Lightning Photo Restoration and Composition

Introduction
Part 1 - Original Photos
Part 2 Extracting A Bolt of Lightning
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7 Final Composition
Part 8 Conclusion

Introduction

The lightning photo below was created by me Robert Schroeter on June 10, 2004 after having taken three different lightning photos and incorporated them into a single composition - "Post Tenebras Lux". Although the camera's sensor captured the moment and the natural lightning you see below, I did enhance aspects of this photo using Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. As you'll see in the following article the original files had extremely visible blemishes that needed touching up. I've taken this opportunity to spend time working on a composition that requires the use of various photo-touch up techniques. The final image is by no means perfect, and still today has some degree of a manufacted look, however the purpose of this article is to demonstrate a few of my techniques for my personal archive purpose, and for your enjoyment.

Welcome to my photo touch-up tutorial. Here I'll attempt to demonstrates from beginning to end, the steps I took to fabricate my art-photo entitled: "Post Tenebras Lux", a composition of three photos taken at Scituate Harbor, in Scituate Massachusetts during a heavy lightning storm on June 9, 2004. The purpose of my tutorial is to simply show you what I did to my photograph, with the hope that you will retain parts of my technique and incorporate them into your virtual toolbox, and possibly bring some new ideas into the fabrication of your future endeavors.

Directly above is the final work after all touching up is complete. Invariably, this tutorial may (and probably will) cheapen the appeal of my final work, however, knowing this I would prefer you benefit from my knowledge (of how this was truly created) than have people out there believe this is original.

The fact that this photo is not original, is all the information some photographers need to quickly conclude that they do not like it. This begs the questions: If this were truly original, then would you like it any more? Knowing it is not original, do you now view this photo with any more scrutiny than you would a film print? Although the purpose of this article is not to debate the issues of editing vs. non-editing it does bare the burden and appearance of being a pivotal object at the epicenter of the debate.

For reasons apparent, my personal opinion on the matter is that photography is the art of addition and subtraction to produce images with the tools at our disposal, and not limited to the use of a single piece of hardware. A debate is not the subject of this article so on to the tutorial.

Part 1 - Original Photos

Below is the original photo from which the main canvas will be used. The first step in fixing this type of photo is to ask yourself why you are fixing it. In this case I want to fix the photo because it does not truly represent what I think I saw when the bolt actually struck. When I witnessed the event I thought it was much darker and more striking, not to mention the fact that the bushes in the foreground were barely noticeable. Our reason for 'fixing' this photo is to try to show the viewer what I really saw that night at the harbor. So to fix this we need to identify what is wrong with it, and simply correct the problems.

As you can see, the lightning bolt was extremely large, and lit up the entire sky because of apparent fog and particles of cloud throughout the photo, as well as with the long exposure - and so we have too much exposure on the sensor (or so it seems). In the close foreground you can see orange tinted brush going across the entire photo - which was not intended to be part of the composition. Further, there are lights on the right shores that are blown as a result of the long shutter speed. And of course the rear-view mirror in the photo acts as a terrible eyesore that we must somehow remove. An artist will notice however, that there is enough information in the photo to possibly save it using the histogram adjustment tool, the burning tool, the cloning tool, the selection tool, the brightness/darkness contrast saturation tool, and the airbrush tool ? all of which are at our disposal in the digital darkroom that is either Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro.

Please note that for the purpose of screen shots, I used Paint Shop Pro - and the majority of the cleaning phase was done in Photoshop using the cloning tool in addition to the methods described here.


Below is a screen shot of the actual histogram adjustment tool being used on this photo. We are editing the luminosity channel, which is responsible for all color channels at once. We leave our low and high points as is so that we do not loose information in the brightest and darkest shades, and then we move the middle (small gray arrow in Paint Shop Pro) to bring the gamma down to a point which produces the most detail (in the sky) of our image. I raised the mid-tones (to compresses slightly) to the point where the most detail is extracted from the image (in this case a value of 5). Good things to zero in on are the lightning bolts inside the whitest part of the photo. If you can begin to notice the bolts more clearly by moving the gauge to one spot, then that's where it should be. Play around with the histogram adjustment tool until you get the result you are looking for. In your photo it may need to gamma up and possibly expand your tones rather than compress them.



Below is the before and after histogram adjustment for each of the three photos that will make up the final piece. Each of the following three frames were taken moments apart with the same camera settings. Even though they are all poorly exposed, we can use the same technique on each one to produce a uniform adjustment to all. Then we have a base to start with.

