Eric Yang's Photoblog

Keys

Eric — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 02:46:59 +0000

What is it about music that moves people? Every single person, almost without exception, likes to listen to a certain style of music. For some people it’s classical, for some it’s heavy metal, for some it’s rap, for others it’s electronic. (For some it’s even country.)

If you think about it in a grander sense, there’s nothing inherently beautiful or desirable about having a certain arrangement of tones and words condensed into a 3-minute sound bite. What possible purpose could such a thing serve? At least painting, photography, and sculpting depict something tangible. Poetry conveys a message. But music?

Yet obviously there’s something that makes us tick when we hear a moving song. We really feel the music – but a song that causes this feeling in one might not in another. It’s pretty mysterious, really, but music is undoubtedly an indispensable part of what makes us human. So whatever, no need to analyze it, it’s good enough just to enjoy.

(I guess that makes this a useless post. I realize this after I write it.)

Post-Processing
Real short time spent on post-processing.

Levels for some color correction
Topaz Clean to remove some scratches and blemishes in the piano
Emphasized bronze words

Before and after

A Good Situation

Eric — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 04:48:37 +0000

So half the people who see this photo might not understand it. In texas hold’em poker, a royal flush beats quad aces, but it’s what’s known as a “cooler”: both people played as best they could but the cards just turned out wrong for one of them… and right for the other. If you’ve ever played poker, you know it feels good to be on the winning side of that equation. Hurray for photographs and blog posts that cater to the uncouth minority!

While we’re on the subject, there’s several parallels that you can draw between poker and life. Here are the biggest ones. First, no matter how bad things get… it can and will get worse. The trick isn’t trying to avoid the bad times, because that is simply impossible. Instead, the real winners seek to minimize the damage caused by not letting random circumstances get to them, knowing full well that if they persevere and literally play their cards right, then they will eventually win in the long term. Second – be patient. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. In serious online poker there’s a cardinal rule to always “stay within your bankroll”, which is usually 30 to 40 times the stakes you play it. In layman’s terms, this means if you play for $200 dollar buyins, you should have about $6-8000 dollars that you can afford to lose in order to safely play at that limit. All too often poker players ignore this rule in hopes of a quick buck and end up completely broke. Same exact thing in real life. If you can’t afford that car, be patient until you can. Don’t pile up a mountain of debt to collect a bunch of stuff that you’re only going to be enthused about for another few months anyway.

Okay, enough of that, time to go to that Gamblers Anonymous meeting. But first!

Post-Processing

Topaz DeNoise for noise reduction
Levels to correct underexposure somewhat
Topaz Adjusted layer set at Lighten blend mode
Some minor dodge and burning

Before and After

Simplified Shrimp

Eric — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:53:32 +0000

Today I came home from work ravenously hungry. Fortunately, there was food in the making, so I only had a little bit to wait. While doing so I munched on half a bagel and some vegetable chips, and snapped this shot of one of the dinner dishes while it was cooking.

Our family’s style of cooking is very interesting. See, there are times when brilliant food is made with a purpose, such as the occasional mouthwatering pork chops or delectable celery wraps. But usually the food consists of a collection of completely random items from the refrigerator. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not complaining at all, because often the food turns out to be quite delicious. But just take a look at the photo again. What exactly is in this dish?

Small shrimp…
Cabbage…
…and Tofu.

It’s like the three most random things in the world. If there was a fourth ingredient it would probably be peanut butter or something. Yet it tasted pretty good.

Come to think of it, I wonder how a restaurant would do if it specialized in this kind of thing. Say, instead of giving you a choice of what to order, the restaurant gives you a list of preferences (presets) like “Vegetarian”, “Meaty”, “Seafood”, “I’m Feeling Lucky”, etc. Maybe there’s a sheet that you can specify what ingredients you don’t want in it, like if you’re allergic or something. Then he throws together a dish made completely at his whim with random ingredients and cooking styles. The fresh hot mess is then delivered immediately to your table. So you might get, like, battered chicken mixed with fried bananas and buttered asparagus. Or sweet and sour shrimp with mashed potatoes and tempura mushrooms. Or maybe some braised duck served on two pancakes drizzled with a bit of chocolate syrup and surrounded by jelly beans.

