MerricksDad's Weapon-A-Day

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

DOOOOO EEEET! I could certainly use some actual redwood pictures! The ones I made back in 2006 were home made by splicing a bunch of textures together. They sucked.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

I'll work at assembling some reference photos for you. Whatever I can get my hands on. I live near a beautiful stand of second growth redwood, some of the original trees of which were big enough for the spanish to use as navigation markers. Don't have any that big to shoot here, but I'll get what I can. And whats more, incense cedar (calocedrus decurrens) has some superficial similarities with redwood and I have shots of those too. They grow all over the place.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well I went out and did another 50 or so shots of pine foliage on magenta. Something is different tonight, and I don't know exactly what, but EVERY photo taken is mixing pink with the needles and stem. So much so that 50% of the stems are tinged pink. Also, blue spruce does NOT work well with magenta. The camera is having issues with those colors near each other and making a mess. All 50 images are totally useless to me at this point. Not one of them is something I can work with without first coming up with a new algorithm to clean off the pink. (and yellow after pink removal). Another issue that is being caused tonight is that the magenta is separating into two hue groups. One is dictated by the red group and the other by the magenta group. If I remove the magenta group, it leaves behind this weird mauve. But if I remove the red, it just makes a mess. No way that I know of to remove it except by manual replacement, and due to the mixing in the camera, that leaves me with just about nothing.

 

I will have to switch back to white for most of those bluer species and see what I can do. It takes longer to separate from white, but I think in the long run, I will get more useful photos.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I have a trunk full of tree clippings from the yard waste dump. This should be good. Blue spruce, green spruce, long needled blue spruce, long branching tree yew, red cedar in young form, red cedar in adult form, white cedar, white pine, ponderosa pine, etc. And lucky me, I found a bunch of discarded bulbs for my garden! Always nice to go to the garbage store.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

I am just getting wierded out by the fact that I can't remove background colors from any photos this week. It has only been a few weeks total I think since I got the first really good image to work, and on the first try. It was perfect. And even last week's branch on hot pink came away without much difficulty, and only left the slightest yellowing around the edges.

 

All the images I took last night, and yesterday morning, I tried two ways. The first shot was on pink, even though I knew the sun was too high. The shadow and the mixing of pink made every single shot worthless, again. The second way was on white while the sun was under cloud cover. Not like the nice storm threatening day I had when I took the first images, but still, dark enough to reduce shadows quite a bit.

 

So the second set of images I see works best when the amount of shadow is reduced to nearly nothing, but at the same time there needs to be enough light that the foliage isn't too dark. There also must not be so much light that the glossiness of the foliage becomes the brightest thing in the image. The background color MUST be separate from other highlights and stuff, both in hue and brightness, at least to do the easiest background removal job.

 

So in last night's on-white tests, the results varied based solely on the amount of sun, and how close the material was to the backdrop. If the object cast too much shadow, the image was pretty much ruined because the shadow on the foliage and the shadow on the backdrop blended together. In my previous images, the shadow cast by the foliage was grayscale or nearly grayscale, so I could simply select colors by a hue range and remove them, give or take unselecting the branches on gray-barked spruces. Last night, against a perfectly gray scale backdrop (where all the RGB values match, or are at least within one point off) the shadow color had added 20% blue and subtracted 20% red. I don't get where the color difference is suddenly coming from. I changed no setting on my computer, and the materials I am using are the same, give or take species.


I had mentioned a post or two back that the problem I started having with on-pink shooting was that anything in the shadow shifted hue, not just lightness. I bet if I checked, there is a 10-20 percent change in both red and blue in the shadow hue on pink, as well as mixing in those same values.

