Photo Nuts Post Final4

a bookby Neil Creek

A GUIDE TO POST-PROCESSING

A note from Darren Rowse – Editor of dPSOver the last two years I’ve had the privilege of working with Neil to publish the previous Photo Nuts ebooks; two of our most popular publications that teach photographers the basics of how cameras work and how to use them to take beautiful images.

The previous Photo Nuts ebooks have helped many thousands of people to do just that but there’s always been one piece missing: what to do with the photos after they leave your camera!

For years my own approach was to avoid post-production; my mindset was that great photographers always got it right in camera anyway and that any processing work was somehow ‘fake’. Over time, however, I’ve come to see the benefit of some gentle processing on my images - not to hide anything but to bring them alive and to reflect the reality of the scenes and subjects that I capture.

While getting your photos right in camera is the only real place to start, this ebook is all about putting the tools and techniques in your hands to take those good images and lift them to new levels through post-production.

I was delighted to work with Neil on this ebook because his approach to post-production is similar to my own. I therefore trust that you’ll also enjoy learning about how post-production can help unleash the potential in your own images.

About the Author Neil graduated from Monash University in 1996 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.

He enjoys science and art, especially so when the two meet. At age 16 he built an 8 inch reflecting telescope from scratch to further his love for astronomy and from which came an interest in optics.

Digital photography has been a passion since 2004, combined with Neil’s enthusiasm for learning and teaching. He has been writing his photography blog for six years and has written three ebooks in his Photo Nuts series on photography which have all been published by dPS. In 2008 Neil took the plunge and decided to become a full-time photographer. Much of his work is in portraiture but he thoroughly enjoys landscape, 360° panoramic and night sky photography and does this whenever he gets the time.

Neil loves to capture the beauty in the world, and share it, as well as what he has learned while doing so.

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Credits and Copyright Written by: Neil Creekwww.neilcreek.com

Publisher: Darren Rowsewww.digital-photography-school.com

Producer: Jasmin Tragiswww.wonderwebby.com

Graphic Design/Layout: Naomi [email protected]

Version 1.0 ©Copyright 2011 Neil Creek

All photos and illustrations by the author unless otherwise noted.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise without prior written consent from the publisher, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. You may store the pdf on your computer and backups. You may print one copy of this book for your own personal use.

Disclaimer: The information contained in this book is based on the author’s experience, knowledge and opinions. The author and publisher will not be held liable for the use or misuse of the information in this book.

This eBook is best viewed in full screen mode using Acrobat 8.0 or above.

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Contents A note from Darren Rowse __ 2

About the Author ___________ 2

Credits and Copyright ______ 2

Introduction ________________ 4 What will be Covered? _________5Disclaimers ___________________5

About Image Files __________ 6 What’s in an Image File? ________7 How is the Image Data Captured and Stored? __________8 Step 1 – Capture ___________8 Step 2 – Interpretation ______9 Step 3 – Processing ________9 Step 4 – Output ____________9

About Colour ______________ 10What is ‘Colour’? ____________ 11Colour Terminology __________ 12Colour Gamut _______________ 13

File Management and Workflow ______________ 14Example – My Workflow ______ 16Hardware Setup _____________ 16Directory Naming Format _____ 17File Naming Format __________ 18Metadata on Import __________ 19Convert to DNG _____________ 19Detailed Metadata ___________ 20Preparing for Output _________ 20Exporting Photos ____________ 20Backup _____________________ 20Retrieval ____________________ 21

The Cull and Select ________ 22Flags versus Stars ___________ 24 Which Photos to Cull? ________ 25Why be Selective? ___________ 25Which Photos to Select? _____ 26A Process of Refinement _____ 27Difficult Selects ______________ 28Practice! ____________________ 28

What is Processing? _______ 29Processing vs Photo Manipulation ________________ 31The Stigma of ‘Photoshopping’ 32Just Three Values ____________ 33Changing the Values _________ 33Selecting Pixels _____________ 34

