPI)

Images from Bill Dixon, Sue Gajda, Pat McPherren, and Gary Saunders represented our club in the digital competition.

Special Category (Individual) - “Barns and/or Silos”

Both Lloyd and Mary McCarthy entered slides in this Special Category competition. Mary received an Honorable Mention for her “Surrounded by Wheat Fields”.

Nature Prints and Nature Slides (Individual)

Bill Dixon entered the Nature Print competition.

NOVEMBER COMPETITIONS

In addition to the regular Interclub Small Color Prints and Interclub DPI competitions is the following:

Special Category (Individual) - “Water”

This competition is for slides only and each entrant may submit 2 slides. The images may not have been entered in ANY previous CACCA competition in-cluding Interclub, Individual, or Salon. The subject must be the dominant part of the image. There is no charge for entering the special category competitions. (Entries in this competition could be submitted later to the Nature Slide competition.)

DECEMBER COMPETITIONS

In addition to the regular Interclub Small Color Prints and Interclub DPI competitions are the following:

Nature Prints and Nature Slides (Both Individual)

Continuation of the competitions that started in Oc-tober.

Special Category (Individual) – “Red and/or Green”

The special category rules are the same as for the No-vember competition above.

THE CHICAGO AREA PHOTOGRAPHY SCHOOL (CAPS)

Every other year, CACCA also sponsors the largest one-day photo school in the Midwest. This is the year!

WHEN: Sunday, November 22, 2009 Doors open at 7:30, Classes 8:30 – 5:00

WHERE: Elgin Community College, Business Con-ference Center (BCC) 1700 Spartan Drive Elgin, IL

HOW TO REGISTER:• Use the form in the handout available at a club meeting or at www.chicameraclubs.org (postmarked no later than Nov. 5), or• Register online at www.chicameraclubs.org/caps with payment through Pay Pal

COST: • $65 for camera club members; $80 for non-members (Plus $10 after November 1)• Add $5 for CAPS 2009 speakers’ notes on CD, if desired• Add $11 for box lunch (sandwich, chips, soda, cookie), if desired

WHAT: “Chicago’s Largest One-Day Photographic School”

I. “Extending the Limits” – Getting the Most Out of Your Digital Photography

Spend a half day with Adam Jones, a highly sought after speaker and tour leader and a Canon Explorer of Light. The Explorers of Light program is a group of 60 of the world’s best photographers who share a common desire to contribute back to the industry with a willingness to share their vision and passion with others.

II. Classes of Your Choice

Spend the other half of the day at your choice of 3 classes:

- What’s New in Adobe Photoshop CS4® (Bob Benson)- Retouching Your Image to Perfection (Bill Brown)- The Inside Scoop for Adobe Lightroom® 2 (Fred Drury)- Photography as Art vs. Technology (Hank Erdmann)- The Decisive Moment (Todd Gustafson)- Multi-shot and HDR Techniques (Jerry Hug)- Woodland Wildflowers (Michael Kobe)- Photojournalism Techniques (George LeClaire)- Corel Painter Essentials® (Tanya Lux)- Close-up and Personal: The Joys of Macro Photography (Lou Nettlehorst)- Lighting Made Easy (Bill Skinner)- Family and Children’s Portraiture (Terry Tas-che)- So You Want to Go to Africa (Rich Fisher & Jane Leland)- Ten Quick, Creative Things to Do in Adobe Photoshop® Elements 7 (Mark Southard)

Optional Lunch Hour Classes:- How to Better Use Your Canon DSLR (Brian Matsumoto, Canon Representative)- Color Management Made Easy (Denis Nerv-ig, MAC Group Representative)

For more details, see the brochure available at club meetings or at www.chicameraclubs.org/caps

Upcoming Events

The Chicago Stereo Camera Club is hosting its 61st Annual “Chicago Lighthouse International Exhibition of Stereo Photography.” The public is invited to attend either of the two presentations featuring this unique form of 3-dimensional photography. A minimum do-nation of $6 is requested at the door. All funds raised will be donated to The Chicago Lighthouse for People Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired. For more in-formation, please call Russ Gager at 773-871-4227 or email at info@chicagostereocameraclub.org. Our web site is at http://chicagostereocameraclub.org/. Please see attached flyer and please pass the flyer on to other club members. Through polarized glasses, audiences will see breathtaking photographic slides taken with antique and modern 3-D photographic equipment. The Chicago Stereo Camera Club is a local forum for 3-D photographic enthusiasts who sponsor this PSA-ap-proved international juried photographic exhibition, where accepted slides will be presented with a musi-cal background and professional voiceover narration. During intermission, audiences will also have the op-portunity to view award winning stereo photographic cards and anaglyph prints. Presentation dates and times:Friday, November 20, 7:30 P.M. Illinois Institute of Technology, Rice Campus, Room 103, 201 East Loop Drive, Wheaton Saturday, November 21, 2 P.M. Oakton Community College, Hartstein Campus, Room A151, 7701 North Lincoln Avenue, Skokie The Chicago Lighthouse, located at 850 W. Roosevelt Rd. in Chicago, is the most comprehensive private rehabilitation and education agency in Illinois creating opportunities for access, employment and indepen-dence for children and adults who are blind, visually impaired or multi-disabled. The Lighthouse served over 18,000 people last year from the Chicago area, Illinois and surrounding states.