Note: At this point it may be a good time to say that the original photos are quite terrible. One might ask why even bother fixing this image because of its obvious problems. Why not simply 'try again'. You may also be wondering why I took these photos as such in the first place? The answer is this: This was my first try at lightning photography. I arrived at this scene about 5-10 minutes before all lightning ceased. From the time I arrived until the lightning was done I would say about 8 lightning bolts appeared. The rain prevented me from exiting my car (not to mention the dangers involved) and my car being so low to the ground left me with little choice but to shoot what I could at that moment. I did approximately 10 exposures, missing the bolts each time but the first one (main photo) and the other two seen here. Next time I will more than likely take measures to get a better photo right from the beginning.

Original Untouched	After Histogram Adjustment

Part 2 Extracting A Bolt of Lightning

Once the bolt is selected, simply add it to an empty layer of a new document (as seen below).
Now we have a good element of this final scene ready for use in our project.

Here we want to extract the bolt of lightning in our third frame for use in our first frame just as we did with the second bolt of lightning in part 1. Specifically we really only want the edge of the cloud where a pair of bolts are actually protruding. This small section will work nicely on the opposite edge of our first frame to add some character to that part of the sky. Again, we use our polygon selection tool (point-to-point), with a feather of about two, to select just the whitest part of the bolts. Then, with that selection highlighted, we raise our feather to about 30, and use the shift key on our keyboard to indicate to our program that we will add to our current selection, and then we select the lit portion of the cloud around the edges. Paste the new selection into a new document ready for use in our final project.

Part 3 Below is our workbench with our three pieces of the final composition. 1: The long bolt from frame number two. 2: the image we'll use as our starting canvas. 3: The bolt from our third frame.
1
2	3
Before we actually start composing the image (placing the pieces over one-another) we need to fix the biggest problem areas in our main canvas. Namely we need to fix: the obvious brush we did not want in the frame. The glaring lights in the right shore. Re-construct the part of the photograph where the rear-view mirror has appeared. Darken the boats in the water (which were inadvertently lit by the brush in the foreground). Remove some multi-exposed lines, which are a result of both the long exposure and the quick Lightning burst of light. And finally we need to rotate the photo so that we get a straight horizon.

Part 4 As the artist, we now must decide what information will make it to our final work and what information will not. To do this we have to closely inspect the entire image nearly pixel by pixel to determine what information is relevant and should be kept, versus the information that is actually brush and that which we do not want. In our cutout section we have identified buoys in the harbor, boats, land and boat masts in red. Now it?s easy to visualize what should remain and what should not.
Our next objective is to cut out the relevant information in our harbor. Remove this information for future use, and then begin the 'cleaning' cycle where we'll actually remove the brush, and re-construct missing parts of the harbor. When we do 'clean' our harbor we'll likely loose information such as boat edges, buoys and land edges, not to mention the entire landmass in the furthest part of the horizon. As you can see below, we used the polygon selection tool once again to trim an outline of all relevant information, minus water, sky and the extremely far away landmass. The image below shows a crude outline of the elements from our cutout above. This is not part of the original manufacturing of my photo, but a crude representation of what we?re doing here. In the real case, the cutout would take many factors into consideration such as differing opacities among all various edges. For example: The edges on a boat's mast will differ from the edge near its shadow (in the water). So in each circumstance a different feather must be used - otherwise the gradient edges that look real for a shadow will look faux for a mast that should be very clear-cut.
Below is a crude representation of the final cut out of the entire harbor and its relevant information. Again, this is not a good representation of what took place in the real production as each type of edge should receive its own custom feather to suit the proper needs of that edge?s particular situation. For now the area of the photo where our rear-view mirror was, is just cut as a straight line. We'll reconstruct that part later.
This is possibly one of the most time consuming part of the project, second only to cleaning the brush. In the end, you'll find that the more attention you pay to each process, the better your final image will look. We?d all like to wave the magic wand and be finished with our work quickly, but in this case, the more time you spend the less sloppy your work will likely look.

Part 5 For this section, we'll be using just a small part of the harbor to demonstrate the process of removing the ugly orange foreground brush.
We begin by using a combination of the selection tool with a big feather to clone parts of the photo we want to copy and paste. These cloned 'parts' should represent a good gradient color that matches the missing area. Another way to clean the brush is to use the smudge tool, however this tool requires additional texture editing afterwards to reconstruct water waves and texture. Below are two of the tool-dialogue windows that show that I'm using the smudge tool with the attributes shown here. Try to use an opacity lower than 100% or you'll likely loose all gradient effect. The density should be below 100 also to prevent from defacing your colors and making your smudge too apparent.
Scroll down and look carefully at each image as the work progresses.
Again, I have to stress that these are not actual screen shots of my production. These are general screen shots that I recreated after to show what's going on. During the real process much more time was spent, and much more detail was kept, however the general look of the smudging was similar to what you see here. The key is to make the water hold onto the original gradients below the brush. Inevitably you'll loose the water texture. That's no problem because we can recreate it later.
Below is a basic idea of what the smudging and brush removal process will look like after you?re done. Still very far from perfect, but the majority of the brush is cloned, air-brushed and smudged out while the sky for the most part stays true. At this point I?ll stress again that the more time you spend perfecting the water the better your final presentation will look. The version you see below is far from what I ended with. It took me nearly 5 hours of cloning and smudging before I got the water in the whole harbor to simulate what the water would have looked like had no brushes been present. So spend a lot of time on this. If it doesn't look perfect go back to a recent saved project and continue from there, knowing what you did wrong on your last one. Don't be afraid to save many versions at different intervals. I had about 40 by the time it looked ok for me to move on.

