Continuing from my previous post processing post I want to look at the next few steps in the process.   I am not as confident with the next few steps in the process and am still learning quite a bit.  I am still using Scott Kelby’s PS CS4 book as a guide but am trying to add my own insight at each step and I am not following exactly step by step.  I am focusing on this one particular photo at this stage and he covers a wider variety of photo types and discusses each step in more detail.  I strongly recommend the book.

Clarity

The clarity slider, according to the Adobe help files, effects the midtone contrast of the photo.  Now I’m not exactly sure what that means but I found this video (for an older version of Camera Raw) that describes the difference between the contrast slider and the clarity slider.  Looking at the histogram, you can see that the contrast slider pushes the middle of the histogram towards the edges (it shifts the darker tones even darker and the lighter tones even lighter) which causes us to lose detail (highlight and shadow clipping).  The clarity slider does the same thing, but has a larger effect on tones near the middle of the histogram and little effect near the edges.  adjusting this slider to the right brings out additional detail and to the left kind of softens features, hiding some detail.

For my photo, after zooming in to about 66% so I could see the changes, I moved the slider to about 30.  The biggest change I noticed was in the roof line at the right.  It looked a lot sharper after applying this correction.  I found that any more than this brought out some noise in the faces so I left it here.

Contrast Curves

This is one area where I often struggle.  I’m never sure when I have the contrast right or not.  Contrast adjustments are best made using tone curves.  Camera Raw defaults the photos to have medium contrast, which can be seen by clicking on the “Point” tab when the tone curve is showing.  Picking linear from the drop down menu shows what the photo would like unmodified.  I have decided to keep the curves at medium contrast because I couldn’t make it look any better, but I will try to describe how the curves work.

In the background of the curve you can see the histogram.  The curve itself identifies how bright or dark the tone behind it is.  The highlights are generally the brightest, so the right end of the curve (representing the highlights) is all the way bright.  Similarly, the shadows at the left are all the way dark, so the curve is all the way at the bottom.  the steeper the curve, the more dramatic the difference between the adjacent tones, so the higher the contrast.  The curve can be adjusted in the point tab by clicking on the curve and moving the points around, or in the parametric tab by adjusting the sliders for the various regions.  This photo is not very contrasty, so I don’t have much to say about setting the contrast.  Maybe I can discuss this more in a future photo (especially useful for a black and white photo).

Cropping

Now is a good time to crop the photo (or in this case straighten and crop).  Doing this to the raw file in Camera Raw means if I want to undo this crop or re-crop in the future, I can come back and do it whenever I want.  I’m not sure what the final application will be but I did consider cropping it as an 8×10 because I may print it off like that later, however, for now I will just straighten it using the straightening tool.

This, like basic cropping is a simple task.  The straighten tool lets you draw a line along something that should be straight (I chose to have the lines in the gable end of the house to be vertical).  It then brings up a cropping box and you can drag the edges or corners as desired.  Right-clicking allows you to select a specific ratio (the same as with the cropping tool).  Hit the enter key to accept.  it can always be undone by clicking on the crop tool later.

Thats enough for now.  It also concludes the basic editing, I will try out some more intense edits later, including some targeted adjustments to get ride of some of the distracting highlights.

Not too much difference, but here are the before (the results from the last post) and the after (after edits described in this post).  For the original, see the first post.

I will start the workflow learning in the middle by taking a picture from a while ago and trying to edit it in Adobe Camera Raw.  I started by opening the RAW (.NEF) from Adobe Bridge.  These corrections are largely based on the tutorials in Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers.  I am using this as a guide but trying to add some insight of my own along the way.

Here is the original picture

White Balance Correction

The first thing I will adjust is the white balance.  This photo has a bit of a blue tint to it, so it needs to be warmed up a little bit.  I have some trouble getting the white balance correct so I usually start by going through the presets (cloudy and shade most closely suit the conditions, but I go through them all just for fun) and then I use the white balance tool (the first eye dropper button above the photo on the left).  With this tool you look for something in the picture that is supposed to be light grey (not white, light gray is what you are looking for).  I had a little bit of trouble in this one because I couldn’t find too much light grey.  I settled on using the shadow in the white t-shirt of the second person from the left.

Looking at the white balance sliders we can see that the temperature is then set to 8900 and the tint to -9.  Looking at the colours of the slider bars we can see the temperature is moved away from blue (recall the bluish tinge when we started) towards yellow to warm it up.  The tint is only slightly changed towards green from magenta, but it is hardly noticeable.

Comparing the adjusted photo with the original we can see some big changes.  The people and the house are much warmer, the colour in the trees at the upper left are much stronger and the grass actually looks green instead of blue.  Already we are seeing a lot of progress.

Exposure Correction

The next step is to address the exposure of the photograph.  This was a bit of a tough photo to take because we were in the shade and wanted the faces and house to not be in the shade, but the sky is bright in the background.  Also, some sun peaking through the trees is causing some problems.

I know there are some over-exposed elements in the picture, but we can have the software show us exactly where the problems are.  In the very top right corner there is a white triangle at the top right of the histogram that tells us (by being solid white) that there are some blown highlights (areas of the photo that are pure white and contain no details, a.k.a. clipped).  Clicking on that triangle turns on the program’s clipping warnings which turn all the pure white parts of the picture a bright red so you can see them.  Doing this we see that not only is the sky over exposed, but so is a bit of the grass as well as some hands and ears.  We need to fix those.

