My Workflow—Part 5

“To Photoshop or not to Photoshop, that is the question.”  If Shakespeare were here today, that would probably be a line in one of his plays.

On my last post, Allen asked:  “With this photo what would you do in Photoshop?”  Good question.

Let me start by saying that for every professional shoot I do, I use Photoshop on all the final images.  Why?  Because Photoshop has so many more tools that help me develop the specific look that I want in the final image.  Specially, Photoshop has much better selection tools, healing and cloning tools and many plug-ins that can help you achieve what you want.

Now, back to: what would I do on this image in Photoshop?   If I were going to present this image for a photographic show, I would push it more to a fine art image.  I start with the cropped Lightroom image and open it in Photoshop.  The first thing that I would do is, remove the distracting leave on the left side of the flower by cloning it out.  When clone something out, I do it on its own layer so that I can easily mask off errors I make with the cloning tool.  Next, I would tray to make the whole left side of the flower look more symmetrical.  I did this by copying the bottom leaf, moving it to its new position and then changing its shape using the warp tool under edit>transform>warp.  I do not want the two leaves looking like each other.  I then took the image into nik Color Efex Pro and used the Extract Detail and Tonal Contrast filters on the flower.  I believe these to filers really bring out detail and add punch to an image.  I usually dial down the overall effects of the filter both in nik Color Efex Pro and also using the layer opacity in Photoshop.  Finally, I would do my normal dodging and burning.   I do dodging and burning on a separate layer in the soft light mode.  I fill the layer with 50% grey and then paid at a low capacity (3-10%) with white to dodge an area and black to burn an area.  I continue to brush over the area until I get it the shade I want.

That’s it.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom 4—see above. 

Photoshop CS5—see above.

My Workflow—Part 4

Someone needs to teach me how to read a calendar.  I prepared this post before I went on vacation and thought that I had set it to appear on August 7^th.  I did not notice that it had not appeared until I started looking at my blog this past weekend.  Sorry about not catching my mistake sooner.   I am sure many of you put your lives on hold until I posted again.

The final step of almost every photo that I take is to do some dodging and burning.  Here I burned (using the adjustment brush) the bokeh background and the leaves behind the flower.  In addition, I blurred a few of the leaves by reducing the sharpness and clarity with an adjustment brush.  The whole purpose of these adjustments is to make the flower and starburst to come forward and make the background sink further into the background.

I think that if you go back to the original photo you will see that my intended subject of the photo is definitely the subject that the viewers' eyes go to first and rest upon the most.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom 4—see above.

My Workflow—Part 3

As I said before the details is one of the subjects of this photo.  In fact, it is the main subject of the photo; so, I want to draw the viewers’ eyes towards the flower.

But, what draws a person’s view?  For many years, it was taught that a person’s eye always goes first to the brightest part of the image.  Recently, some researches have said that the human eye goes to the portion of an image that the human brain can most easily recognize.  Next, it goes to the area that is sharpest, has the most contrast and most colorful.

With this in mind, I next added: sharpness, contrast, saturation and clarity to the flower using the adjustment brush.  In addition, I warmed-up the color balance on the flower under the theory that warm tones are moved to the forefront and cooler tones are moved to the background by the brain.

Hopefully, the picture that I took is starting to look more like a real photograph.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom 4—see above.

My Workflow—Part 2

While attending his workshop, Jay Maisel said:  “If it does not add to the story then it takes away from the story.  Include only what is essential in your photos.” 

Jay believes in getting it right in the camera so almost all of his photos that you see are not cropped.  They are as he shot them.  I believe Jay is absolutely right but I lack his talent of “getting it right” in the camera.  Besides that, I think that some images just look best at ratios other than the normal 3:2 or 5:4 ratios that my camera allow me to capture.  So, I do crop my images to the format that I feel best suits them.

After I import the image, my first step is to crop the photo into the format that I believe shows only the things that “add to the story.”

In this photo, my subject is:  the details in the flower, the starburst and the bokeh.  I cropped the top, bottom and right sides of the image so that I had symmetry between the top and bottom right corners.  The corners are not important however I think including about the same amount of leaf in both corners helps anchor the flower.  I know some people will be bothered by me cutting off parts of the flower but do you know what it is even after I cut parts of it off and is there enough of the flower left to show-off the details in it.  I believe there is.  Finally, I cropped the right side of the photo so that the bottom leaf was complete.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom 4—see above.

My Workflow—Part 1

A few weeks ago, my friend, Doug, from the Bay Area Photo Club, asked me how I go about processing my photos.  Rather than try to tell him in words (the old problem of trying to accurately writing instructions of how you would go about sharpening a pencil), I decided to show him my basic processing on a given photo.

This photo, to me, is about three things:  the details in the flower, the starburst of the sun and the bokeh.  To get a good starburst, you must use a small aperture—here, I chose f/19.  This aperture would also make my bokeh-circles very small. I though that this combination would look pretty cool.