Part 6 Below I?ve identified the sections of the photo that were affected (color-wise) by the orange brush. I used a feather of about three and cut out the entire photo once more selecting all orange-looking objects. I knew each part of this photo that had orange in it was not the real color of that object.

Once the harbor objects; land, lights, rocks and buoys were highlighted, I used the colorize tool to colorize those objects to match the colors they should represent - in this case, a dark mauve or bluish purple. This particular color is a hue of 170 or so. The saturation is how colorful it will be (either grayish 0-100, or really bright purple 100-255). I needed to match it up so I tried a few variations and found the two below were a good match. This process basically removes any of the old orange colorings from the photo and replaces it with a midnight-ish blue (which is what they really were). Here I should note that I selected only the orange parts of this photo (to colorize) because if I had colorized the entire photo, then the final product would seem two-toned (because at that point it would be). By only colorizing the parts we need to, we maintain a sense of real color, even though the use of our histogram adjustment has made the final output unnatural in color.

Above is an example of when colorization is applied to the entire image. Notice that our entire color scheme now looks false (as in black and white or sepia toned images). It?s not precisely what we want to go for here, so we simply selected the parts we wanted changed, and colorized those parts. Next we'll add our darkened boats selection from a previous step (where we selected the objects from the harbor), to our canvas. We darkened the layer, after colorizing it as well, and then we add this layer to our now colorized canvas image. We'll see this in a moment.

Now we need to add texture to our water with ripples and noise so it looks like real water again. To do this I simply use a feather of three or four and select the portion of this entire photo below the horizon. Then I add noise using the uniform option (not much noise, just enough to differentiate the part of this photo from the sky) (shown first image below). It should be barely noticeable.

Lastly, I did an extra effect here of rippling - a very subtle ripple effect that took some time to perfect. I had to select the water once more using the polygon tool, and then I opened a new document and pasted the water part of the photo, into a new layer. I copied the layer three times. I produced a ripple effect (shown below) at three different ripple sizes (big medium and small). Bigger ripples should appear closer to the viewer, and smaller ripples should appear closer to the horizon. I splice the top third of the first image and paste it over the top third of the second image. Then I splice the top two thirds from the second image and paste it over the third image. It is difficult to see here, but I hope you understand the concept. At a higher resolution you can see the ripples more clearly.

Now we have lightning bolts from other frames, we have the silhouette of the boats and objects in the harbor, and we have harbor water. All we have left to do is layer the pieces together in our final composition. Note: Additional steps to get to this point that are not discussed include the cloning of some of the rock textures on the left to add them to where the rear-view mirror used to be. Also I removed most of the colored portions of the dark land matter in the foreground and in the right sea shore. The only real color present was color created by our ugly brush (bushes) and the real color of these areas would have been black anyway. In addition, we added our two lightning bolts one at a time as a final step. Because of the lightning bolts edges and opacity and color, we needed to place the two bolts in positions such that their edges matched the color of the background onto which we put the bolts. For example: had I placed the long bolt right in the center of this photo, its dark blue edges would be extrmely apparent over the white part of the big bolt. Here I placed the long bolt in the upper portion of the photo where it's edges were best matched to the background.

Part 7 Final Composition Now we put the pieces together one by one. We use our background canvas and layer our various pieces over the canvas in the desired position. First we add the water layer, and then the harbor object layer, then our second and third bolts of lightning. Below is the composition at this point. We should also rotate the photo properly at this point.

Yeah we're done! Ok not quite yet. There is still a lot of work left to do. Can you spot the blemishes? Look at the photo below, I?ve highlighted areas that need more work - compare the circles to the photo above. Notice that in some areas the gradual effect is not exactly perfect? If a part of the photo looks like it?s just a bit off, or not quite real, then you still have work to do. Even my final piece of work is not perfect, but as far as my patience and eyes can tell its as close as I can get it. Unfortunately at this point, if you have obvious flaws then you may need to go back and fix some of your 'pieces' before composing. In my case, I composed about 15 times before I was happy with the final result, and after the composition was finished I returned to the drawing board a few more times to correct aberrations I thought looked too obvious. This entire project is time consuming and tedious. At times I contemplated turning back and just giving up because it took so much time, but in the end it was worth the effort. The total project took me about 2 full days of work (+/- 15 hours) and writing this entire article (tutorial about this photo) took another day. I won't even mention the number of bug bites on my legs and hands I got waiting for the shutter to snap each time (holding still).

