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Discussion Board -> Photography -> Graduated ND filter on a budget

Graduated ND filter on a budget

+mayne
08/03/05 3:27 PM GMT
This is just an idea so bear with me. Have you ever got those images where the sky is way to bright and the land is correctly exposed or the land is underexposed and the sky is nice and blue...of course you have;-)

The solution is a graduated Neutral Density filter which is a filter that is graduated from various levels of gray down to clear. By splitting your image and placing the gray to the sky you reduce the brightness and get less brightness difference between land and sky.

The idea here is to create that filter at home by using a clear packaging label and apply a gradient to it via your printer. Get yourself a cheap UV filter and cutout the label and stick it to the lens and voila.

If someone has done this with success let us know;-)
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Darryl

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::philcUK
08/03/05 5:42 PM GMT
another top tip from the DIY photomeister.....

any solutions for fixing a quite prominent scratch on an expensive circ polariser?
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
+mayne
08/03/05 6:30 PM GMT
Hahaha, well that is a bit of a conundrum. You leave me head scratching;-)
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Darryl
*caedes
08/03/05 7:12 PM GMT
Have you actually tried this? My suspicion is that the resolution of the printer is not going to be fine enough; you would end up with alternating dark/light spots on your image. For instance, if your printer can do 1200dpi and you print that onto roughly 1.5 linear inches of filter then you only have about 1800 dots across the whole GND filter. If you'r digital camera has a higher resolution than 1800 linear then you might be able to see the dots (depending on the focus and aperture you're using). Of course since the filter is not in the focal plane they would be seriously blurred most of the time.
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-caedes
::regmar
08/03/05 8:37 PM GMT
You could try spraypaint? Or lick the filter? ;-) I personally just squint when I look at the photo, and it looks fine.
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ж Regmar ж
+mayne
08/03/05 8:43 PM GMT
Scratches his head some more...I think the dots would blur as you say and would still darken the image. Haha, I had to look at those clear inkjet labels and they are not very clear. I think this may also be the solution to those expensive soft focus lenses;-) I wonder how the real filters are graduated? Is it a painting process?
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Darryl
::philcUK
08/03/05 9:06 PM GMT
probably printed by laser dye sublimation which has no screen or dot pattern.
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"Some mornings, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps"
trisbert
08/03/05 10:29 PM GMT
I think it would have a better chance to succeed if you used a dye to colour the filter, or perhaps some wood stain, something that won’t leave a pattern on the filter. You would have to watch out for wild colour effects too.
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There are three colours, Ten digits and seven notes, its what we do with them that’s important. Ruth Ross
+mayne
08/04/05 1:37 AM GMT
Perhaps I could try dipping half of it in the sludge they call coffee at work. We could call it the coffee filter. Or stick it over that old diesel exhaust pipe;-) I would like to hear more about the laser dye sublimation.
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Darryl
Jeffo
08/04/05 2:34 AM GMT
or if you want to cheat just use photoshop
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My brush is a welder and my canvas is a peice of metal.
MiLo_Anderson
08/04/05 5:40 AM GMT
I was going to post a question about this prediciment about the sky being overexposed because i was having a horrible time with it today:P. For some reason i was thinking a polerizor would help in this situation. Is that true, or would the same thing still happen. OI have never really understood the graduated filters, since the horizon isn't always a straight line.
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"A piece of toast with butter always lands butter side down, and a cat always lands on its feet. What happens if a piece of toast is tied butter side down to the back of falling cat? Does it hover above the ground in perpetual indecision?"
Si
08/04/05 3:40 PM GMT
A polariser can make blue skies darker, but I don't know that it'll help too much on cloudy grey skies that really come out white in photos. What I have done a time or two is take two shots, one exposed for the sky and one for the land, then combine the two. You can get natural looking results but it does take a bit of effort, so if dunking a bit of clear plastic in a mug of coffee can do the same job I'd be interested... ;-)
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MiLo_Anderson
08/04/05 5:45 PM GMT
i often have this problem even if the sky is blue and the sun is starting to get low so im in alot of shadow created by hills and such.
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"A piece of toast with butter always lands butter side down, and a cat always lands on its feet. What happens if a piece of toast is tied butter side down to the back of falling cat? Does it hover above the ground in perpetual indecision?"
+camerahound
08/07/05 12:52 AM GMT
Sheesh.
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I was born nine months prematurely.
trisbert
08/07/05 1:16 PM GMT
Milo, A polarising filter will help a little, however the graduated neutral filter was designed to control exactly the problem you describe.
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There are three colours, Ten digits and seven notes, its what we do with them that’s important. Ruth Ross
*caedes
08/07/05 6:28 PM GMT
I was thinking about this thread while looking at my mom's sun glasses and remembered that some sunglasses are made with a graduated density. So if you can find a pair of these glasses I think they would serve your needs better than most of the suggestions so far.
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-caedes
+mayne
08/07/05 8:47 PM GMT
With all this digital technology, why don't they program the camera sensor to automatically adjust the exposure of each pixel in the camera? It seems so simple;-)
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Darryl
*caedes
08/07/05 9:14 PM GMT
I don't think that would work (if you look at each CCS element individually). For instance element number 234 gets 1.7 million photons. What value do you assign to that pixel? You have to compare each pixel's intensity value to the average in order to get a "color value" within some range. Instead, you'd have to redefine the area over which your are getting the average. This is essentially what the GND filter is doing. It is only averaging over each horizontal line in the frame (not the whole image). A digital camera could certainly do this, but it would have to be built in to the image processing electronics. Just think, instead of getting a new filter you'd just push the GND button!

Also, if a camera's CCD was sensitive to the light polarization you could eliminate the need for a polarizing filter.
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-caedes
+mayne
08/08/05 3:42 AM GMT
You stole the words right out of my mouth haha *scratches head and grunts*;-) Yes, the image processing electronics are probably being manipulated to do this as we speak. Also, there is no news yet of the digital nasal receptor to pass on those specific smells that were experienced when the picture was taken. The food gallery would be spliffy to smell don't you think?
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Darryl
::regmar
08/15/05 7:57 PM GMT
I have a membership on shutterpoint, and it's festooned with "how-to" guides. I even read them once in a while, and yesterday I discovered a link to a tutorial on how to create a "virtual neutral-density filter" using TheGIMP. The method looks like it would work equally well in most photo-editing software packages, so here it is. The writer presents an excellent idea, and I shall make use of it if I ever finish painting our new house.
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ж Regmar ж
*caedes
08/16/05 2:02 AM GMT
As I suspected, the tutorial admits that this technique is of little use with a scene with too much dynamic range (just the case that we would need to use an ND filter for), but it is still an editing technique that wouldn't hurt to know how to do.
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-caedes
::regmar
08/16/05 1:37 PM GMT
Zees ees true, but it does have the advantage of price :-) I think what the writer was talking about was situations in which the exposure is so great that the foreground or background data are just not there to be rescued. It has the disadvantage of all post-production alterations: The data have to be there in the first place.
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ж Regmar ж

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