I shoot in RAW about 99.99999999999% of the time.  I do this because I feel that it provides me with the best file to develop the photos into the image that I want.  The image that you see on the back of your camera will not look like the one you open-up in your RAW processing program unless you do some basic processing of the file. 

Why is that?  Because what you see on the back of your camera is actually a JPEG image that is embedded within the RAW file.  The JPEG image that has been processed in accordance with the “Picture Control” (Nikon’s term; not sure what other manufacturers call it) that you selected in your camera.  Nikon has six Picture Control settings: Standard, Neutral, Vivid, Monochrome, Portrait and Vivid.  Based upon which one you select, the photo displayed on the back of your camera will show varying amounts of: sharpening, contrast, brightness, saturation and hue.

I do not believe in redoing things over and over.  I also like things to as consistent and easy as possible. As a result, I have developed a series of Lightroom presets for each of the Nikon Picture Control settings.  Before I start to shoot, I select the Nikon Picture Control Setting that I believe will produce images that are most consistent with what I want.  I rarely change this setting during any shooting session. 

As I import my photos into Lightroom, I apply the appropriate preset to the photos.  What does this do?  Well, it makes my photo look very much like what I was seeing on the back of my camera as I was shooting.

How did I develop the various presets?  First, I took photos that used the different Nikon Picture Control Settings in both JPEG and RAW.  I then imported the photos into Lightroom.  Next, I applied Lightroom’s Camera Profile (you will find it in the Develop Module under Camera Calibration tab) to the RAW file.  I then tweaked the sharpening, contrast and saturation of the RAW until it matched the JPEG file.  Finally, I saved the settings for sharpening, contrast, saturation and Camera profile as a preset for that Nikon Picture Control Settings.

The first photo today shows the RAW file as it would look without applying any preset to it.  The image is basically flat and definitely not what you were seeing on the back of your camera. 

The second photo shows what the image would look after applying my Nikon Camera Standard Control Setting preset.  Notice how the colors are richer and there is generally more details throughout the photo.

Enjoy.

Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing:  

Lightroom 4—see above.

Evolution of a Photograph—Part 5: Settling on How to Present

My final step in post-processing is settling on how to present the photo. What do I mean by that? Well, do I want to present it in color or black & white, include a boarder or not, add a vignette or not, etc. Presentation is totally about two things: your vision for the photograph and personal taste.

For this photo, black & white with a sepia tone seemed to be the ideal presentation because the black & white would emphasize the contours and the textures within the photograph and the sepia tone would fit with the age of the old rusty truck. I used nik Silver Efex Pro to convert my photo to the sepia toned black & white. I believe that Silver Efex does a really fine job converting RGB images to black & white, and does it very easily.

All the work done on this photo took about 16 minutes. So, not a lot of time was spent to arrive at the final photo. I can hear some of you say: Da, and it looks it! Of course, this image did not require any complicated or detailed selections and the cloning was pretty straight-forward.

The post-processing of all photos is dependent upon your starting photo and what you want to do with the photo. The better starting point, the easier it will be for you to develop the image that you want. I hope my posting help you understand my approach to photo post-processing.

Enjoy.

Evolution of a Photograph—Part 4: Dodging, Burning and Sharpening

A few years ago, I was in Chicago and visited one of the museums that was presenting a collection of Ansel Adam’s photographs. The collection included several images that Ansel had printed four or five different times over a twenty or thirty year period. As you looked at the various photos in a series, you quickly noted differences in the dodging and burning that Ansel had done. I studied the different photos within a series and then between the different series (trying to line-up the printings by when they were printed). Ansel took different directions with each of the series, but, after spending a lot of time studying the photos, I came to two conclusions about Ansel’s dodging and burning: it was an evolutionary process and the last print was almost always my favorite of the series.

I do some dodging and burning on almost every photograph that I print. In Photoshop, there are a number of ways to do dodging and burning: (1) use curves or levels adjusting layer with mask for areas to be affected; (2) use a blank layer in the soft light mode and paint in white to dodge and black to burn; or, (3) use copies with a mask for areas to be affected of the final image in screen mode to dodge and multiple mode too burn.

I generally use a screen and multiple-layer to do my dodging and burning. I find that this method seems to more evenly lighten or darken the area without shifting the colors. For this photo, I dodged the clouds and tops of plants in middle of photo and burned the edges of the frame, the dirt by the truck and parts of the near hills.

Enjoy and don’t forget to ask any questions you might have along the way. I will do my best to revise my next posting to accommodate the questions this week.

Post Processing in Photoshop—used a screen layer and a multiple layer of the final image to dodge and burn various parts of the photograph by using mask and then used high pass filter to slightly sharpen entire image.