Part 8 Conclusion The final product of our efforts.

Until the gradients were free flowing I did not rest because it was the gradient colors that made it look real. My final image is named "Post Tenebras Lux", which is a Latin proverb for "After darkness, there is light". Still to this day, I look back on the image and feel a sort of loss for having not captured this image properly when I was in the field and had the opportunity. The photo itself was taken from the driver?s seat of my BMW Z3 at the edge of a parking lot overlooking the harbor in poring rain. I had just arrived a moment earlier, stacked a beanbag on my lap (over a backpack) laid my camera down in its settings and looked through the viewfinder only to see all black, minus the dim lights on the right shore. I had no idea the brush would come out like it did, and my car being so low to the ground showed even more than I wanted. This was my first exposure that night. And only after I saw the result did I notice that I had captured much more than I wanted. Because of the rain, I was not able to get out of the car, so for the next 10 minutes or so I was bound to shooting this scene. The other two exposed lightning shots were also shot in similar fashion. When I reviewed my first shot on the back of my canon 10D I got the idea for this entire composition - knowing I had major work to do. I will say that I?m happy with the result. This was a spur of the moment idea to drive down to the harbor to try at some lightning photos. Next time I will bring an umbrella and some bug repellant ? although my recent readings suggest that being outside in some cases is very dangerous under a lightning storm. I may even outfit the passenger side car seat with a better setup for beanbag pictures out of the passenger side window. This way I?m safe and still have the opportunity to shoot. I will need to find a better spot without so much brush however. If you have comments, additions or corrections, please send them to rschroeter@anhassociates.com. I would love to hear your feedback about this or other photos. Yours, - Robert Schroeter Original Photo Stats: Camera: Canon 10D f-stop: 2.8 (accidentally chose this) shutter: 30 seconds (but covered the lense after the lightning struck) Post-Processing: Paint Shop Pro Location: Scituate Harbor - Scituate, MA Lens: Sigma 24-70mm EX 2.8 DG DF Conditions: Rain, fog, 10:50pm - very dark, but some ambient light from streets and homes. Final Notes: I used Photoshop for much of the cloning that was used to clean the brush, and Paint Shop Pro v7 for almost the rest of the process.

Read 6,740 times

Reply 

From michaelcastellano/Michael (63,775) on June 9, 2005 2:07:38 PM CDT Fabulous tutorial, Rob. Thanks for posting. Reply

From rschroeter2124/Rob (4,934) on June 9, 2005 3:20:48 PM CDT Thanks a lot for saying so Michael - I realized after reviewing it a few times that it is a long tutorial/article - and that perhaps it is too long winded. Take Care Rob Reply

From rexr/Rex (236) on June 16, 2005 7:30:16 PM CDT It is long but for us Photoshop novices it is very informative. Thanks for posting it... Reply

From crdome/Crdome (3,096) on August 26, 2005 2:13:34 AM CDT Thank you for taking time to make this informative tutorial. It gives me much to digest and certainly helps me understand how limited I've used my software and what the possibilities it opens. -Chrome Reply

From rschroeter2124/Rob (4,934) on September 4, 2005 11:03:31 AM CDT Thanks for the positive feedback Chrome :) Reply

From noormoon/Noor (1,865) on September 15, 2005 6:09:12 PM CDT how long u r using the photoshope, very helpfull to the beginers, so feel long, if it interesting sure excellent Reply

From rschroeter2124/Rob (4,934) on September 22, 2005 9:39:10 PM CDT I've used photoshop for a few years, 5 or 6, but it doesn't take that long to enjoy it, and see results. The more you work, the better you feel using it to create imagery. It's a great idea to look up once in a while, to see what others are doing, but remember, only once in a while should you look up! ;) Reply

From gregcampbell/Greg (67) on November 8, 2005 10:56:08 PM CST You've created a great little tutorial, and I can't help but be impressed with the before vs. after result. Thanks! On the other hand, the final image is FAR too synthetic for my taste. Cutting and pasting lightning from seperate exposures is bad enough, but adding artificial 'waves' is really over the top, IMO. (Clearly my personal view!) - This begs the questions: If this were truly original, then would you like it any more? Yes, I would have a great deal of respect for any (lightning) photographer with the patience, foresight, skill, and dumb luck, to take a photograph that looked remotely like the final image. Frankly, taking a roadkill shot from the front seat, and then tarting it up with hours of computer time seems a bit beside the point. (Sorry for the brief thread hijack, but you did ask! :) ) -Greg Reply

From rschroeter2124/Rob (4,934) on March 5, 2006 1:50:26 PM CST I did ask, Thanks for taking the time to respond :) Good points you make. Reply

Return to articles