Reminder – The Garden Photographic Society is pleased to an-nounce that starting Saturday, 31 Oct through noon on Monday, 2 November we will be presenting pho-tographs from our members at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. Approximately 90 photographs from our members will be display in Regenstein Hall. The exhibit will be open from 10 am to 4:30 pm. Once in Regenstein Center, either look for signs, or ask the security garden for directions. Hope everyone can make it to see the work of our club. Please share this with your club members as well as friends. Rich Fisher

THE DIGITAL NOTEBOOK: 4.9 LAB Color 3 FRED DRURY

In the last column I demonstrated a second example of LAB color correction. I also introduced a modification for how the Shadow/Highlight command should be used and a new ‘known color’ criteria for sky. This column takes the LAB color correction process a couple of steps further by introducing additional ‘known color’ criteria and a very powerful color enhancement technique first introduced by Dan Margulis in Computer Artist about ten year ago.

One concern regarding the use of the LAB color space ism the possible adverse affects that can oc-cur when swapping color spaces. This can be a real issue. Figure 1 shows a three dimensional com-parison of the RGB and CMYK color spaces. The CMYK color space is much smaller and an RGB image may not ‘fit’ into CMYK without changes to some of the colors. A return trip back to RGB is less problematic. Multiple round trips between col-or spaces exacerbate the problem. Color accuracy is often compared quantitatively using the statistic ‘Delta E’ (ΔE). A ΔE of 1 is beyond the limit of hu-man visual acuity. Making 5 round trips between RGB and CMYK results in a ΔE value of 26, clearly producing a significant visual change. Therefore more than a single round trip from RGB to CMYK and back to RGB should be avoided. On the other hand, LAB is a larger color space and so the problems are less; making 25 round trips from RGB to LAB and back to RGB produced a ΔE of 1.6 which is barely perceptible. It would be most unlikely that one would ever need more than a couple of round trips to LAB and therefore one can judge that this will not produce any problems1.

When using LAB there is no need to convert the file back to RGB before printing. Inkjet printers all ‘understand’ LAB. In fact, LAB is the universal language for all digital devices. When you send an RGB file to a printer, the computer converts the file to LAB and then ap-plies the ink-paper-printer profile, then passing the file on to the printer driver. The printer driver then converts the file to instructions which drive the printer nozzles to output the correct amount of the various inks provided by the printer.

The last column described how the setting of eyedroppers (in the Info palette) to read in LAB can make it easier to identify color casts in skies. Skies are generally a mixture of blue and cyan, and cyan is a combination of blue and green. Therefore skies should be slightly negative in the ‘a’ channel (more green than magenta) and strongly negative in the ‘b’ channel (much more blue than yellow). Here are three other LAB relationships which one can use to quickly evaluate image color.

1 In the 25 RGB–LAB–RGB test, four samplers were placed on the image. The LAB values for the samplers changed as follows: #1 initial: 83,-75,-27; final: 83,-75,-26; #2 initial: 32,0,0; final: 32,0,0; #3 initial: 20,35,28; final: 20,37,27; #4 initial: 62,40,29; final: 63,38,29. Results will vary, but I believe this test is representative.

Figure 1 shows a comparison between typi-cal RGB (wireframe) and CMYK (solid) color spaces. The RGB color space is invariably

larger which makes fitting an image into the smaller color space problematic.

• Greenery: everything that grows is some-what green. It is also strongly yellow. Examples include grasses, leaves, and evergreen needles. For all of the growing things, the ‘a’ channel will be negative, and the ‘b’ channel will be positive. The abso-lute value of the ‘b’ channel will be approxi-mately twice that of the ‘a’ channel.

• Faces: human skin of all races is warm in tone, meaning it is more magenta than green and more yellow than blue. There-fore skin should always be positive in both the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels. While there is great variation in skin tones, it is never green or blue, and therefore never positive in either channel.

• Neutrals: in the LAB color space a nega-tive value in the ‘a’ channel indicates a color that is more green than magenta, a positive value indicates a color that is more magenta than green. A value of 0 is a color that is neither more (or less) magenta than green; in other words a neutral. The same relationship is true in the ‘b’ channel. Neutral colors (black, white, light gray, middle gray, dark gray, etc.) all should have 0 values in both the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels.

Taken together, these four criteria are very useful tools for quickly evaluating the colors in an image. And the process is simpler in LAB than in RGB because the color information is carried in two rather than three channels.