Evolution of a Photograph—Part 3: Removing Distractions and Adding Detail

I often see photographs that I think are really good, except there is this or that distracting element in it. Since I am not a photojournalist, I try to remove distracting elements before I take the photograph, either by changing my camera angle or position or just physically removing the item. But sometimes that approach is just not possible.

In my crop, I wanted to keep the curvature of the truck cab and the truck’s back window, so I was forced also to keep the tank in the left corner and the piece of wire basket behind the truck cab. To me, both are distracting elements within the photo and, therefore, must be surgical removed. If the elements to be removed are small, I will use Lightroom’s clone or healing tool; but, in this case the items are large so I will use the cloning tools in Photoshop to remove them.

When I clone is Photoshop, I clone my changes onto a new layer. I usually use a new layer for each area that I am cloning so that if I make a mistake, it will not destroy any of the work I have already done. When you clone onto a new layer, you do need to make sure that you use “sample current & below layers”.

As I mentioned on Monday, I remembered a lot more detail in the scene. Details can be added a number of ways in Photoshop—sharpening, adding contrast, etc. Since I am lazy, I use two Photoshop plug-ins to accomplish this task—nik Color Efex Pro (tonal contrast or pro contrast filters) or Topaz Adjust. Barry Armer has been using Topaz Adjust for a long time and I have been impressed with the results that he has gotten using it. I recently purchased it and to date, I like it very much. Because the filters are very quick to run, I will usually run both of them on different layers and then select the result I like best.

For this image, I think the Topaz adjust did the better job so I used it.

In my layers pallet, you will notice layers titled “Composite.” These are layers that are combination of all the layers below it. In Photoshop, you can make composite layers by holding the ALT key down and then going to Layers>Merge Visible.

Enjoy and don’t forget to ask any questions you might have along the way. I will do my best to revise my next posting to accommodate the questions this week.

Post Processing in Photoshop—Cloned a few distracting elements and used nik Silver Efex Pro Tonal Contrast filter and Topaz Adjust to add contrast to highlights, mid-tones and shadows

Evolution of a Photograph—Part 2: Setting White Balance and White & Black Points

I believe that getting the white balance to reflect the color tone in the image that you want and setting a good white and black point (assuming the image has either or both) are the two most critical steps in post processing of a photo.

As you look at the tabs in Lightroom, they are the same as Camera RAW, except that Lightroom has a separate tab for Vignette whereas Camera RAW includes the vignette functions under the camera calibration tab.

I start by setting my white balance. Why? Because as you change the white balance, the white/mid-range/black points will shift somewhat. How do I select the white balance I want? Well, I usually look at the subject or a dominate aspect of the photo and move the Temp and Tint sliders until I think the color tone is correct. In this image, I used the sky to set my color tone.

In Vincent Versace’s Welcome to Oz, he prescribes at setting the white point to where the first pixel becomes white and the black point to where you start to “see meaningful black” or an area in which we actually see something that is important. How do you do that in Lightroom or Camera RAW? If you hold the ALT key while moving the exposure slider, any pixel that is not white at that exposure will turn black; then, as you move the slider to the right or left more or less pixels will become white. The black slider works the same (except the background turns white).

Although the histogram shows that I have clipped some shadows by using a black setting of 8, if you look at the screen shot of what is actually clipped (using the above described method), you can see that what was clipped is details that are not really needed—maingly shadows in the back bumper and in the wheel well. I could have pushed the slighter even further without losing any details that were essential to the photo.

Yesterday, I got a few questions about cropping that I answered on the blog. However, I got a question regarding a slight color shift between the two photos presented. Yes, I also noticed it. I think it has to do with how the photos were converted to JPEGs. The uncropped RAW photo was exported from Lightroom as JPEG to my blog folder while the cropped photo was saved from Photoshop as a JPEG to my blog folder. It goes to show you how different JPEGs can look.

Enjoy and don't forget to ask any questions you might have along the way. I will do my best to revise my next posting or answer the question in the current post to answer the question or comment.

Post Processing in Lightroom—Set white balance and white and black points, added mid-tone contrast, vibrance and clarity.

Evolution of a Photograph—Part 1: Assessment and Cropping

Over the past few months, I have received several questions regarding my image processing workflow. So, this week, I thought I might share with you what my normal workflow is. This is the workflow that I use when I intend to print an image. I often do less for photos that present on my blog—mainly because I am lazy and the extra work often does not show-up on photos posted on the internet.

I have selected a photo that I took on drive between Capitol Reef National Park and Moab, Utah. The photo has been hanging around my hard drive for a few years, but I have not really done much with it. I have always liked the photograph, but in its RAW stage, the image just really did not do much for me.

Currently, as most of you know, I use Lightroom 2.4, which I believe is one great program that has enhanced my post processing workflow. If you do not use Lightroom, rest assured, you can do the same things that I do in Lightroom using Camera RAW.