That sounds absolutely awesome. I would certainly dine at such a place over and over again. Who wouldn’t?

Post-Processing
Basically I just used Topaz Adjust to enhance the detail and Topaz Simplify’s BuzSim preset for the abstract look. After spending so much mental energy thinking of random delicious items, I don’t think I’m up for another list. So on to the before and after!

Before and After

Strings and Ribbons

Eric — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:59:55 +0000

What is this? I promise you cake if you answer correctly.

This item in question took a central role in more than a decade of my life. It gave me a little taste of success in exchange for a large dose of hard work. Most importantly, it instilled certain values that have served me all my life, for better or worse.

To answer the question… if you’ve never see the inside of a grand piano before, well, now you have. Whenever a pianist hits a note, a little soft hammer impacts a grouping of two or three strings, which vibrate and make a single sound. If properly arranged, the combination of these sounds become what we call music. The large volume of notes on a piano means there has to be at least twice as many strings behind the scenes, which is what you see here. By the way, I have no idea what those holes are, so I’ll just say they’re for acoustics. (Since I’m the only one with a voice here, I can make up whatever facts I want. Did you know 70% of statistics are made up on the spot?)

Even more interesting than the meticulously crafted interiors of a Steinway grand is the piano subculture that makes it sing. All around the world, every day, competitive amateur pianists are practicing hours every day, hoping for the off chance that they may receive a little shiny piece of plastic at the end of a competition that only comes around a couple times a year. And amateurs have it easy. When you watch a pianist on TV or see that dude in The Pianist, you think they must have been born with a piano. What you don’t see is, for each second that they’ve played on TV, they’ve practiced a hundred hours at home. This is a group of people who tediously work for hours each day for years on end, of their own choice. It’s simpler to do, of course, if you love the music, but that by no means makes it easy.

But you know what? That’s the way it is with anything: you gotta put in the work or you get nowhere. Screw office politics and get rid of those bullshit excuses. If you get great at what you do, none of that will matter because you’ll be a huge success either way. This universal truth applies to everyone… it’s just a bit more visible with pianists.

But whatever. Back to mucking around in Photoshop.

Post-Processing
I actually liked this shot quite a bit straight out of the camera. Here’s all I did to the photo:

Cropped out the blown out highlights and little piece of shiny pink paper that I forgot to move when I took the photo
Color correction with Levels.
Soft light duplicate layer on 50% opacity to accentuate contrast
Topaz Detail to make the strings and larger features pop out a bit

Before and After

The Bernard

Eric — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:26:46 +0000

I came home today intent on taking another photo for the blogeroo, but unfortunately I just couldn’t find a decent subject. It was already dark outside. Any photographic value my possessions might have were nullified by their rampant clutter. It’s been scientifically proven that my face breaks cameras (with its beauty, of course). So what am I to shoot?

I ended up just going through Lightroom and browsing through a bunch of old photos. I ended up finding this one of my old college/highschool roommate, Bernard, who I’ve known since 6th grade. Very chill guy. I remember a phase we went through when we would always try to prank other kids in our dorm. It was pretty easy, too: all you need to do is tape the door and wait till they left the room. I forgot what we did to them after they left, but I bet it was epic.

Oh, and at choice times we also stayed up deep into the night playing a peculiar mini computer game called Icy Tower, which involved a little guy with an afro jumping around yelling “ashimidaaaa!” … Surprisingly, I don’t have too much more to say about that.

Finally, if you’ve ever played online poker in the last few years there’s a good chance Bernard has taken money from you, as he is currently a professional poker player. I bet you didn’t see that coming!

Post-processing
I kind of cheated for this photo because I had already post-processed it once before. However, after revisiting I decided it was bad, so I completely re-did it.

Cropped a weird aspect ratio because I neglected to frame it right when I took it
Healing brushed the table.
Played with Selective color. Changed the color of the table to make it more green, and changed Bernard’s shirt color to red to contrast it more with the table and give some company to the pool ball.
Added contrast with Curves
Corrected skin tone with selective Hue/Saturation. If he was a girl I would use Topaz Clean to clean up the skin a bit but alas… he is not a girl
Burned the edges

And that’s it!

