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Transformation to Remove a Warning

Way back in 2016…you remember 2016 don’t you?…I took you to the island of Burano. You can tap here to recall this very colorful island which sits in the Venetian lagoon. Whilst exploring this unique place, I came across yet another door. I know, I know…that’s what I tend to do when I’m in any part of Venice…or Italy in general, for that matter.

This particular door wasn’t all that photogenic, but I made a snapshot anyway. I thought that I might be able to spruce it up a bit. There was a bit of faded graffiti to the right of the door. And on the door was a dire warning of some sort. But, as you know, that just doesn’t stop me.

The Snapshot

Here is the snapshot…

The Warning Placard

Regarding that warning on this door…what is that, anyway? Let’s take a look. You can click on the image to get a closer look.

We can see that lightening bolt, which normally means ‘electricity’.

And one of the warnings seems to say, “Don’t touch this”. While the other warning lets us know that we shouldn’t throw a bucket of water on a fire here, should we encounter that.

Below that graphic we can see that this is the Mandracchio area of Burano. A mandracchio is a small inlet where one would tie up a couple of boats, which fits well with this island/town of Burano. And the logo at top left suggests that the Enel energy company put this label there. And this ‘cabin’ has been here since January of 1989.

I’ll be darned, this isn’t a door to a residence or business, but its an electrical closet of some sort.

I can hear you now, “Don’t worry about any of that, Steve…go ahead and do your transformation thingie!”. Ok, ok, I’m on it.

The Transformation

The first item is the removal that warning placard. And hey, did you see that kids have been playing a bit of soccer here, as we can see from the soccer ball imprint on the door. Careful kids! And, while I’m at it, I may as well straighten and crop a bit.

The placard is now gone, as is the soccer ball imprint.

Let’s now give the image a bit of color…it’s much too blah.

We’re getting close, but I’m wanting to see a bit more of that Venetian patina. I forgot all about that bit of graffiti to the right of the door…sorry about that. It has to go.

The Final Image

OK, here it is…the final image.

Disclaimer!

Uh oh, the carabinieri are here! I swear that I didn’t remove that placard. Well, maybe I did. But, I’ll put it back, ok? Done!

Endings

Not a lot of charm in this doorway, but what would one expect from an electrical closet, right?

I’ll keep wandering the calle of Burano to see what I can see. I know that there are a few women around who still make handmade lace, so I’ll see if I can find some.

There they are. Well, it appears that one is making lace, one is checking out a catalog, and one is thinking about what she will make for her dinner’s secondi course tonight. Come back next week to find out.

That’s it for today’s transformation. Come back next week to see what sort of possibilities abound with the secondi course at the Italian mealtime. Until then…

Ciao for Now,

Steve

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A Transformation With Substantial Alteration

Today we need to get out our bag of stonemason’s tools to perform some major alterations along a Venetian canal. We’ll need to cut a building in half and then reassemble it to our liking…well, at least my liking…and I hope you like it, too,.

As usual, we will start with a really, really blah snapshot and convert it for more of a fine-art look. The photo was snapped so quickly that I neglected to get the canal in the shot. But no worries, I’ve also got a firehose in my set of tools that should help us to take care of that problem. So, here goes…

The Original Snapshot

So, here it is.

Original snapshot

A piece of this building has fallen ott!

A piece of this building has fallen ott!

As is often the case, the photo is not level…it droops to the right. I’ll have to jack up the right side of this brick building to alleviate that problem.

And I don’t know whether you noticed it, but there is actually a big chunk of the building that’s fallen off. Look along the right side, or in the detail photo.

I didn’t do that folks…”it was that way when I found it”…how many times have we used that line?! I’m going to use the ‘if you ignore it, it’ll go away’ mantra to resolve this major structural issue.

And there’s a big crack running from the top of the window on the right going toward the top-right corner of the photo. I’m not touching it…I’ll leave it as I found it.

Finally, that window on the right side of the photo has a really distracting reflection that needs to be removed.

The First Alteration

  1. Building jacked up and leveled? Check.

  2. Chunk of missing building on the right ignored? Check.

  3. Didn’t mess with that big crack? Check.

  4. Reflection in right-hand window removed? Check.

No missing chunk and building leveled out

A Major Rework

OK, I’m going waaaay out on a limb here, and I hope you like where I’m going next. I can only assume that like me, you don’t like that big empty space in the middle of the photo. Am I right? (That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way, so you can answer right out loud wherever you happen to be as you are reading this…maybe even shout it out.)

So, I pulled out my building-cut-in-half tool. Getting rid of the excess bricks wasn’t particularly a problem, as they fell right there into the canal. And, I like the way we were able to fit the bricks from one wide with the other…interlocking them as we went. I also decided that the second-from-the-right window needed its own reflection removed.