My first post-processing task is to do an assessment of the photograph by asking myself a few questions. Why did I take the photo? What was my main interest in the scene when I decided to take the photo? What is the most important aspect of the photo? Are there any distracting-elements within the photo? Is the color correct?

As I look at the photo, I noticed that it just does not have the details than I remember. So, bringing back the details is definitely a priority in my post-processing. I also do not like my framing. The left side of the photo contains details that really do not add to the image. Consequently, cropping is definitely in order. Here, I need to say that I am not a fan of the 2x3 format that is native to DSLRs (due to the sensor size). As a result, I often look to crop my photos.

Most people do not crop their photos until late in the post-processing workflow. Cropping is one of my first steps and I usually do it in Lightroom because it is nondestructive process, which means I can redo it if I later decide that I do not like the crop. Why is cropping one of my first steps? Because I want to look only at the part of the photograph that I intend on using and the histogram will then show me only information about the “cropped image” not the entire image. This makes the histogram much more useful as I proceed in my post processing work. As you compare the uncropped and cropped histograms you will notice a portion of the uncropped bright areas are gone from the cropped histogram.

Enjoy and don’t forget to ask any questions you might have along the way. I will do my best to revise my next posting to accommodate the questions this week.

Camera settings: Nikon D200, Nikon 28-70mm f/2.8 at 17mm (effective 25mm), shot at ISO 100, f/13 and 1/100^th of a second on a tripod.

Post Processing in Lightroom—Cropped image.

Seeing Your Final Image #4

“What if we made the photograph look like it was glued to an old album page?”

I thought Tom had a pretty interesting idea, but I was not sure how we would do it. We talked about how we would do it for a while and then settled on our approach which was:

• Increase our canvas size.
  
• Insert a new layer, move it below our background layer and filled it with a dark color selected from our photograph.
  
• Opened PhotoFrame and used Texture-paper_02 to give the paper background that old look.
  

After we finished, Tom again began to study, but this time he kept looking at the monitor and then at one pages of my old family album. He then said: “Look at these pages. All the photographs are not straight and they are not laying flat on the page. We need to make ours look like this.”

So, back to Photoshop to:

• Combined the photo of the bridge with its edge treatment, scratches and faded layers into a new layer
  
• Used Edit>Transform>Rotate to adjust photograph’s orientation
  
• Used Edit>Transform>Warp to make the photograph look like it was not setting flat on the page.
  

Well, this is the final image that Tom and I settled upon. I think it does a good job of making the subject and presentation look like they belong together.

Tom and I hope you enjoyed our little post processing adventure.

Seeing Your Final Image #3

Tom pointed out that many of the old photographs in my family albums had scratches, faded-out areas and a “cool” edge. I agreed. So, back to Photoshop and onOne PhotoFrame 4.0. PhotoFrame is a Photoshop plug-in that has more than frames; it has adornments, backgrounds, edge effects, layouts and texture overlays. It is a relatively easy plug-in to learn and onOne has some very good video tutorials that come with the program. You can download a trial version to see if you like it.

After looking through a lot of different presets, we finally settled on:

• Vincent_Versace_old_photocorners to provided photo corners and that “cool” edge that Tom liked.
  
• Dave_Cross_08 texture to give us that faded out areas.
  
• Texture_scratches_film to give us that worn look.
  

I could tell that Tom liked what he saw, but then I heard, “you know what we should do . . .”

What does Tom think he and Larry should do? What would you do next?

Seeing Your Final Image #2

What is wrong with the photograph that I posted yesterday? Nothing, technically. But, to my eye, the subject does not fit with the overall presentation. There appears to be definite disconnect between the bright blue skies and the saturated colors (due to using a polarizing filter) and this old rusty railroad bridge built in the 1920s.

Tom’s dad had to go to Galveston for a meeting, so Tom came over to my house so that I could show him what post processing I would do to the old railroad bridge photograph.

I told him that we needed a look that would make the photo appear like it was taken 80 years ago. He looked puzzled. I showed him some old family albums that included many photographs from the early 1900s. I do not believe Tom had ever seen that many black and white photographs at one time.

After doing a little clean-up work on the image, we opened it up in nik Silver Efex Pro to convert the color image to black and white. I could see the amazement in Tom’s eyes as saw the image change from color to black and white. The photograph had a totally different tone. In the black and white image, the bridge and its reflection seemed to come forward; it definitely became the subject of the photograph. We scanned the various present and then settled on Antique Sepia. We made a few tweaks to the present and came up with this photograph.

Tom studied our product for some time; he then decided that we needed to do a little more to get a real 1920s look.

What did Tom decide? Will Tom and Larry be able to create Tom’s vision? What would you do with their photograph?

Tune-in tomorrow and see Tom and Larry continue their journey to the past!