Vegas as a photo editor

musicvid10 wrote on 8/8/2010, 10:51 AM
History: I got Photoshop 5 soon after it came out. As an old-school photog, I never saw any compelling reason to upgrade, although some of the effects you can do with CS are pretty cool.

Photoshop Levels is my tool of choice for all my baseline correcting of stills. Having a full set of controls for four channels and a graphic display (albeit not realtime), I can turn a flat or off-color still into a good one in short order.

Also, having entered NLE in the early days (when sampling was not so good), I assumed I had to do all the work on my stills in Photoshop before bringing them to the timeline. I now wish I had broken out of that mold a long time ago.

Using stacked Levels plugins on stills in Vegas is so easy! At first I thought having to stack was going to be a disadvantage. But being able to click back and forth, and selective disable is really an advantage over PS5. But the biggest treat is being able to use the Histogram Scopes with all four channels visible and updating in realtime. What I can do quickly and better (with shadow and highlight detail) with the scopes in Vegas is a huge advantage over PS5! (I don't know how CS handles this).

I'll be trying some of Vegas' effects on my stills in the coming weeks, and I can always grab the image (Match Media Settings, Best/Full) to take into PS for more work, or just save it. I think PS is going to be used less for my CC and Levels work from now on.

Just one more reason Vegas is one of the best software titles on the planet.

Comments

Andy_L wrote on 8/8/2010, 2:05 PM
Vegas isn't just a better still editor than Photoshop, it's also a better audio editor than Sonar or Pro Tools. It's also a far better database than Oracle, a much more secure browser than FireFox, and, in my humble opinion, the best first-person shooter since Far Cry. Now, if I could just figure out a way to get it to replace my OS... :)
FuTz wrote on 8/8/2010, 3:58 PM
WWWWwwhhhhat ?!?

!O_O!
winrockpost wrote on 8/8/2010, 4:21 PM
no offense ,,,but I think you need to learn photoshop a little more
musicvid10 wrote on 8/8/2010, 4:56 PM
None taken, and as a twenty year veteran of technical / commercial photofinishing until a forced retirement in 1990 (PPD sensitivity), I have used Photoshop 5 (not CS5) almost daily for work and pleasure since it was released about the same time. I was adept at making color layer masks on film before they could be done on a computer.

If the improved Levels controls and graphic interface in current CS versions are better though, which is what I "think" I hear you saying, I would certainly like to hear about it in detail from you. But right now I'm as happy as a clam.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/8/2010, 5:38 PM
the issue you'll encounter is that you can run a script on 100 images via photoshop (or gimp, etc) to do something faster then the time vegas can render it out. Not all the time, but ~50% of the time. You'll learn when you should use pshop & when you should use vegas.

5 is the last version I used too. Kept it for years, hated the UI changes in 6 & newer. :) Eventually I went to gimp. Took some time to learn, but I can do pretty much anything in PS5 in Gimp, plus more (has features 5 doesn't have).
musicvid10 wrote on 8/8/2010, 5:50 PM
I bet you could load a hundred stills on the Vegas timeline, apply your effects, and render it out as an image sequence in no time. Frame rate would = image length. I'll have to play with that idea.
EDIT: Guess you would have to keep them to 2048x2048, at least in Vegas 8. Oh well.

But yes, I run batch actions in PS all the time -- I'll take an image sequence out of Vegas, batch it in PS5 with different effects, and render it back in Vegas. Here's a quick example of Posterization, which can't be done with a simple filter natively in Vegas. Only disadvantage is PS can't do lookahead / lookbehind processing of images, so it's rather "early-cinema" looking. A bit of motion blur once back in Vegas helps, though.

(No sound track)


Like you, I was so turned off by PS6 that I never upgraded.
As for Gimp, I was never able to wrap my brain around all the windows.

But anyone who didn't have to do this stuff by hand for a living doesn't understand what an advantage any digital photo software has over the way we used to do it. Imagine burning, souping, registering and copying contrast masks with 100 color transparencies that had bad gamma -- and only having a week to do it.
Harold Brown wrote on 8/8/2010, 6:15 PM
I have been using LightRoom 3 and really like the work that I can do with it. I still need Photshop on some things and for that I use Photoshop Elements 8. I have Photoshop 7 but when I installed Windows 7 64bit I never installed it.
ushere wrote on 8/8/2010, 6:36 PM
not that i've used it, but apparently gimp now has a 'ps' layout option so you'd think you were in ps....

PeterDuke wrote on 8/9/2010, 4:28 AM
A problem I constantly face in both stills and videos is high dynamic range.

Can you do local (as distinct from global) shadow lightening in Vegas? For instance, a normally light object in a shadow could have the same brightness as a dark object in sunlight. Can you lighten the former (along with the other objects in the shadow) without affecting the latter? If you lighten shadows by fiddling with levels only, you spoil the contrast in both sunlight and shadows. The NewBlue Shadows and Highlights plugin for Vegas seems to be a global levels adjuster and does just that.

Premiere (Pro and Elements) has a Shadow Highlight effect which allows you to adjust shadows and highlights independently, and I understand that Photoshop has a similar tool. (I use LightMachine plugin in a different photo editor and don't use photoshop.) These tools work by identifying local shadow and highlight regions and placing a feathered mask over the region you are working on so that you don't interfere with the other region. There are parameters you can adjust for feather width, transition region level etc. to minimize halo effects.

