Pacific Northwest Images

Now that the holidays are over, what do I do with all of the pictures I’ve taken? Most of what I have are snapshots and not what we would call “art”. Nonetheless, they are of family are I consider them more valuable than any other pictures I take. Because I take so many pictures, I don’t want to have to go through each and convert from RAW so I shoot in jpg.

The problem is that I still don’t always get printable shots directly from the camera. There are things that I can do “in camera” to help with this (I’ll talk about that in a later article) but for now, I’ll talk about what I do with images that need minor adjustments to make them ready for print.

Here is the original picture:

The flash fired but the picture is still underexposed and pretty flat so I pull it up in Photoshop.

Then I add a levels adjustment layer and set the “mode” to “luminosity” so I don’t impact any of the colors.

As you can see from the histogram, there is very little information in the highlights indicating an underexposed shot.

Now, click on the right most slider and (on a PC) hold down “alt” and move the slider to the left until you start seeing pure white in the image. The white indicates those parts of the image that will print as pure white. I like to back off a little from this point so I don’t have any highlights that blow out but there may be some images that need some pure white.

Now do the same thing with the left most slider only you are looking for the portions of the image that turn pure black. These are the shadow areas.

Finally, the middle slider will adjust the overall brightness/darkness of the image.

Now you can see what the image looks like after the levels adjustment. Note that the histogram is nicely spread out and not bunched to one side or the other.

The brightness is better but the photo still looks pretty flat. To correct that problem let’s add a curves adjustment layer with the mode again set to “luminosity”.

As you can see, I’ve added the classic “S-curve” to provide some help to the mid-tones. Every image will require its own curve adjustment to bring out the best, but I find that the S-curve works pretty well on most.

Now let’s work a little on the color. I use another adjustment layer (mode set to normal this time) to go through each individual color and balance them. I start with the red channel and adjust the black to see where the reds are. I then go through each of the other slider until the red channel works for me.

I then do each individual channel (except black, white, and neutral) until I get the balance I like.

Now I’ll work on saturation by adding a saturation adjustment layer with the mode set to “normal”.

Go through each color and adjust the “Saturation” slider until you get the right balance

The nice thing about using an adjustment layer is that you work non-destructively on the image and you can go back into each layer and work more on the settings to fine tune it. Below is the final image and the before image for comparison.

Looks better (looks a lot better in print).

Now, you aren’t going to want to go through a hundred Christmas pictures and do this to each! In my next article I will talk about setting up automatic actions to do this for you.

I showed in an earlier posting the steps I take in Photoshop to work on an image. I follow these steps to get an image ready for printing and selling at the early stages of my processing workflow. There may be other steps that I take including cropping, sharpening, masking, etc. that could take hours, days, or even weeks.

When an image must look its best, I don’t mind taking the time to make it as good as possible. But, if you have a hundred holiday pictures that you want to get printed NOW you need to make some compromises. These compromises come in the form of using automated setting in Photoshop.

When discussing one of my prints with “non-photographers” the topic more often than not shifts to equipment. “What kind of camera did you take that with?” Now that my answer is almost always “a digital SLR”, I always prepare myself for “Oh, it’s not real, it’s digital”

I’ve started to shrug it off and just move on but since I’ve been getting more and more involved with Photoshop, I’ve begun thinking about the topic of digital manipulation more. What is it that I am actually doing in my digital workflow?

The main thing that I am trying to accomplish when I load an image in to Photoshop is to ensure the image accurately reflects what my creative vision was when I began composing the scene.

Does this mean that I want a final print that always matches precisely what I saw in front of me? Not necessarily, and I’ll tell you why. I’m not a documentarian and I’m not a photojournalist, I’m an artist. I take three-dimensional scenes and create representations of them on two-dimensional media.

What I want to see in print is what I saw when I looked at a scene. I want a print that I want to hang on my wall. Does that mean that I add a polar bear to a beach image? No, that’s going into “digital art” and that isn’t where my interests lie. But it does mean that I may saturate the colors, I may open up the shadows, and I may clone out a soda can.

But how far is too far? I’ll tell you where my limit is and it’s “teetering” in my opinion. I shoot only Canon digital SLR’s and I seem to always have a problem with the dynamic range of my landscape work. I tend to run into the “Canon sky” syndrome – blown-out white skys…

In the past, I have bracketed my shots to expose for the highlights and the shadows and then blended the multiple images together. That method works pretty well but sometimes I run into masking problems that make me want to pull my hair out! I’ve tried sky creation (as shown in the image below) but I just can’t get it to look right.

My next step is going to be taking pictures of as many different skies under as many different scenarios as possible so I can build a library of sky images for “replacement” in any “blown sky” images.

Sky replacement and especially creation is as far as I am willing to go. In fact, some may believe that it’s too far.

Ray
http://www.crh3.com/