When I shot this picture the overall exposure was pretty good (the main subjects are well exposed) it’s just that some select areas of the picture are over exposed.  If we start messing with the Exposure slider we may fix some of the highlights, but we also may loose our relatively well exposed main subjects.

The Recovery slider is the solution.  The more you move the recovery slider to the right, the more it steps down the blown highlights.  With the highlight warning (red highlights) on, we can move the slider until the bulk of the highlights disappear.  For this photo, at this stage, the highlight warning never turns off, but we are able to step down many of the highlights.  We can recover all of the sky above the house in the upper right corner (some blue sky is even starting to show), but there a few trouble areas that will need some localized attention later on.  I picked a value of 35 because this is where a bulk of the highlights are recovered and any more only makes minimal changes to the remaining highlights.   There is a pocket of blown highlights in the sky that can be seen under the roof line through the porch and a few of the spots where the sun is shining through the trees onto our main subject’s faces and hands as well as the grass right in front of them that will need some more detailed work once the overall corrections are done.

The next thing to look at is the other end of the histogram, the blacks.  Clicking on the triangle at the upper left of the histogram will highlight the pure black areas of the photo in blue.  Camera Raw seems to automatically put the Blacks slider at 5 but if we put it bake to zero we can see that there are almost no black clippings, however the black jackets in the picture look just dark grey, so let’s add a bit of black.  The Adobe default of 5 does a good job.  Yes it saturates a few areas of the photo, but black clippings are not so bad and make the colours look nicer and we haven’t lost much detail.

The next slider to look at is the Brightness slider.  This will adjust the midtones of the photo and Adobe defaults it to 50.  This seems like a good number in this case but after playing with it and the next slider I am going to talk about I decided to drop it down to about 30 and I will explain why in a second.

I wanted to slightly brighten the people and the house without touching anything in the background.   The Fill Light slider is great for this and the reason I used it instead of the leaving the Brightness slider up is because the brightness slider was washing out the colours in the trees at the upper left corner and was adversely affecting the highlights in the grass.  The Fill Light slider brightens our main subjects (people and house) while leaving these other areas untouched.  So, I upped the fill light a bit (set the slider to 20) and brought down the Brightness slider to 30 from the 50 default.  In doing this we lost some of the colour saturation (and the black jackets are again a dark grey) that the Blacks slider correction had brought us in the last step, so I upped the Blacks slider to 8.

This last step shows how all of the sliders must be used together since changing one has an effect on the others.  This is another reason why each photo is different.

Here is the picture after white balance and exposure corrections:

This picture is by no means done, but I am going to stop here for now since this is taking a long time to write.  This is a great learning process for me because not only do I make the corrections but I need to think about each step in order to discuss it.

Next I will work on the contrast corrections.  This is something that has always been an issue for me in the past and I have never fully understood curves.  Hopefully looking at it step by step will help me with that.

I haven’t done too much serious post processing yet, but one thing I have learned is that it is important to have a good workflow in order to be consistent  and efficient.

A good workflow starts with the capture of the image and finishes with publishing (printing, posting to the web, etc.).  Each step along the way can be quite involved, and some steps are even unique for each photo, but it is important to start with a general plan of attack.

While the post processing part starts with getting the images off of the camera (after the picture has been taken), the work actually starts with taking the picture.  Some people will argue that a picture can always be made better by post processing, but others such as Brian Peterson in Understanding Exposure suggest the photo editing should be done as a last resort.  If you get it right in the camera there won’t be much work to do later and this can save you a lot of time.  Though I agree in most part with Peterson’s arguments, it goes against the popular philosophy of shooting in RAW format.  RAW photos will always need some processing to get them into a usable format and haven’t had any white balance or noise corrections.  Sure I could buy some coloured filters and fix the white balance on the camera, but I’m not going to get into that.  Some types of photos also in their nature require some level of  post processing.  Things like panoramic photos, HDR images or other special effect shots require some manipulation.  Another problem (and perhaps the most applicable argument) is that I’m just not that good yet.  I need a lot of practice still, and until I get a lot better I am going to need the help of Photoshop and Camera Raw to fix my mistakes (and hopefully learn from them).

It will take a long time for me to develop a good workflow, and as I previously alluded to, each photo may have it’s own unique challenges, making it all the more challenging to develop a good plan.  I will start by giving a quick outline of the workflow here and will start addressing the different steps in more detail in future posts.  Since the workflow will always be updating and changing I will create a static page that I will update when I add to or modify my personal workflow.

I will start with a general outline of the work flow.  This is by no means definitive and I expect to extensively modify it in the future (adding and re-ordering steps).  I will try to elaborate on each of these steps in future posts but for now I will give just a brief description.

1. Take the picture (pre-processing);
2. Transfer images to your computer (copy, sort, label, backup);
3. Review photos (select the images to be edited);
4. Photo style preparation if needed  (panoramic, HDR, B&W, etc.);
5. Basic exposure corrections (white balance, exposure, curves, etc.);
6. Cropping (straightening);
7. Advanced editing (fix blemishes, remove spots, red-eye, cloning, special effects etc.);
8. Noise reduction and sharpening;
9. Prepare for publishing (get ready for printing, web publishing, etc.); and
10. Publish.

These steps are by no means definitive and are meant just as a general guide.  Every picture is unique and may have its own unique requirements.  Some may like to crop before fixing exposures, others may not use certain steps, but this is a good starting point for me.  I will start here and see where it goes.