There are times however when the shadow regions in a still are not easily distinguished from the highlights automatically, and so I have to draw the mask(s) by hand. Can hand drawn masks be done as easily or as well in Vegas as in a still editor like Photoshop?
JJKizak wrote on 8/9/2010, 4:49 AM
Vegas is much quicker at doing the simple photo things and with a few new items like smudge and spray paint with eyedropper I probably wouldn't use the graphic software at all. You can blow up the picture to over 300 %, crop, cookie cut, color correct side by side and do it faster.
JJK
musicvid10 wrote on 8/9/2010, 6:01 AM
ushere,
Thanks for motivating me to try Gimp again. It certainly is an improvement over what it was years ago. The Levels graphic is the same as PS however (updates after applying), and batching is done via the command line, which I'm slow at. Neat tools though.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 8/9/2010, 12:50 PM
As for Gimp, I was never able to wrap my brain around all the windows.

only PS on Windows had the main background window to contain everything. On Irix & Mac-Something or other (a G4) it was all floating windows.

You get used to it. :D
Earl_J wrote on 9/15/2010, 7:38 PM
Hey everyone. . .
I'm not fully versed on what is really going on in here ... but the discussion about light and shadow brings up the New Blue light Effects release ...
I've downloaded it and played with it a bit ...
As with the other programs they offer; it downloads quickly, installs efficiently, and simply just works when opened in Vegas Pro (either 32- or 64-bit) . . .
If I can ever figure out what we're trying to accomplish here in this thread, I'll use it to find out how LE will handle the issues. . . (blush)

Until that time . . . Earl J.
musicvid10 wrote on 9/15/2010, 8:54 PM
"If I can ever figure out what we're trying to accomplish here in this thread,'

Since I started the thread, I'll take a shot at explaining:

Old-school RGB/CMY levels and gamma guy here, went straight from commercial photofinishing to Photoshop.

I now find using stacked levels in Vegas easier, faster, more forgiving than sequential levels adjustments in Photoshop (or Gimp); visually, using scopes, and from a recoverability standpoint. That's all -- it may be hard to understand the difference unless one does a lot of this kind of work.

Even though I'm more of a "manual levels" than "auto levels" type, I'll download the trial plugin you mentioned and see what it does.
Rory Cooper wrote on 9/15/2010, 11:07 PM
PeterDuke check out Photoimpact from 10 up for High dynamic range for stills. Nice price software and very effective

I work with Photoshop every single day, its very good and its overrated, and overpriced
it’s like we have been brainwashed…….PHHHOOOOTOOOOSHHHHOPPPPPP………bow..very low now.

Sony Vegas scopes and secondary color corrector etc are very very impressive
I have used Boris and Vegas to do some fx on stills before especially on logo’s and text. on those images Photoshop would not have come close.
The only downside is size limitation in Vegas.
PeterDuke wrote on 9/16/2010, 1:21 AM
"PeterDuke check out Photoimpact from 10 up for High dynamic range for stills"

It's a while since I looked at Photoimpact, so I may be off-beam here so far as it is concerned.

To generate a HDR image for stills, different exposures of the same scene are combined to give a single image with no burnt out highlights and fully exposed shadows. However, a HDR image cannot be displayed on LDR screen or paper, so tonemapping is usually used to do this. The net effect is to squash the contrast and make the image look very unnatural. A better approach is the shadows/highlights effect as found in Adobe and some other products, which attempt to separate the scene into non-overlapping highlight and lowlight regions, so that the brightness of each region can be adjusted independently.

I think Photoimpact might use tonemapping to reduce the global contrast of the image as a whole rather than adjusting the brightness of the shadows and highlights as separate regions, thereby preserving local contrast within the regions.

Even regular stills can benefit from shadow/highlight adjustment, and I regularly use PhotoPaint plus LightMachine plugin to do this. Of course you should not lighten shadows with irrelevant detail in them. Only backlit subjects and the like.

Rory Cooper wrote on 9/16/2010, 3:25 AM
Here are some useful tips if anyone is interested

http://gyes.eu/photo/high_dynamic_range.htm

http://gyes.eu/photo/camera_curve_profiles.htm
Earl_J wrote on 9/16/2010, 5:06 AM
Hey musicvid, very good explanation ... thanks ...
I'm with you as well. . . use the tool for the best use of efficiency and effectiveness for the job at hand - which is why we use a screwdriver to open paint cans instead of taking the time to find the paint can opener - or going to buy one ... (grin)
* * *
Not sure if you've played with New Blue tools before - and certainly don't want to insult your intelligence - but once any preset is selected in any NB plug-in, there is always the opportunity to make tweaks to those settings and save your settings as a new preset of its own. . . I mention that only to clarify that NB is not a preset-only plugin to those who may not be familiar with any of their products ...
* * *
Rory, interestingly enough, our local photo club has an HDR presentation setup for the 26th ... it should be fun. . . thanks for the links ...

Until that time... Earl J.
musicvid10 wrote on 9/16/2010, 7:56 AM
The only downside is size limitation in Vegas.

Yes, if the destination is not going to be video or the web, it is a bummer.
Earl_J wrote on 9/16/2010, 6:46 PM
Hey musicvid ...
are we saying that this sort of compilation can be created with video clips ... ?
I can alternate my shots of a sunset through three or four different exposure settings to give me five or ten seconds of each exposure setting that I can blend together in post?
Now that would be fun . . .
We mask out the parts we don't want and let the rest show through ...
We mask out the overblown portions of the over-exposed to bring out details in the brights, the dark shadows from the under-exposed to bring out the details in the dark, and then let the rest show through from the layer that is left untouched. . . hmmm. . .
Do I have that correct?
I guess the ideal would be three cameras - one for each setting - all clustered real close together... hmmm...

Until that time ... Earl J.
PeterDuke wrote on 9/16/2010, 7:33 PM
Another HDR tool for stills some might like to consider is Photomatix. I tend not to use it because of the tonemapping. Also the auto alignment sometimes doesn't.

http://www.hdrsoft.com/