Processing Tools ___________ 36The Histogram ______________ 37Global Adjustments __________ 39 Exposure _______________ 39 Selective Exposure Sliders __39 Curves _________________ 40Colour Adjustments __________ 41 White Balance ___________ 41 Saturation _______________ 42 B&W Conversion _________ 42Selection and Specialist Tools _ 43 Cropping _______________ 43 Masking ________________ 44 Direct Selection __________ 44 Region Selection _________ 45 Spot removal ____________ 45 Red-eye Reduction ______ 45 Noise Reduction and Sharpening __________ 46 Lens Correction__________ 47

Processing Walkthroughs ___ 51Rocky Coastline _____________ 53Alley Portrait ________________ 56Heron Landing ______________ 59Portrait of Annie _____________ 62Beach Sunset _______________ 65

Common Problems and Solutions ______________ 69Exposure ___________________ 70 Clipping ________________ 70 Noise ______________________ 74Composition ________________ 75 Tilted Horizon ___________ 75 Shifting the Composition __ 76Colour ______________________ 77 White Balance _______________ 77 Saturation _______________ 80Spot Corrections ____________ 84Soft Images _________________ 85Getting it ‘In Camera’ ________ 86

Creative Processing ________ 87Capturing Reality ____________ 89Communicating via Processing _ 90What are You Trying to Communicate? ______________ 90Processing to Communicate __ 91Your Processing Style ________ 94Changing Reality ____________ 94Presets _____________________ 95

Processing as an Intermediate Step __________ 96Approach ___________________ 98Workflow ___________________ 99

The Output Process ________101File Size ___________________ 102Image Dimensions __________ 103Sharpening ________________ 105Metadata __________________ 106Watermarking ______________ 107Other Output Destinations ___ 108 Delivery to Clients _______ 108 Ebooks ________________ 108 Printed Books __________ 108 Art Prints ______________ 108

Conclusion ________________109

Stay in touch ______________110

Download the videos included with this book here:digital-photography-school.com/post-videospassword: nutsvids7

You press the shutter, a moment in the universe

is captured, and an image is created that will last

forever. Right?

If this is where the process ends for you, then you’re

skipping half the work, but missing out on half the

creative potential and fun! Post-processing – the

work you do to the photo after you have captured

it – is half of creating a great photo. The creative

choices and opportunities in ‘post’ are almost as

great as they are in the capture of the photo itself,

and almost every photo can be improved with a little

post-processing.

Photo Nuts and Post is the natural progression in this

series of comprehensive guides to the essentials of

photography. Book one, Photo Nuts and Bolts, brings

you up to speed with how the camera works, how to

control exposure and how to take full control of your

gear. Photo Nuts and Shots helps you to become a

better photographer, with tips and techniques for being

more creative and expressive, and eliminating the

most common problems encountered in photography.

Photo Nuts and Post follows on directly from the

first two titles by teaching you how to turn the

photo you’ve captured into a finished, polished and

appropriately prepared photo for whatever need

you have, whether it be sharing online, printing or

publishing in a book.

Introduction

BEFORE AFTER

The lessons in this book flow smoothly from one chapter to the next, but you can read it in any order you like. However I urge you to read the first few chapters which cover the basics of image files, file management, pixels, colours, and the fundamentals of processing. These subjects may seem overly theoretical when you’re keen to leap into the practical side of processing, but just as an understanding of how the camera works will make you a better photographer, so does understanding the fundamentals make you better at processing your photos. Throughout this book, you will see pairs of photos showing before and after processing. These photos don’t necessarily relate to the subject being discussed, but are there to provide you with inspiration.

This book will help you realise the hidden potential in your photos to look better than they do straight from the camera. You’ll learn the basic concepts behind processing, discover how tweaking a few settings and adjusting some sliders can make your images ‘pop’ and find your own processing style.

We’ll step through the whole workflow from pressing the shutter button to copying and backing up files, organising your growing collection of photos, and managing metadata, processing and output, focusing on how different uses for your images have different requirements. You’ll develop a better idea of what to do with a photo that “doesn’t look quite right”, and how to make it look as you want it to. Once you have progressed through this book, you’ll be better able to bring your images to their full potential, and to fulfil your own potential as a photographer.

