Tips for taking a night landscape scene

[Etienne Cassar]

I need to take a picture (sample picture attached) at night with my EOS5Dii camera.  This picture is for a friend of mine who is planning to having it printed at 140cm by 240cm on canvas.  I have never printed this big, and so have no idea if 21MP will be enough for such a picture.  I was thinking of zooming in and taking 4 pictures and merge them in one with photoshop to increase the resolution, but I am afraid that the result will not be so good because of the sea in the foreground.  Also shall I aim for a long exposure at ISO400 or even lower, or for a short exposure at ISO3200 to get the least noise possible and the best result? Any advise will be highly appreciated.

Etienne.

[feppe]

I need to take a picture (sample picture attached) at night with my EOS5Dii camera.  This picture is for a friend of mine who is planning to having it printed at 140cm by 240cm on canvas.  I have never printed this big, and so have no idea if 21MP will be enough for such a picture.  I was thinking of zooming in and taking 4 pictures and merge them in one with photoshop to increase the resolution, but I am afraid that the result will not be so good because of the sea in the foreground.  Also shall I aim for a long exposure at ISO400 or even lower, or for a short exposure at ISO3200 to get the least noise possible and the best result? Any advise will be highly appreciated.

Etienne.

I have quite a bit of experience with exactly this subject matter. You need about 17,000 pixels on the wide side to get a 240cm wide print at 180dpi. So you would need to stitch. That means four pictures side-by-side, allowing for 20-30% overlap when shooting the to-be-stitched panorama. If you want nose-sharp results, go for 6-10 columns.

People have good experiences with PS stitching. I haven't tried it, and use Autopano Pro.

Use the lens at its sweet spot aperture, usually stopped down two stops or so. Take a lot of test shots, examine the histogram carefully in the darkest frames of the set and the one with the harshest highlights. If you don't think you can contain the dynamic range in one exposure which is often the case with nighttime cityscapes, you might need to bracket - which quickly becomes time-consuming when shooting, and post-processing becomes a whole new project in itself.

Go for the lowest ISO to get least noise. Don't worry about the water reflections. If you use exposures lasting several seconds, it will stitch just fine and where it doesn't, it's quick to fix in PS. And it'll look great!

Good sturdy tripod and mirror lockup is a must.

Below an example of what you can expect from such a project if you go for a 218 megapixel panorama, bracketed 3 sets of shots. The full-resolution shot is on my site.

[Geoff Wittig]

I need to take a picture (sample picture attached) at night with my EOS5Dii camera.  This picture is for a friend of mine who is planning to having it printed at 140cm by 240cm on canvas.  I have never printed this big, and so have no idea if 21MP will be enough for such a picture.  I was thinking of zooming in and taking 4 pictures and merge them in one with photoshop to increase the resolution, but I am afraid that the result will not be so good because of the sea in the foreground.  Also shall I aim for a long exposure at ISO400 or even lower, or for a short exposure at ISO3200 to get the least noise possible and the best result? Any advise will be highly appreciated.

Etienne.

What feppe says.
The biggest you can print from a single frame capture at 21 megapixels depends partly on the subject, but anything bigger than about 24x36" will start showing serious digital artifacts. Your subject has a lot of detail, so you'll do better stitching frames. Shoot at low ISO and expose enough to avoid noise in the shadows, because this becomes more obvious when you print very large.

If the water is moving, the ripples may give you some artifacts when you stitch the frames together. It's usually not too difficult to take care of this in Photoshop.

[Etienne Cassar]

I have quite a bit of experience with exactly this subject matter. You need about 17,000 pixels on the wide side to get a 240cm wide print at 180dpi. So you would need to stitch. That means four pictures side-by-side, allowing for 20-30% overlap when shooting the to-be-stitched panorama. If you want nose-sharp results, go for 6-10 columns.

People have good experiences with PS stitching. I haven't tried it, and use Autopano Pro.

