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UltravioletPhotography

Flying with Tiffen #12


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Andy Perrin

I took a helicopter flight on Father's Day (US holiday) with my father flying the copter. It's his hobby. We flew from Hanscom Field in Lincoln, Mass. to southern Massachusetts near Halifax, then turned around and went through Boston and back to Hanscom. We took the doors off the helicopter so there wouldn't be any ugly reflections (also that nice cool breeze...).

 

post-94-0-96463300-1530238799.jpg

 

These are pseudo-aerochrome images made with Tiffen #12, although I did not work very hard to achieve the "look" of the original film. It was sufficient for me to get the red trees and blue sky, and other than that I adjusted the colors as I thought pleasing.

 

Lens: Novoflex Noflexar 35mm

F/8 mostly (as far as I can recall...) and ISO100. I didn't keep close track of the exposures, as I was busy taking photos out of a doorless helicopter at the time.

 

Processing:

Raw to TIFF with no white balance. Then, in MATLAB,

Rnew = B

Gnew = R - B

Bnew = G - B

then a white balance off asphalt or whatever was handy that looked like it ought to be white in PhotoNinja. Various adjustments to exposure and saturation, then denoising with Neat Image.

 

post-94-0-93935700-1530239090.jpg

 

Fall River Expressway, headed toward Boston

post-94-0-15002100-1530239108.jpg

 

post-94-0-96167100-1530239129.jpg

 

Whitman, Mass.

post-94-0-18403400-1530239161.jpg

 

cranberry bog

post-94-0-88503600-1530239181.jpg

 

post-94-0-96793700-1530239202.jpg

 

post-94-0-85801600-1530239217.jpg

 

post-94-0-60467700-1530239235.jpg

 

Boston in the distance

post-94-0-28118100-1530239252.jpg

 

Boston harbor way off...

post-94-0-97194200-1530239268.jpg

 

post-94-0-00903100-1530239284.jpg

 

Hyde Park area in Dedham, Mass.

post-94-0-78109500-1530239297.jpg

 

Approaching Boston, looking through the front of the helicopter

post-94-0-20344300-1530239312.jpg

 

Downtown Boston, with the Prudential building and John Hancock building (the dark one) prominent

post-94-0-20422500-1530239328.jpg

 

Gold dome of the Massachusetts state house on the left, Park Street church in the middle, Boston Common on the bottom right (the trees)

post-94-0-59023300-1530239343.jpg

 

post-94-0-76093100-1530239363.jpg

 

Boats in the harbor

post-94-0-22618000-1530239387.jpg

 

Logan Airport

post-94-0-11550100-1530239404.jpg

 

Bunker Hill Community College (by the baseball diamond) and Route 93

post-94-0-28763200-1530239420.jpg

 

MIT's Stata building

post-94-0-40184600-1530239439.jpg

 

Route 2, in Lexington, Mass.

post-94-0-60665000-1530239045.jpg

 

Houses by Hanscom Field air force base

post-94-0-20948100-1530239033.jpg

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eye4invisible
Superb shots! I especially like the one looking through the front of the chopper.
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Andy Perrin
Thanks! It was necessary to use MATLAB (no “h” - it stands for MATrix LABoratory) because I started with nearly 130 images and doing them one by one in Photoshop was too slow. I guess technically I could have set it up as a PS action but it was just as easy to write it in MATLAB.
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Thanks for the correction, Andy. BTW, have you tried if your routines will run in Octave or do you need MATLAB specific libraries? (For those not familiar with it, Octave is an open source MATLAB clone). MATLAB licences are quite expensive if one has to pay for them and our university does not allow university paid licences on private computers.

 

In general, with respect to working on TIFFs, one issue I can think of is when the TIFFs contain non-linear (gamma corrected) data as they typically do. I have for instance had problems with this when trying to compensate vignetting with flats in astrophotography software. It never works as well as when working directly on the raw files. Subtraction of light pollution is another case. Whatever you are using, your routines seem to work well enough though!

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Andy Perrin

MATLAB is $149 or so for a personal-use-only license, which doesn't strike me as out of line for commercial software (or people who will spend hundreds on lenses and filters...). They do ask for more for the toolboxes, although I did not use any toolbox functions here. The student version is $49. As far as whether it would work on Octave, probably, but Octave crashes constantly. It is very unstable. I've used it enough to know the $$ for MATLAB was worth it to not have to deal with Octave.

 

The way I processed these, I used PhotoNinja to export the demosaiced but otherwise unadjusted RAW to TIFF, which didn't seem to contain any gamma correction at all based on how dark those images were. I did the non-linear contrast adjustments myself after the channel subtraction, not before. I think EXIFtool could also be used instead of PhotoNinja.

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I don't have Matlab, so first converting the RAW to TIF, I tried your subtraction formula above with Photoshop.

 

"Processing:

Raw to TIFF with no white balance. Then, in MATLAB,

Rnew = B

Gnew = R - B

Bnew = G - B

then a white balance off asphalt or whatever was handy that looked like it ought to be white in PhotoNinja. Various adjustments to exposure and saturation, then denoising with Neat Image."