Processing photos is a creative process and, like any creative process, there are as many opinions on how to do it as there are photographers. Each photographer has a different ‘eye’, a different artistic aesthetic, and a different way of doing things. There is no right or wrong way to process a photo, as long as the end result is what you wanted. Nonetheless, the fundamental principles are the same for everyone.

Naturally, I see the world through my own eyes, so when reading this book, keep in mind that I’m describing techniques and creative ideas that work for me. Even though the principles remain the same for everyone, my unique perspective may be reflected in how I discuss them. You’ll have your own way of processing photos that will be right for you, and it will probably differ from mine. Developing your own processing style is one of the joys of photography, and that applies equally to processing and shooting.

The particular software to use is another choice digital photographers need to make when processing their photos. There are many software solutions for post-processing photos, including those which come bundled with digital SLRs, as well as a number of sophisticated applications from other companies. This book is written to be as software-agnostic as possible, but by necessity some of the terminology and examples may be influenced by my personal choice of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. Screen shots of examples are mostly from Lightroom, but I have striven to keep them relevant to other software choices.

Finally, this book assumes that you are shooting with a full-scale camera. Camera phones and other tiny, simple cameras are great tools, but the photos they create allow limited post-processing. While there is phone-based software that will let you do simple processing, it is beyond the scope of this book. Nonetheless, the basic principles that you’ll learn in Photo Nuts and Post apply even to camera phones.

What will be Covered? Disclaimers

BEFORE AFTER

ABOUT imAge files

The image file is at the heart of digital photography, and well worth a closer look before we get into

processing itself. It might seem like a simple thing, but there’s actually an awful lot going on inside

that .cr2 .nef .jpg or whatever format you’re working with.

As well as the data that describes the photo you captured, an image file contains other information wrapped up in a container. This other information is metadata, or data about data, and it describes various aspects of the image including the make and model of the camera, information about the camera’s sensor, the settings of the camera when the photo was taken, a thumbnail-sized version of the photo for quick browsing, often a medium-sized JPEG image for previewing on the back of the camera, and much more. As a lot of this information is not actually of use to most photographers, different applications will hide varying amounts of metadata to keep things simpler. Typically, editing programs will allow you to see more metadata than viewing programs.

Metadata is very useful to a photographer for helping organise their work, learn the effect the settings had on a particular photo, and so on. The more technical metadata is critical for the processing software to understand how to interpret and display the data in the image file. During the editing process the metadata contained in the image file can be edited and added to, including allowing the photographer to add copyright information and keywords, and storing certain kinds of changes made to the image.

What’s in an Image File?

As I emphasised in both previous Photo Nuts books, if you have the option available, always shoot in RAW format rather than JPEG. Some of the reasons for this advice will be discussed in this chapter, and again later in the book. In this book I assume that you’re shooting RAW.

About Image Files

The process of capturing, recording, processing, and finally exporting an image is a kind of data flow, and the data which is originally captured by the camera sensor goes through several transformations of increasing refinement, but also decreasing ‘depth’. At each stage a significant chunk of data is discarded, but the aim is to home in on the data values that you actually need.

How is the Image Data Captured and Stored?Step 1 – Capture

The camera sensor, as described in Photo Nuts and Bolts, is a vast array of microscopic light sensors that turn light energy into a correspondent level of electrical energy. Each of these sensors I will call a ‘photo site’ to distinguish it from ‘pixels’. The light data collected by these photo sites will eventually become pixels in your photo, but they do not correspond exactly. There are approximately four photo sites for each pixel in the image.

Each photo site has a coloured filter in front of it, either red, green, or blue. This is what allows your camera to take colour photos. The millions of photo sites on your camera’s sensor are arranged in a pattern of these colours, as shown in the diagram here. Each photo site can record 12 or 14 bits depth of electrical value, depending on the camera. That’s 4096 levels of brightness or 16,385 levels of brightness respectively (although there is some debate as to whether this translates to a significant practical advantage). All of this data is stored in its raw form in the RAW file that the camera saves to the memory card, hence its name.