Use the lens at its sweet spot aperture, usually stopped down two stops or so. Take a lot of test shots, examine the histogram carefully in the darkest frames of the set and the one with the harshest highlights. If you don't think you can contain the dynamic range in one exposure which is often the case with nighttime cityscapes, you might need to bracket - which quickly becomes time-consuming when shooting, and post-processing becomes a whole new project in itself.

Go for the lowest ISO to get least noise. Don't worry about the water reflections. If you use exposures lasting several seconds, it will stitch just fine and where it doesn't, it's quick to fix in PS. And it'll look great!

Good sturdy tripod and mirror lockup is a must.

Below an example of what you can expect from such a project if you go for a 218 megapixel panorama, bracketed 3 sets of shots. The full-resolution shot is on my site.

Thanks for the tips Feppe. Seems like its going to be quite a heck of a job to get it right.  I hope that I'll be up to it.  I never got my pictures printed so big and I am not very used to taking nightscapes, that is why I am a little bit concerned about this project.  A print this big will cost quite a bit to do and I don't want to get a big fright when I see it ready.

[bill t.]

Prints that size from a small file can actually work OK for many types of subjects when the original is sharp and noise-free.   Also, printing big on a coarse canvas can usually save a relatively low resolution image, remember that the average oil painting has a resolution of roughly 1 or 2 megapixels, tops.

Your very harsh image could benefit from a 3 to 5 stop HDR or exposure blending treatment, bracketed at 1 stop intervals.  That would let you look into the shadows while holding detail in the brightest areas.  Would give this scene a very painterly feel, much superior to what you have now, you'd be very pleased with the result.  At the scene shoot say +- 4 stops, then pick the best 4 or 5 for blending.

And to save yourself a lot of aggravation shoot from a tripod at a low ISO setting.  With long exposures or HDR techniques the water will soften out in an appealing way.

Make a few small prints of sections of your image at the blown-up scale.  Put them on a wall, look at them from a normal viewing distance.

[Etienne Cassar]

Prints that size from a small file can actually work OK for many types of subjects when the original is sharp and noise-free.   Also, printing big on a coarse canvas can usually save a relatively low resolution image, remember that the average oil painting has a resolution of roughly 1 or 2 megapixels, tops.

Your very harsh image could benefit from a 3 to 5 stop HDR or exposure blending treatment, bracketed at 1 stop intervals.  That would let you look into the shadows while holding detail in the brightest areas.  Would give this scene a very painterly feel, much superior to what you have now, you'd be very pleased with the result.  At the scene shoot say +- 4 stops, then pick the best 4 or 5 for blending.

And to save yourself a lot of aggravation shoot from a tripod at a low ISO setting.  With long exposures or HDR techniques the water will soften out in an appealing way.

Make a few small prints of sections of your image at the blown-up scale.  Put them on a wall, look at them from a normal viewing distance.

Thanks Bill.  I have never printed on canvas before, let alone printing such a large picture, but I have read somewhere that you can get along with a resolution of less than 180ppi on canvas because of the weave.  But I am not sure to what extent this can be lowered and whether you get a much more better result by stitching pictures together to improve the MP count.  I have no problem with doing this, but on the other hand I would love to bracket like you said to get and HDR affect.  But how can you do both at the same time?  I mean do you first blend each picture into HDR and then stitch them together after or, do you stitch together pictures from each exposure value, and then blend the whole stitched photo into HDR after?  
Thanks for your input and wonderful help.
Etienne

By the way the picture I submitted wasn't taken by me but was given to me by my friends to show me exactly what they have in mind.

[feppe]

Your very harsh image could benefit from a 3 to 5 stop HDR or exposure blending treatment, bracketed at 1 stop intervals.  That would let you look into the shadows while holding detail in the brightest areas.  Would give this scene a very painterly feel, much superior to what you have now, you'd be very pleased with the result.  At the scene shoot say +- 4 stops, then pick the best 4 or 5 for blending.