But, I’ll be darned…because I messed with the cut-and-rejoin stuff, that crack has opened up to a dangerous extent. Why I let you talk me into messing with this building, I’ll never know. Help me out here…OK?

Middle removed, but huge crack opened up

This’s better. I know, right? Thanks for giving me a hand. And I didn’t mean to come down on you…in my panic I felt I needed to blame someone else…and you were handy. I won’t do it again! Let’s move on.

Crack repaired…with your help

Took Some Out…Put Some Back In

Things are now looking a little too ‘packed in’ to me. The windows are too close to the edge of the photo. So, I’ll recover some of those bricks that fell into the canal, grab some mortar, and I’ll get to work adding some brick work to each side of the photo.

Widened the photo

Is The Tide Out, Or What?

Well, this is a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea, so maybe the tide is out, indeed. Glad I packed that firehose into my kit. So, let’s use it to fill up the latent canal.

Water added to canal

The Final Photo

All that’s left is to give the brick work that Venetian glow and to ‘enrich’ the water a bit. And there you have it! Major rework of a Venetian building with just a small hiccup that you were able to help me repair. I kind’a wish that the original architect had designed it this way…right?

Whilst in Venice, touring the numerous beautiful churches with their fabulous artworks, many artworks are often draped over and scaffoldized as they are restored. Today, we were able to do some renovation and restoration without distracting the traveler from their pursuit of visionary pleasures.

Ciao for now,

Steve

p.s. Thanks again for helping me to repair that crack…it was my problem, and I’m grateful for your help.

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JPEG versus RAW

Want to know how the image is captured and saved to your camera? Want to know what JPEG stands for? Then read on.

“...if you are satisfied with cellphone and point-and-shoot photo quality, saving images in the .jpg format, stick with it. If you are interested in pursuing a higher-level of photography, then you will want to capture and save your images in the raw format.”

When it comes to taking photos in the JPEG format, versus taking photos in the RAW format, there are huge differences. Below, I’ll just discuss how an image is captured and then the difference in the file formats. In a future article, I’ll graphically show you the differences in the image quality of these two image formats.

After getting a better understanding of JPEG versus RAW, you may want to upgrade to a camera that saves it’s images in the RAW format…or not.

JPEG vs RAW

You have surely heard of images saved in the JPEG format, but have you heard about camera images saved in the RAW format? About 99.9% of you have cameras that save images in the JPEG format – if you have a cell phone that takes photos, you have one – if you have a point-and-shoot camera, you have one – and if you have a pro-level camera, you have one. You may have noticed that when you look at your image files on your computer, they have the file extension .jpeg or .jpg, like ‘filename.jpg’. 

But, do you have a camera that captures images in the RAW format? Yes, you do if you have any camera at all. All cameras capture their image in a raw, unaltered format. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the image is ultimately saved in one of the raw image formats. For most people, this is just fine.

DIGITAL CAMERAS HAVE A SENSOR

Here’s what happens when you press the shutter button on any digital camera. The image is captured on a sensor (in the old days, film would be waiting for those light rays after they passed through your lens – today an electronic sensor is waiting for those same light rays), like the one at right that’s in my camera.

And here you can see the sensor (the greenish-blue thingie), when the lens is removed, as it sits in my camera.

See ‘Size Matters’ below for a short discussion of camera sensor megapixels and their importance.

As soon as you snap your photo, that sensor, along with the computer chip in your camera, now passes color information along the camera’s electronic pathway.

WARNING: Don’t want a bit more technical information? Then skip the next paragraph.

Each pixel on the sensor is made to respond to either red, green or blue light (but not all three) and there are 2 green-sensitive pixels for each red and blue pixel, because human eyes are more sensitive to green. I don’t want to muddy the waters much more, but there is another important step in here: a process called ‘Bayer interpolation’ calculates what the ‘true’ color of each pixel should be based on the relative strengths of the red, green and blue neighboring pixels. Each pixel in the converted image now has three color factors stored for each-and-every pixel: the red intensity, the blue intensity, and the green intensity. The brightness of the pixel is also stored for each pixel. The mixture of those three colors for each pixel gets converted into color intensity for each of the typical colors, be it red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta, or the millions of colors in-between.

So, the computer chip within your camera has now determined which color each of the pixels should be, along with their intensity, and that color information is now transmitted along the camera’s electronic wiring to the next step.

CAPTURING THE IMAGE

Once that color intensity information has been calculated, it is passed to a computer chip that is installed in your camera. But, before it reaches that chip, it is in a raw, unaltered state – this raw image has not yet been saved to the storage device in your camera (a ‘card’ for many cameras, or typically a built in storage device within your cellphone). So, just before that image reaches that computer chip in your camera, the image is in a raw format. If you were able to see that image at this point, trust me – it would not be very flattering to you as a photographer, as it is very dull in several ways.