The Bayer arrangements of colour filters on the pixel array of an image sensor.CC BY-SA 3.0 – en:User:Cburnett

About Image Files

8

Step 2 – Interpretation

In its current form, this data cannot be viewed as an image. The millions of recorded brightness levels of red, green, and blue photo sites need to be converted into an array of pixels, which are the smallest element of a photo. Pixels are described as a triplet of red, green, and blue values, or RGB, depending on the bit depth of the file. For example, a 24-bit image would have each pixel with RGB values from 0 to 256, or 8 bits depth, and three channels multiplied by 8 bits depth equals 24 bits. This means each pixel can be one of over 16 million colours.

To get from the millions of photo site values to millions of pixel values, the processing software has to perform a complicated algorithm, sometimes called demosaicing. Different applications use different algorithms and can produce subtly or dramatically varying results. Adobe users would be familiar with the Adobe Camera Raw engine, which performs this process for Adobe software. This is one area of competition between the various processing applications, and the methods used to convert raw data into an image are continually improving with each new version release.

The decisions made by the algorithms are automatic, and depend on the aims and ultimately the personal biases of the programmers who create them. This is one reason why it is a mistake to suggest that an unprocessed image is more worthy than a processed one, as is a common misconception. Every image is processed in some way, just to turn it into a form that can be displayed.

The side effect of this conversion process means that some of the data collected – in the order of half the data – is discarded. However, the idea is to leave the ‘right’ data to bring you closer to the final image you want.

Step 3 – Processing

The amount of data left after the conversion process still exceeds that which can be displayed on typical modern displays, and stored in most image file formats used online, such as JPEG. A further refinement process is required to make sure that the ‘right’ data is used in the image when it is exported for use elsewhere. Most photographers will also want to at least tweak most of their photos at this stage, for creative reasons. This is the part of the data flow that most of us will know as ‘processing’.

Step 4 – Output

Finally, the actual creation of the final output file takes the large data set interpreted in the second step and processed in the third step, and creates a file suited for the intended use of the image. In the majority of cases, this is the creation of a JPEG file suitable for sharing online. Typically this last step throws away most of the remaining data through a combination of resizing and compression to a web-friendly file size. The remaining data here will be a tiny fraction of that which was captured.

For example, in the case of a photo taken by my 5D MkII, each compressed RAW file is approximately 28 megabytes, yet a typical JPEG file uploaded to the web might be 200 kilobytes – less than one percent of the file size of the original RAW file.

AFTERBEFORE

About Image Files

9

BEFORE AFTER

ABOUT COlOUR

What is ‘Colour’?When we talk about colour in our daily lives, we think about words like red, yellow, green, pink, and orange. This might be fine for describing the colour of your shirt to a friend, but for a camera to accurately capture an image of a real-world scene, it needs to have a much more detailed and precise way to describe colour.

All digital cameras are fundamentally black-and-white cameras, inasmuch as each individual photo sensing site on the sensor chip can only measure the intensity of the light hitting it: the brightness (a term we will look at more closely in a moment). By itself, this brightness tells the camera nothing about the object’s colour. The way around this problem is to use coloured filters in front of the sensors. These filters only let through light of a certain wavelength, or colour. A red filter will therefore only allow light that is red to be recorded. Parts of the photo that have little or no red –

a deep blue sky, for example – will be recorded as very dark or black.

A combination of three coloured filters – red, green and blue – is all that we need to capture the information needed to take a colour photo. When the three separate images are combined later, the (almost) full range of colours is able to be displayed. This is actually very similar to how our own eyes work, with cells sensitive to red, green and blue wavelengths of light.

This is where the term ‘RGB’ comes from; it refers to the way colour is defined and stored in digital files. The relative values of red, green and blue describe all of the colours that the camera is capable of capturing, and the bit depth – as discussed above – is the number of colours that can be distinguished.

Colour is a surprisingly complex and confusing topic. So much more can be said about colour than is

within the scope of this book, but it is important to define some of the terms and explain some of the

reasons why colour is such a challenge for photographers. Everything I discuss here can be expanded

and discussed in much more detail, but for the purposes of day-to-day use and understanding of colour

in photography, this summary will do.