 

My results are too embarrassing to post.

Also, I don't know how to white balance a TIFF.

Whatever your doing is the best I have ever seen.

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Thanks for further information Andy. The problem has been that the licence is only for the basic MATLAB, then one end up having to buy several additional modules if one want to have some fun and it all adds up. At least that is how it used to be; my information might very well be outdated as I cannot recall there were personal licenses. (Student licences on the other hand used to be a package deal with a number of different modules included). They do not even list the prices on their web site. I have had Octave on my computer for quite a while, but admittedly the use has been very sporadic.
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Andy Perrin

I don't have Matlab, so first converting the RAW to TIF, I tried your subtraction formula above with Photoshop.

 

"Processing:

Raw to TIFF with no white balance. Then, in MATLAB,

Rnew = B

Gnew = R - B

Bnew = G - B

then a white balance off asphalt or whatever was handy that looked like it ought to be white in PhotoNinja. Various adjustments to exposure and saturation, then denoising with Neat Image."

 

My results are too embarrassing to post.

Also, I don't know how to white balance a TIFF.

Whatever your doing is the best I have ever seen.

Can you send me the RAW tiffen#12 shot you are playing with? I wonder if my camera/lens combo made any difference.

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Andy Perrin

Thanks for further information Andy. The problem has been that the licence is only for the basic MATLAB, then one end up having to buy several additional modules if one want to have some fun and it all adds up. At least that is how it used to be; my information might very well be outdated as I cannot recall there were personal licenses. (Student licences on the other hand used to be a package deal with a number of different modules included). They do not even list the prices on their web site. I have had Octave on my computer for quite a while, but admittedly the use has been very sporadic.

Prices are definitely on the site. Here is the home license (for anyone, not just students):

https://www.mathwork...atlab-home.html

 

You do usually have to buy a few modules, so it does add up a bit, but my whole MATLAB setup cost less than my Noflexar, and I need it for work anyway (I tutor MATLAB). Octave should work in principle. Script is here if anyone wants to see the details. The top part is just to edit the files in a batch. The work is done by the function at the bottom.

batchTiffenToAerochrome.txt

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Thanks for the link, strangely Google did not want to take me to that page when I checked. (Not ready to shell out for a licence with my sporadic use though, but good to know should the need change). Also thanks for showing the code, surprisingly few lines.
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Hi Andy -

 

I've scrolled through these Tiffen #13 aero-scapes several times with great enjoyment. Really spectacular stuff! The alternate light and your excellent processing encourage the viewer to see in a new way how the man-made structures interact with the environment. And what a cool Dad you have who flies helicopters as a hobby. What fun !!!!! BTW, how did you tether the camera in that doorless heli? :lol:

 

I love the cranberry bog and the one following that with the winding river. And I love the highway cloverleaf with the clover all filled with trees. The harbor view of Boston is amazing and my favorite of the city ones.

 

The view of the MIT Stata building is so crazy from the air!! We took my SigOth's Italian architect cousin to look at that building. But from the ground one does not entirely get the overall effect of the design.

 

I wonder if you could make an interesting little booklet from a series like this to sell to Boston residents & tourists? Also I think you should contact the photo editor of the Boston Globe and try to get a story about this photography. It would make a nice Sunday short feature in the appropriate section of the paper. Just send an email to the appropriate editor with a couple of examples and a "hey, would you like to do a story about this kind of photography?" query.

 

Thank you also for sharing your MatLab program. If you would ever like to have a Matlab section for posting and talking about some of these cool photo processing programs, please let me know. We could put it into the Tutorials section.

 

*******

 

Now, a bit off topic, but years ago a fellow from the Pacific Northwest made a great program for channel stacking. I don't know if he used Matlab or what. But it occurs to me that Matlab is the way to go for re-creating a good channel stacking program.

 

For the uninitiated, what I call a channel stack is a photoshop RGB difference layer. For example, you place the IR version of a scene into the Red channel, the Visible version of the same scene into the Green channel, and the UV version into the Blue channel. There are a huge number of interesting variations on this.

 

Anyway, Andy, would it be easy to use Matlab for channel stacks?

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Andy Perrin

Thanks! I actually don’t really enjoy being in the public eye very much, so I’m not sure I’ll be talking to the papers any time soon.

 

MATLAB does channel stacks nicely. It’s what I’m doing here, more or less.

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Now, a bit off topic, but years ago a fellow from the Pacific Northwest made a great program for channel stacking. I don't know if he used Matlab or what. But it occurs to me that Matlab is the way to go for re-creating a good channel stacking program.

 

For the uninitiated, what I call a channel stack is a photoshop RGB difference layer. For example, you place the IR version of a scene into the Red channel, the Visible version of the same scene into the Green channel, and the UV version into the Blue channel. There are a huge number of interesting variations on this.

 

Anyway, Andy, would it be easy to use Matlab for channel stacks?

 

Andrea, I think you might be referring to Ben Lincoln, who wrote TMSB (The Mirror's Surface Breaks).

https://www.beneaththewaves.net/Software/The_Mirrors_Surface_Breaks.html

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