Another really cool thing is that a lot of other information travels along with that captured, but as yet unsaved, image. Information such as the camera model, date, time, lens and camera settings, and location (on some cameras, but for sure on your cellphone camera). That information will be stored in the image file down the pipeline as explained below.

JPEG STORAGE

So, what happens next to this raw image? That’s where the computer chip in your camera does some marvelous things. What that chip does was determined several years ago by a group of camera-industry folks who started to meet in 1986. They called themselves the Joint Photographic Expert Group (the acronym for which is JPEG – cool, huh?!). In a 1992 meeting, they all agreed that the raw, unprocessed, unaltered, unadulterated and non-manipulated image that the sensor captures had to be enhanced if the masses were to ever buy a digital camera.

The JPEG agreed on the following: the raw image should have the contrast increased a certain amount, so the image doesn’t look so ‘flat’; the raw image should have the saturation increased by a certain amount, to give it more ‘color’; the raw image should be sharpened a certain amount, so it doesn’t look so ‘fuzzy’. 

Another factor that is adjusted is the ‘white balance’, which is a bit more difficult to explain in a short article; but, suffice it to say that it has to do with whether the overall look of the photo is warmer or cooler, and is directly related to the settings you can make using your camera’s menu for ‘scenic’, ‘portrait’, ‘shadows’, ‘tungsten’, 'flash', etc.

They also came up with a way to save the photographic image so that it would take up less space on your storage device, which means that an image saved as a jpeg image loses just a bit of its quality each time it is saved.

So finally, the sensor information with the JPEG-designated changes, as well as the camera and capture information mentioned above, is baked into the file with the file extension of .jpg as it is saved to your camera.

CAPTURE SUMMARY

So, when you press the button on your camera, the sensor captures the light rays, the electronic version of those rays is sent through your camera’s wiring to a computer chip in your camera, then that chip manipulates the image using the Bayer calculations and standards created by the JPEG folks, and finally it is saved to your camera’s storage device. You then just look at the image digitally, print it out at home, upload it to a print facility, or take it personally to a print facility.

If you want to have prints larger than the usual 4”x6” variety, you may or may not have much luck getting a quality print – as the camera’s sensor size is one of the factors that determine print-size quality. Again, see ‘Size Matters’, below.

Here is a simple flowchart showing the process just described. The flow along the top is the one to generate a JPEG file. The blue line below avoids all of the JPEG's enhancements, as discussed next.

SAVING IN RAW FORMAT

If you have a more expensive camera, like a digital single-lens reflex (or DSLR), or one of the new mirrorless cameras with interchangeable lenses, then that camera most likely can actually save images in a raw format. The file extension (instead of .jpg, for instance) is .nef for Nikon, .cr2 for Canon and .arw (among others) for Sony, etc. Most of the cameras just mentioned can also save images in .jpg format instead, or at the same time (i.e. two different file-format images are saved at once to the storage card).

And further, even though one may just intentionally be saving images in a raw format, there is also a small .jpg image being created and saved (whether you want it to or not – and you do, by the way) for display on the back of the camera. Yes, that image one sees on their DSLR camera back is a jpg image that sits in another file alongside the file for the raw image.

SO WHAT, YOU SAY?

OK, if you are satisfied with cellphone and point-and-shoot photo quality, saving images in the .jpg format, stick with it. If you are interested in pursuing a higher-level of photography, then you will want (actually, I’d say ‘need’) to capture and save your images in the raw format.

Why? The files saved in the raw format that you will be working with have tons more information with which to work, which I will demonstrate for you in a follow-up article. In other words, the raw files are not limited to the fixed enhancements that the JPEG manipulation bakes into the .jpg files. 

The down side? You will have to manipulate every image using software (like Adobe’s Photoshop or Lightroom) to get to a satisfactory .jpg image to print yourself or to send away for printing. That means that you will need to touch every image to even get it up to the same quality as the JPEG’s criteria of the less-featured cameras.

SIZE MATTERS

In the case of your cellphone camera or point-and-shoot camera, the sensor is much, much smaller than this one shown at the beginning of this article. And being smaller, the files that are saved are much smaller. If you tried to blow up a photo to a large size using an image from your cellphone, it would look quite ‘blocky’ and have very little resolution.  As a quick guide, generally speaking, a camera that captures images at 3 mega pixels (or 3mp) will create a decent print of only 5”x7”. If you have a camera that captures its images at 10mp, you could print an images at 9”x13”. My Nikon D800 camera has a 36mp sensor that creates images that can be printed at 16”x24” with no additional manipulation needed. So, size does matter when it comes to camera sensors and how large you want to print an image.

 

Summary

As mentioned above, if you want to get into photography at a more-serious level, you should consider a camera that can save images in the raw format, and then invest in the software and time to manipulate those raw files. If you are satisfied with what you have, stick with it.

I will show you what I mean by 'having more to work with' in a raw-image file in an upcoming article.

Ciao for now,

Steve

 

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