Before and After

Lakeside Sunset

Eric — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:30:22 +0000

I don’t live by the lake, unfortunately. If I did I’d be out all day jetskiing instead of writing some lame blog post. No, “Lakeside” is the community that I live in. See, what happened today is I got home from the office and got all excited about my take-out Chipotle barbacoa burrito. In the process of ferociously devouring it I suddenly choked because I knew I forgot my all-important life mission: to post a photo every day. It’s going to take some getting used to, that’s for sure.

So I grab my 40D and jump into the car to go take a couple of photos at our neighborhood park. When I get there I discover that I should have just walked because there’s nowhere to park my car. I end up stopping smack in the middle of the narrow street before waltzing off to take a couple of pictures as the daylight slowly but surely crept away. A couple of bystanders seemed to think I was a tourist.

It’s kind of sad – I haven’t gone to that park in a while, especially not during the cold months, and it’s definitely not as nice as it was last time. It used to be completely green, with little waterfalls and spouts streaming from a large pond surrounded by winding trails and tall trees. Now it seems overrun with pollution, construction vehicles, and a drab ambience. It’s almost as if someone took that scene and dropped a solid brown layer set to Color blend mode on it. (You know you spend too much time in Photoshop when it creeps into your analogies.)

Anyways, I grabbed this shot right before the sun set for the day. I later tried to get one from a better angle but the beautiful reds and oranges had already degenerated into a drab gray. I like this shot’s colors, but the composition could be better.

Post-processing
I tried to go for a more artsy interpretation of this photo. To that end I applied extreme contrast, high saturation, and used some creative filters to get the final result. It might be a bit much for some, but I like the result that I got here and of course my opinions are always right.

I first applied a saturation adjustment layer and selectively increased the saturation of the orange/reds and blues in the sky to bring out the contrast
Duplicated layer, set blend mode to Overlay at 70% opacity.
Topaz Adjust to increase detail and cloud definition + a tiny bit of adaptive exposure
Masked in some Topaz Simplify to de-emphasize the fine detail of the trees

Before and After

Seagull Entourage

Eric — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:01:54 +0000

I’ve been involved in music since I was 5 years old when I first started playing piano. In my life I’ve played the piano, violin, guitar, and a pair of Technics 1200s. It seems like I can’t really go an extended period of time without having music in my life. Since I only have a limited amount of time, I usually can only do one instrument at a time. Right now it’s guitar.

I first started “playing” guitar back in college/high school (long story), where I would go to a couple of friends’ rooms and mess around on their guitar. Eventually I got a cheap one of my own and I would constantly practice “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to the chagrin of my neighbors. In fact, I wouldn’t only play the notes on the guitar – I would belt out the lyrics too. The best part is that I could never hit the high note in that song, so each time I started playing everyone in earshot would duck for cover. (That’s an exaggeration… I think.) I think there might be a couple of videos of me doing that still floating around. Oh well, fun times.

Post-Processing
Post on this photo was somewhat involved. I chose to take it in a more “artistic” direction, so Topaz Simplify played a big role in the outcome. Here are the steps I took to achieve the final outcome:

Created and saved mask of the guitar using Topaz ReMask
Digitally cleaned up scratches and some dirty spots
Cleaned up and darkened background
Topaz Simplify modified BuzSim preset to create vibrant colors and “artistic” guitar look.

Enjoy.

Before and After

Audi R8

Eric — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:43:06 +0000

I want this car. Yeah yeah, I’m young and naive, there’s plenty of better ways to spend my money… but still. I want this car!

I took this today at a car show in Plano called the Coffee and Cars something or other at Classic BMW. All throughout the car show I couldn’t help but think that it’s a fantastic idea for that dealership: they get a bunch of car enthusiasts walking around their dealership for four hours on a nice Saturday morning, without dropping a single dollar in advertising. There were a ton of people there, and a lot of insanely expensive cars.

In my 20 minutes of walking around, I saw two Bentleys, two Lamborghinis, one Aston Martin, one Ferrari, 10+ Porsches, lots of classic cars that I’m not familiar with… and of course like 400 shiny BMWs. (No Maseratis though, and no Bugatti Veyron.) Now, I’m very happy with my car (which perhaps will be the subject of a future post), but this massive display of disposable wealth made me want to trade it in immediately and start eating cardboard in the hopes of saving enough to afford one-twelfth of any one of these cars. There was a woman there who apparently owned 11 of the high-end, luxury cars, and was saying stuff like “Yeah, the Aston Martin is a bit boring, I prefer the Bentley for daily driving.” Absolutely insane!