11

Colour Terminology Unfortunately, RGB isn’t an easy way for us as human beings to imagine colour. When we see ‘orange’, we don’t think 255 red, 150 green; we think ‘orange’. An alternative way of describing colour is used alongside RGB in photo editing software, called HSB (or sometimes HSV). This stands for hue, saturation and brightness (or value). This is a much more comfortable way for us to think about colour, and if you’ve ever used a colour picker in any software, you’ve almost certainly used HSB.

Hue is the scale most of us would commonly call ‘colour’ and represents the spectrum of colour values, from red through orange, yellow, green, blue, purple and back to red again. This is actually a loop, and is described in degrees around a cylinder as you see in the diagram here.

Saturation is the purity or richness of a colour, and describes how ‘diluted’ the colour is by white and black. A change in saturation is the difference between red and pink. In the diagram the saturation is along the radius of the cylinder.

Brightness is the luminance of the colour: from black to white. A change in brightness is the difference between blue and navy. In the diagram the brightness is the height of the cylinder. Brightness is sometimes referred to as ‘luminosity’ or ‘value’.

I will use the terms hue, saturation and brightness in this book when I need to refer specifically to the terms as they are defined above. When I don’t need to be specific, I’ll say ‘colour’, which you can take to be the combination of HSB or RGB values.

About Colour

12

In the colour cylinder, the hue is described in degrees around the circumference, saturation as a percentage along the radius outwards and value as a percentage of the height from the bottom.CC BY-SA 3.0 – HSV_color_solid_cylinder.png: SharkD

Colour Gamut Colour becomes a bit more complicated when you learn that no way of capturing or representing colour is able to reproduce all of the colours that the human eye can see. Each method of describing colour has a different range of colours that it is limited to. This range is called the colour gamut, and the various methods of defining colours are called colour spaces. sRGB is the standard colour gamut of the web; CMYK is the gamut used for printing. There are a number of modified RGB colour gamuts being developed and used in various applications today, but the one you are most likely to encounter is the Adobe RGB (aRGB) colour space. Many modern DSLR cameras allow you to use this slightly broader gamut, although few consumer displays can show this as yet.

Why shoot in aRGB rather than sRGB? Even if your display cannot show these colours, and the JPEG file you upload to the net is sRGB, there are two good reasons to shoot in Adobe RGB. Firstly, if you wish to create a high-quality print of your work, a good printer will be able to print colours in the aRGB space which are lacking in the sRGB space. Secondly, just as shooting in RAW will give you more dynamic range for editing your exposure, aRGB will give you more room to edit colours before you run into clipping problems – which will be discussed later.

This diagram represents colour gamuts. The horseshoe shape underneath represents the range of colours visible to the eye. The ProPhoto RGB gamut is the largest colour space shown here, able to represent some colours into the blues and greens the human eye can’t see, but unable to represent some aquas and purples. The other colour gamuts represent fewer colours, Matt Paper being the worst.CC BY 2.5 – User: Cpesacreta

About Colour

13

BEFORE AFTER

file mANAgemeNT AND WORKflOW

Everything you do with your images benefits

from a structured way of thinking, and it works

best when it happens seamlessly and naturally.

For new photographers, it can be a challenge to

remember to have enough memory cards, and to

know where you copied your photos.

For an organised photographer, these are rarely

issues, because the manner in which we do

things doesn’t allow for such mistakes. If you

make a habit of organised thinking, organisation

becomes as natural as breathing.

Of course, that’s all very philosophical and

entirely useless without specific examples, so

let’s walk through my workflow so that you’ll be

able to see what I mean. Consider my process,

and see if you can adapt it to your own style.

Digital photography’s greatest strength can also

be a problem. Fast, easy and cheap photos

help you to learn faster, and you never need to

be afraid to waste a shot, but very quickly you

can find yourself with hundreds or thousands of

photos to deal with. A strategy to sort, store and

retrieve your photos is essential to getting the

most out of them.

Here I’ll discuss my experience of handling tens

of thousands of images accumulated over more

than eight years of intense photography. My

solutions helped me turn an unmanageable mess

of images into an organised archive, from which

I can find any image I want relatively quickly and

easily. My methods have evolved over time, as

I’m sure they will continue to do, and they won’t

be ideal for everyone. So please don’t take my

word as gospel, but instead glean and adapt

what knowledge you can to organise your own

collection in the way that works best for you.