The last two columns included examples of LAB color correction where the objective was to enhance the image color to return it to something more representative of what the pho-tographer saw at the time the image was made. A very important issue here is that the camera does not compare with the human eye in terms of seeing color, especially in scenes which are single-colored (monochromatic) such as canyons or rain forests. In the last two

columns the color enhancement was ac-complished by steepening the ‘curves’ in the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channels. The amount was arbitrary; one could have increased (or de-creased) the enhancement by returning to the respective curves adjustment layer and altering the curve accordingly. Here’s an alternative method, first introduced by Dan Margulis, which adds flexibility and simplicity to the process. This the ‘Man from Mars’ technique was first demon-strated as a way of improving skin tones. The method first creates an excessive ef-fect, which is then adjusted to a realistic

Figure 2: Four samplers have been placed in the image. The Info palette at top left shows the RGB values for the samplers and for the cursor loca-tion (leaves, lower right). The LAB LAB values are shown in the Info palette on the lower right.

Interpreting the LAB values is much simpler than interpreting RGB values.

Figure 3: A view of Denali NP from the Eielson Visitor Center. The Alaskan range is visible in the background.

level using the opacity control on the respective curves ad-justment layer.

Figure 3 was made near the Eielson Visitor Center at mile 66 on the Denali National Park road. The clouds are clear-ing revealing the Alaskan mountain range to the south (the Denali summit is just visible behind the cloud at the top right). The cam-

era has lost the color on the hills and substantially under-stated the colors in the foreground tundra.

The first step was to check the color; samplers were placed on the lightest part of the snow in the mountains, at the lightest point in the clouds and at a representative spot in the blue sky. Figure 4 is the Info palette. A curves adjust-ment layer (Figure 5) was used to make adjustments to the color. The sky values (-5, -20) are acceptable. The white point (1,5) is warm but this makes sense for early morning. The cloud value should be close to neutral and at (1,-5) is too blue and is adjusted accordingly. Granted this is a small change, but the next step is exceedingly aggressive and would amplify this small deviation considerably and which would be quite difficult and either difficult or impossible to correct.

The next step is the color enhancement curves (a second curves adjustment layer) shown in Figure 6. These curves are constructed as follows: start by <Shift><Clicking> on a represntative point in the image; for example the lightest point in the cloud. This places the ‘selected color’ on all three LAB channels (near the center of the ‘a’ and ‘b’ channnels and towards the top right of the Lightness channel. For the ‘a’ curve select the top right corner and drag it to the left about 4½ squares; doing so causes the bottom right point to

Figure 5 shows the slight adjust-ment of the ‘b ’ curve that corrects

the sky ‘b’ from -5 to 0.

Figure 6: The ‘a’ and ‘b’ curves are drawn by moving the top right point to the left rotating the curve around the ‘slected color’ point near the center. The Lightnss curve increases the contrast in the

snow while not excessively darkening the shadows in the hills.`

Figure 4 is the initial Info palette for the Eielson Visitor Center image

rotate counterclockwise around the center point2. Similarly, on the ‘b’ curve drag the top right point to the left about 4 squares (recall that the ‘a’ should always be steeper than the ‘b’ as was introduced in the last column). In the ‘L’ channel, the objective was to increase the contrast in the snow. To do this, move the mouse over the snow to identify where it ‘lives’ on the curve, then steepen the curve in that region. The lower end of the curve was adjusted so it did not overly darken the shadow areas of the hills. This color enhancement curve is extreme and should next be ‘throttled back’ by reducing the opacity of the curves layer; Figure 7 shows a final setting of 37%. One of the advantages of this method is that at any time, one can simply adjust the opacity of this layer to modify the effect.

Looking now at the Info palette values, the snow, the clouds and the sky are all worse for the color enhancement curve. In Figure 8, this problem has been corrected by using the Apply Image command to stamp an inverted version of the Lightness channel into the mask on the curves layer. The Lightness channel is light in the sky and dark in the hills; inverting it makes the sky dark and hills light. Therefore the mask ‘conceals’ the effect of the curve

2 The lower end of this curve is not as straight as the top end. This is a ‘non-issue’ because extreme LAB values are actually beyond the range of human vision. The ‘a’ and ‘b’ curves extend to both 127 and -127 at their ex-tremes, whereas the maximum visible values are approximately 93 and -112.

Figure 7 shows the efftect of the color enhancing curves adjustment layer at 100% opacity (left) and with the opacity adjusted to a more reasonable 37% (right).

Figure 8 shows the Apply Image command used to stamp an in-

verted copy of the Lightness chan-nel into the mask on the enhance-

ment curves layer. This mask substantially reduces the effect of the curve on the sky and clouds.

The Info palette shows the sampler values before and after the Apply

Image move.

in the sky, and ‘reveals’ the effect of the curve in the hills. The final snow and cloud values are warm, rather than neutral, which is consistent with the early morning light.

This method is quicker and somewhat more flexible than those demonstrated in the previ-ous columns. It incorporates a color correction before the color enhancement, a technique which will be used again in the future.

Next month I will introduce a Channel Blending. It would be nice if ‘all channels were created equal’; however this is not the case. It is often beneficial to replace one chan-nel with another which has superior quality. The result is an improved image. As was the case with LAB, I’ll spend several months on the subject of channel blending.

Figure 9 is the final ver-sion of this image along

with its layers palette.