While walking around, I’ve come to the conclusion that my new dream car is the Audi R8. It used to be the Lamborghini Murcielago, but after taking a look in real life, without the airbrush, it doesn’t really look all that special. There’s just something about the R8 that stirs something within me, even though it only packs 420 horses for 100k+. I don’t know what it is – all I know is that the R8 is epic. Perhaps it is because I saw this a long time ago:

Mmm. One can dream.

Post-Processing
I took a long time on this photo, because I am much worse at car retouches than people or landscape. It’s still not exactly where I want it, but I spent a couple of hours on it and don’t have any more time. If I did, though, I would definitely add a new background, fix up the windows a bit, and clean up some more reflections. The background would probably be my top priority, as the two guys in the current background kind of kills the whole photo

Anyways, here are the steps I took for this photo:

Drastic Levels adjustment (I didn’t notice I used spot metering for this shot until later. The photo came out really underexposed)
Topaz DeNoise for noise reduction.
Healing brush and clone stamp for all the specular highlights on the car body
Removed major reflections in the side panel behind door
Replaced windshields with… wait for it… a linear gradient! This is one area I need work on. I tried a bunch of different methods to adequately retouch the windows, and most of them failed miserably.

I did easily mask the car out with ReMask, but couldn’t create an adequate background to put it on. Perhaps I will revisit this photo later and find it a more impressive habitat.

EDIT: I took a bit of time and put in a more acceptable background.

Before and After

Mom and Son

Eric — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:56:03 +0000

That’s my mom and brother Bill.

I took this photo back in December 26, 2008 when I went with my family to visit relatives in Houston. You know, it was one of those huge Asian get togethers with lots of hugging, Asian food, and karaoke. It was pretty fun and great to see everyone, except for one hitch. At this particular gathering, one poor misled soul had deemed it a good idea to gift my brother with a “Nerf N-Strike Longshot CS-6″. In case you’re not a Nerf gun connoisseur, this thing is like three feet long of plastic death. Not too many real guns are even that long.

Anyways, there’s really two ways to interpret this photo. Since it’s been more than a year, I forgot which version is true, so you’ll have to decide for yourself. Here they are:

Mom and Billy are caught in a mesmerizing kindred embrace – a beautiful and ephemeral thing that is a treasure to see and a blessing to capture; or
Mom confiscated Billy’s Nerf gun and he’s trying to schmooze it back.

Choose wisely!

Post-processing
This photo came out pretty decent from the camera, I only had to do some minor adjustments to make it pop out a bit. I didn’t, however, want it to look artificial or too processed, so I didn’t take it too far. Here are the steps I took to post-process this photo:

Cropped and straightened in Lightroom
Levels
Selective Topaz Adjust on the subjects only, taking care not to mask in any halos. It was the Portrait Drama preset at 30-40% opacity.
Minor spot healing brush work on skin
Minor dodge and burning on skin to even out texture and facial lines

Mom and Son, Before and After

Photoblog Time!

Eric — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 21:33:53 +0000

This is a good time for me to start a personal photo blog, because I’m at a point where I just really want to take photos whenever I can. I have the opportunity to see crazy good photos on a daily basis as a result of being in a Photoshop plug-in company, and the repeated exposure to it makes me kind of sad that I almost never have time to take photos anymore.

So here’s the deal. I’m going to post-process and post at least one photo a day, starting from today. This is partly to satisfy my momentary photography craving, but also so I can improve my photography as well. Although I’m technically competent with photography and Photoshop, I’ll be the first to admit that the creativity isn’t up to the standards I’m going for. So this guaranteed one photo a day will help me both maintain a good photography outlet and ensure that I’m always improving my photography.

So it doesn’t matter whether I take the photo on my Canon 40D or my iPhone, as long as I post-process and post one photo a day without skipping a day – evar. I realize too many of these types of things fail for too many people, but that’s not going to happen here.

I’ll also write random thoughts whenever I feel like it about assorted other stuff. Okay, cool, go!