Hardware SetupAfter having a hard disk drive (HDD) die, taking with it five years of photos (which I fortunately managed to retrieve years later), I swore that I would never again be without backup. My current HDD setup is largely inspired by The DAM Book: Digital Asset Management for Photographers by Peter Krogh.

I have a series of large internal HDDs. The main drives where all my RAW files are stored are named RAW1, RAW2, and so on. The drive to which I export processed files is called DERIV (for derivative files). I also have a separate pair of large external drives where the contents of the RAW and DERIV drives are backed up. These backup drives are connected to the network, and every night a backup program writes all changes to them automatically. I have a stack of other HDDs with a tertiary backup stored at my parents’ house, and I update these every few months – far too infrequently. We’ll talk a little more about backup shortly.

Example – My WorkflowBelow are the typical steps in my workflow.

Take the shot Click!

Copy files Create a new directory on my RAW hard disk drive and copy all files there from the card.

Collect the files Copy all the files from any camera-generated sub-directories into the new top level directory.

Load up Lightroom Import all the files (into whatever RAW processing/image editing software you prefer), applying what metadata you can on the way. Rename the files – my renaming style is discussed below.

Select and process Delete the duds, rate the picks and process.

Add metadata Assign more detailed and descriptive metadata to the picks of the shoot. Adding unique keywords is where I need to make the most improvement to my routine.

Prepare for output On my DERIV HDD, I prepare a new directory.

Export Using my preferred settings for the intended use, I export all the photos I want.

Share Upload, email, burn or otherwise disseminate the images.

Backup Automated software mirrors all changes of my entire RAW and DERIV HDDs every night for a current backup.

Retrieve With the directory and file naming schemes I use, finding the images I’m looking for is usually simple. Because my metadata routine is imperfect, finding images based on concepts is a little tougher.

File Management and Workflow

16

A consistent naming system is absolutely critical to any digital asset management, especially photos. Names generated by your camera contain no information about the photo, and they are not unique. Your file name could be the same as hundreds around the world (impacting your ability to search for uses of your photos online); worse, when you ‘go around the clock’ and take enough photos to cause the camera to start reusing numbers, you could overwrite your old files. I use a structurally similar system for naming both my directories and photos. A typical directory on my RAW HDD might look like this:

110120 - Peninsula Trip

Date - Description

The date is very useful. In the space of just six characters I can uniquely identify any date within one hundred years. The date is read in pairs from left to right in descending order of detail: year, month, day. The reasons for choosing this format are:

• Only six characters is very efficient; it takes up as little room as possible, making it easier to scan a list of folders in a narrow column in your file manager.

• The descending order starts with useful information that becomes increasingly more useful. If you start with the day, it could refer to any of a hundred years. By starting with the larger time block, you can easily and quickly narrow down the exact day.

• Files are sorted correctly by date in your file manager.

• The confusion between European and American date formats is avoided.

The nominal description is simply to help me find the folder once I’ve narrowed down the approximate date. If I know I took those Peninsula photos sometime in January, a quick scan down the directory list will find them. If the description includes relevant keywords, it’s possible to search for them with your file manager’s find tool. If I shoot more than one location or event in a day, I’ll usually create a second directory with the same date but different description.

Directory Naming Format

File Management and Workflow

17

Once I move all my photos into the day’s directory and import them into Lightroom, I rename them all. Whatever naming convention you decide to use for your photos, the most important thing is that you stick with it. The strength of a naming system lies in its consistency. If you use more than one system, things will quickly become a jumble, and you won’t be able to confidently track your photos.

The file naming system I use for my photos is similar to the one I use for my directories. A typical RAW file might be named like this:

creek-110120-058.cr2

My name - Date - Unique number . Extension

I use my name as a prefix to my photo names for a number of reasons:

• The photo is easily identified as one of mine, which is valuable if my photos are being passed around a client’s studio – they don’t have to delve into the image’s metadata to know who took the photo. It also helps me build my name as a brand, aided by the fact that my surname is uncommon.