If you want to do real HDR, that's probably needed. But if you just want to get enough dynamic range to cover highlights and shadows, that's massive overkill. You only need to bracket every four stops or so. For example, the shot I put up above is bracketed at 0.5, 10 and 30 secs - this gave me good shadow detail, pleasing midtones and enough detail in the bright city lights. Your requirements will vary depending on the scene. There's an excellent post by Guillermo Luijk on the forums here called "zero noise technique" which goes to the details.

As for the resolution, it depends a lot on how far away the print will be examined. If it's going to be in a gallery, it's probably going to be looked at from nose length, so you will need more resolution (towards the 360dpi range). If it's at home or office and looked at "normal" viewing distances for such a print, you can get away with much lower resolution (180dpi or even lower).

For the workflow of stitched HDR and blended shots, there are several threads about that in these forums. I stitched my shots as three layers: Autopano Pro will do that for you, and I blended the end result with Tufuse.

While it might sound like a daunting task, don't overcomplicate it. Plan well and you'll do fine!

[Etienne Cassar]

If you want to do real HDR, that's probably needed. But if you just want to get enough dynamic range to cover highlights and shadows, that's massive overkill. You only need to bracket every four stops or so. For example, the shot I put up above is bracketed at 0.5, 10 and 30 secs - this gave me good shadow detail, pleasing midtones and enough detail in the bright city lights. Your requirements will vary depending on the scene. There's an excellent post by Guillermo Luijk on the forums here called "zero noise technique" which goes to the details.

As for the resolution, it depends a lot on how far away the print will be examined. If it's going to be in a gallery, it's probably going to be looked at from nose length, so you will need more resolution (towards the 360dpi range). If it's at home or office and looked at "normal" viewing distances for such a print, you can get away with much lower resolution (180dpi or even lower).

For the workflow of stitched HDR and blended shots, there are several threads about that in these forums. I stitched my shots as three layers: Autopano Pro will do that for you, and I blended the end result with Tufuse.

While it might sound like a daunting task, don't overcomplicate it. Plan well and you'll do fine!

Wow Feppe.  That is some news to me!!! I never imagined bracketing my shots that far apart.  I will surely give it a try.  I am not after a real HDR effect, but I do want to have some good shadow detail being such a large print.  The way you have put it now seems more doable to me.  By the way forgot to tell you; is picture you attached in your previous post is stunning.  And thanks for the good tips.

[feppe]

Wow Feppe.  That is some news to me!!! I never imagined bracketing my shots that far apart.  I will surely give it a try.  I am not after a real HDR effect, but I do want to have some good shadow detail being such a large print.  The way you have put it now seems more doable to me.  By the way forgot to tell you; is picture you attached in your previous post is stunning.  And thanks for the good tips.

Same for me until I read Guillermo's post. Please read Guillermo's thread here. It is clear that that 1 or even 2 stops is unnecessary, and 4 stops seems to be a good bracket. Again, if you're doing HDR, you might need to do 1-stop bracketing (don't know the requirements), but for traditional blending manually or with Tufuse you're much better served with 4-stop bracketing.

Thanks for the kind words on the photo! It was quite an undertaking. On my site I have two other large panos which were practice runs for the HK pano, and it turned out very nicely. The toughest part was the sky. The pano itself had almost no clouds in it, and it was windy enough so that the 10 and 30 sec exposures had blurred clouds. But I had several shots from earlier that evening when I was shooting the same scene at 10mm wide, and I used one of those shots for the sky - it turned out surprisingly well. I'm planning to print it large, at least 180cm wide - first have to figure out where and how to mount it, though.

In the future I will be shooting such scenes with three sections in mind and exposing accordingly for each section: sky, buildings and water. I had water and buildings covered in this one, but the sky proved to be a new challenge.

[Bill Koenig]

For HDR, download PhotoMatix Pro and give it a go. Its fully functional, but it will put a water mark on your picture until you buy it. It sells for $100. You can do things you never thought were possible with this software.