 

I need a lab, or at least a partner. I think if I have somebody hold the end of the foliage (I have cut the stems long on these I got from the yard waste dump), I could get a picture of the foliage with pure white background and no shadow at all. I just need to make sure the person holding the foliage does not pollute the image with shadow. How in the world do other texture producers make theirs? This is suddenly so strange to me.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Lord Sullivan]

               

@MerricksDad

 

The kind of work that is required to clean/contour a branch/foliage is that most of the time it is not as easy as just selecting the background color and deleting it. You wil find that you have to also do some work with the eraser tool. This is generaly how it goes.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_rjshae]

               

Would a portable photography backdrop work? Might cost you a little though.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Well the white backdrop I got, and the pink ones, work pretty good depending on the light, and they do actually let me simply remove the background, as long as the lighting is right and there is no shadow, seams, or other interference. My first spruce shows how easy that is, and I made that total in less than 30 minutes, including time it takes to model, export and post the images here. The pink one took just about the same time as the original, but like Lord Sullivan said, it did take some more work, and I failed to properly un-yellow the edges after I removed the magenta channel. I don't have that issue with the white background because blending with white doesn't do that horrid mixing on my camera.


I was just talking to a photographer in town at my local coffee shop (where I was purchasing a coke) and she mentioned all her photos outside without a backdrop object are best taken in the early morning hours. The lighting isn't colored too much except on days with distant clouds. The light is clean, unlike light in the afternoon, which is when I took my on-white photos yesterday.


The only photos I got working with the pink backdrop were the ones I took between a thunderstorm and the sun coming out in the afternoon. It was patchy then, so it wasn't as good of lighting as when I did the original ones on white during a 4 day rainy period with no sun.


It sounds like what I need is a garden net, like the ones they use to create a percent shade. Then I could take pictures nonstop all day long and still have that outside without-a-flash look to my textures.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Oh happy day! Finally the storms came back last night and I was able to get some storm-light for my foliage textures! About 50 textures to work on today and they are perfectly lit on white board. It takes this much work to cut them out:

• create a mask by brightness


• enable editing the mask


• modify the mask brightness/contrast by 50/50, again by -50/50, and again by 50/50 (in steps on purpose because of how this program does the math)


• save the mask as the alpha channel


• delete the mask, taking with it the background


• create a layer under the original image with a color equal to somewhere near the mean of the foliage color


• clone the original layer on top of itself and set the blending method to multiply


• resize image to nearest binary size


• save, done, bingo!

Here is this morning's first image

 

 

32 more texures will be in this package, including: Japanese Yew, white pine, red pine, eastern red cedar, a blue colored red pine, blue spruce, and black hills spruce. I need to retake the white cedar as I have lost the branch parts in the storm. The number of red cedar branches is also reduced from the original total because they dried out and got nasty over this hot week. Plenty more at the yard waste dump!


I am also updating the list of species I plan to photograph (above)

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Estelindis]

               

That texture is jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Another method to making foliage edges fit a certain background color is to, right after making the background color layer, copy the merged image and paste it below the original layer (or replace the background layer with the merged copy).


Then with the merge layer active, do an edge dilation (either by percent or pixel number depending on your program), or regional blur. This fills the partially transparent area with more of the foliage, and less of the background color, while keeping the sharpness of the original texture.


Depending on the type of foliage, and the lighting on the edges, you might then increase your mask size by a few pixels to grab some more of that mixed area.


Again, this is just another option I have seen used on large foliage textures. I don't use it, but I also don't think with these quality images it is needed. But for smaller images where the leaf edge becomes pixelated, it might be a very good idea.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_henesua]

               

that looks great MD, and I am sorry to say that I won't be able to produce photo references that clean.

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

well fine then, I'll just have to work harder at getting that redwood vacation I always wanted '>

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

The first package of individual foliage parts is up. I also added a package of some non-seamless bricks.

 

               
               

               
            

[Legacy_MerricksDad]

               

Next project, until I can have a day car again to fetch stock, is to do individual leaf varieties. Tonight, I started with the ash tree:

 

 

I'll be doing these as about 512 pixels per foot of foliage, so expect some of the texture sizes to start getting smaller for these bits.