• Having a word, especially a name, in front of the otherwise purely numerical file name draws attention to the file. A file with a numerical name looks machine-generated and can easily be ignored, or mistaken for some other kind of file. Because humans can more readily make sense of a name than a number, a name gives a file some protection from deletion.

• Sometimes I shoot with friends, and keep a combined archive of their photos and mine. The naming system works equally well for their photos, but a name prefix keeps our photos separate.

• Being a short name it doesn’t add too much to the length of the file-name, and since all my photos have the same prefix, it doesn’t affect their sort order.

File Naming Format

File Management and Workflow

AFTERBEFORE

The rest of the file name is pretty straightforward. The date is used in the same way and for the same reasons as in the directory name. The unique number is just a count, from 001 up. For especially large shoots, you could count from 0001 and up. The extension is the default RAW file type, but that will change soon enough, as we’ll discuss below.

It’s important to note – name your photos before you do any culling. Once you’ve named your photos don’t rename them ever, otherwise it will lead to a version control nightmare! There’s nothing wrong with having a file list with missing numbers.

18

Metadata on ImportMetadata is an incredibly useful tool. This is where all the information about your photo is stored, as discussed on page 7. Photographers should also be aware of the IPTC metadata fields. Of most interest is the credit information and keywords.

Credit information is crucial for identifying a photo as the work of a particular photographer. It allows others, especially potential users of the photo, to know who took the photo. I’ve created a metadata preset in Lightroom that adds all my details to every photo I import.

Keywords are extremely useful for describing a photo, and later finding it. Search engines are not yet smart enough to recognise the content and context of a photo, so keywords fill the gap. Effective keyword use makes searching a huge database of images for exactly the one you want straightforward. The main problem with keywords is that keywording hundreds or thousands of photos is a lot of work. Inconsistent keyword use also lessens their usefulness.

At this stage in my workflow I assign a standard credit to all imported photos, and I add a few keywords that apply to all images in the shoot. Sometimes this isn’t easy, as a shoot can be so varied, but even one or two keywords can help make it easier to find, say, family photos among a year’s worth of professional photos.

Convert to DNGAt some point in this process I convert all the photos to the Adobe DNG format. I’m a big fan of the DNG RAW format, for many reasons, including:

• It’s an open format, meaning that software will be able to read the files many years in the future when the proprietary format may have been abandoned.

• The DNG files are slightly smaller than my .CR2 RAW files, saving about 20% disk space.

• Metadata is fully contained within the DNG file itself, meaning your folders don’t become filled with extra .XMP files.

• The self-contained metadata means that all edits and keywords added to a photo stay with the photo, rather than be locked in a catalog or separate file which can become lost.

If you choose to work with DNG, you should keep in mind that while most apps are compatible, there are a few which are not. This is particularly true of independently produced plug-ins or utilities made by individual developers. Check that all your processing tools are compatible with DNG before you convert all your photos.

File Management and Workflow

19

Exporting Photos We’ll come back to the output process in much more detail towards the end of the book, but let’s discuss it briefly here. The settings I choose for the exporting of photos depend on what use I intend for them. The vast majority of the time they’ll be uploaded to the web or sent to friends via email. Other times I’ll be exporting full-res photos for printing, or creating a sequence of images to be combined into one, such as with a panorama.

If the photos are destined for a website that supports keywords, I take a bit of extra time to keyword the images before export. If I keyword the RAW files, they’ll stay with the image in the metadata, and some sites will preserve and display the keywords when uploaded. They’ll also be there for any other use I have for the image, and make it easier to find later.

Backup By this stage, I’ve completed all the work I’ll do on a particular image, from pressing the shutter release to sending the photo to its final destination, whether that be online, a friend’s inbox, or the photo lab. But I can’t forget about the image just yet. It’s still vulnerable, as there’s only one electronic copy of it in existence.

Backup is an essential part of any workflow, and if you don’t have a reliable backup procedure in place, you’re just setting yourself up for heartbreak when you lose some or all of your photos. It will happen one day, and it’s happened to me. You really must protect yourself against data loss – end of story.

