A reality check ... one last time

Reality & Media Collide: In my 6th April entry there is a vid' for Skins, a new UK TV drama for teens. This show hit the news in the UK today...

"A TEENAGER was hiding last night after 200 yobs at a Skins party wrecked her family’s posh home. Rachael Bell, 17, wanted to copy the cult Channel 4 sex and drug drama while her parents were away. She posted an invite on networking website MySpace to "trash the average family-sized house". Tearaways from across Britain flocked to the £250,000 home..."

The full story can be read here.

UK social trends report

The Office for National Statistics published a detailed UK social trends report today. A full PDF download is available here.

There is some tie-in with GI's recent 'One Life' global visual trends report. For example, more than seven million Brit's now live alone, compared with three million in 1971. And the average age for a first marriage in England and Wales is 32 for men and 29 for women, up from 25 and 23 in 1971.

Fixing Fringing: Chromatic aberration & blooming

What it is & why it happens...

Chromatic aberration is an optical effect found in almost all wide angle and cheap telephoto lenses, both primes and zooms. It's caused when the different wavelengths of white light originating from the same point hit the sensor (or film plane) at two different points. It always appears as two different colours as a result.

Blooming cannot occur with film capture. It is caused by the micro lenses on a digital camera sensor and is compounded by individual photodiodes being overloaded with charge (blowing out to 255,255,255 white) next to low charge areas (dark tones). It's always a single colour, usually purple, sometimes blue'ish or red'ish. With digital captures it's not uncommon to have both chromatic aberration and blooming/fringing on the same image.
From here on in I'll refer to the lens issue as 'CA' and the digital sensor issue as 'blooming'.

Fixing CA

Above is an interiors image opened in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). The red circle shows the area below under the 'Lens' tab. If you don't use ACR then in Photoshop go to: Filter > Distort > Lens Correction. This is a 200% view...

This is 'classic' CA. My 24mm lens always displays this red-green CA towards the horizontal edges and corners of the frame. With ACR I just select all of the raw files that were taken with the 24mm in Adobe Bridge and paste an ACR setting of -24 on the 'Fix Red/Cyan Fringe' slider to them all. Again opened in ACR this is the result...

You can save settings and then apply them for your problem lenses/focal lengths, or use the copy & paste method (after correcting one image), or use the synchronize button within ACR. Whichever method you choose you can correct hundreds of images for CA in one fell swoop by selecting all of the raw thumbs in Bridge/ACR and then making a couple of mouse clicks. Neat eh!

Sometimes the problem is a little trickier to solve. My 17mm lens is a case in point. This is because it exhibits CA on more than two wavelengths of light and the CA effect shifts a little at different focusing points (between close focus and mid-infinity focus). Here's an image taken with the 17mm opened in ACR...

At 200% green-magenta CA is clearly visible...

This is corrected with a -17 on the 'Fix Red/Cyan Fringe' slider, and a +18 on the 'Fix Blue/Yellow Fringe' slider...

Fixing Blooming
Below is another 200% section of the above image with the Chromatic Aberration sliders still at -17/+18...

If we try to use the sliders to correct this problem we'll cause other problems elsewhere. The sliders are for CA only - they always manipulate two colours. This problem is blooming and it needs a different technique to fix it. Here it is at 200% in PS...

There's no raw conversions fix for this issue but it is easy to deal with in PS. Unfortunately it's a manual job. There are non-manual PS fixes but they corrupt the whole image unless you resort to manual control to limit their effect.

We're going to use the clone and/or brush tool to paint away the blooming. Create a transparent layer above the image layer (click the circled icon) and set this new layer to 'Color' mode...

This is the clone tool set up for working on the image...

Ensure that the 'Sample All Layers' box is ticked if you're using the clone tool. Sometimes it's best to use 'Aligned' cloning and sometimes it's not. It just depends on the amount of space you have to sample from in relation to the blooming.

If you're using the Brush tool (again a decision based on sampling area) ensure that you've sampled the foreground colour with the eyedropper tool from an area unaffected by blooming.

Now just paint/dab away. With either the clone tool or a brush you're simply overlaying the colour component of the sampled area/colour. The underlying luminosity (light, shadow & texture) is not affected. This is the job in progress with the clone tool (diameter 9px, hardness 70%)...

For the longer diagonal strip (not blooming, I just didn't like the colour!) I used the brush as the sampling area for cloning was very narrow. The whole thing took less than 30 seconds...

PS - In the 'Fixing CA' section the slider adjustments match the lens focal lengths. This is pure coincidence. Those sliders have nothing to do with focal lengths.

A reality check ... again

In yesterdays entry I briefly covered the trend of documentary styling in commercial visuals, especially those featuring/targeting teens & young adults. I've just remembered some recent trailers for a new Brit TV show, 'Skins', that happen to feature/target teens & young adults. Click here to see one of them.

Quite a revision on the 90's teen hit 'The Fresh Price of Bel-Air' isn't it... Click here.

I appreciate that some of us Europeans have for a long time leaned toward a greater level of realism in our visual media than Americans, but this is something I also see shifting. Our YouTube generation may be an unsuspecting movement for a form of global visual unification.

A reality check

It seems clear that there is an increasing crossover between illustrative (aka straight, documentary, journalistic, editorial) and produced (aka commerial, creative, advertising, conceptual) imagery in terms of what is deemed by viewers as 'real'. In essence what was once accepted as reality is now viewed with a level of scepticism by some viewers. I'm not just talking about moon landing conspiracists here. In recent years Photoshop combined with the distribution of the Internet have thrown up tens-of-thousands of faked 'real' images and made them available to millions of viewers. It's got to the stage where professional PJ's have lost their contracts for enhancing their hard news images...

http://www.intellnet.org/news/2003/04/02/19060-1.htm

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html

Conversely commercial imagery, once the exclusive domain of the beautiful people, the designer home, and 2.4 children is moving towards societal reality. As recently mentioned on my MAP Report entry the hero figure is being replaced by the real person. But it goes beyond this and can be separate from this.

Documentary & 'snapshot' styling is the other facet to consider. I'm seeing a growing number of print and internet ads that at first glance you take to be a genuinely candid snap taken by a friend of the very real looking (non-'modelly') subject(s). Only when you begin to clock the subtle technical considerations do you realise this is produced imagery. It's becoming a popular look for advertising featuring and targeting teens & young adults.

I'll finish this entry with a link to a Meisel shoot for Italian Vogue. It was published Sept. 2006. When the high end of fashion photography throws up something like this you know there's a real shift in produced visuals underway ... Click here.