When dealing with the large files you end up with when shooting RAW, backup becomes a bit more challenging than simply burning a DVD of all of your documents and low-resolution photos for family and friends. DVDs simply aren’t large enough, and they’re notoriously unreliable. By far your best solution is to buy additional HDDs. I recommend external drives that you can easily transport if you need to take your archive with you – and that you quickly grab in an emergency. One or two 1–2Tb drives should be ample for today’s photographer, but be aware that your archive will grow; also, as cameras produce larger files, or you start taking HD digital video, your storage needs will likely increase in the future.

Detailed MetadataThis is where the keywording task becomes daunting. Adding additional keywords to individual photos is time-consuming, tiring, and no fun at all. However, the pay-off can be huge. Searching for a specific image from thousands of keyworded ones is so much easier, and the time spent keywording can be saved in searches many times over.

This is the weakest point of my own process. I rarely spend the time keywording that I should, and as a result I have to rely on my file naming system to find images. However, whenever I offer photos for sale, I dedicate a great deal of time and effort to keywording those photos. This helps them be found by potential customers, and adds considerable value to the image for them.

Preparing for OutputI discussed my hardware setup above, describing the RAW/DERIV hard disk drive system I use. The directory setup I use on the derivative HDD is similar to the one I use on the RAW HDD; the only difference is that I group the directories into years. This speeds up access to the photos in my preferred viewing application, ACDSee. Loading the folder list for every day I’ve ever done a photo shoot would take too long, so grouping the shoots by years on export speeds things up greatly.

File Management and Workflow

20

The easiest way to do an off-site backup is to repeat the same steps for creating your first backup and then transport the drives to another location, perhaps a relative’s house. Once a month or so, take your local backup disks to the off-site location and swap them with the off-site disks, return on-site with them, and synchronise those with the latest backup.

A new alternative is becoming the backup choice for some. High-speed internet connections, cheap storage, and large data transfer quotas make possible the creation of an online backup for your files. A number of companies offer high-volume or unlimited storage at an affordable price. If you have access to a fast, unmetered internet connection, it’s a relatively simple matter to perform a nightly off-site backup to this third-party service. Initially uploading your entire archive could take considerable time; some services allow you to courier a HDD with your files to them to seed your initial backup.

Unfortunately, this solution only applies in the lucky few countries where the internet service makes this possible. This isn’t yet a viable option for many photographers around the world, but with any luck that will change in years to come.

Retrieval Due to the care I’ve taken to use descriptive, consistent file and directory naming conventions, and my increasing emphasis on good keywording practice, finding an image I want isn’t too painful. If I have a specific image in mind and I know the approximate date off the top of my head, I can usually find it within a minute. Looking for images that match a certain concept is harder, as my keywording is incomplete in that regard; however, it’s much faster than having to scroll through thousands of disorganised thumbnails in an image browser.

The main difficulties I face with image retrieval at the moment are caused by the segmented Lightroom catalogs, which require the whole application to be reloaded just to check them. I’m hoping that this problem will be but a memory after my next hardware upgrade.

The backup method I use is to create a nightly mirror of all files on my desktop drives to a pair of external drives using backup software – SyncBackSE in my case. I recommenda similar procedure for your own backups. The key is that they are done regularly.

A backup system isn’t really safe if all copies of a file are kept in the same place. A house fire or burglary could cause the loss of your originals and your backups. To eliminate the risk of this, as well as the risk of master and backup drives failing at the same time (due to lightning strike, for example), you should use an off-site backup as well.

File Management and Workflow

21

DESKTOP PCExternal drives

backed up nightly

External drives backed up monthly

OS & APPS

DERIV 1

RAW 1

BACKUP 1

OFFSITE 1

OFFSITE 3RAW 2

BACKUP 2

OFFSITE 2

OFFSITE 4RAW 3

BEFORE AFTER

THe CUll AND seleCT

Digital cameras have fundamentally changed

the way photos are taken. When film had a

limited number of frames on a roll, and there

was the associated cost of developing and

printing, more thought and consideration had

to be put into each frame. Digital photography,

with its essentially free photos, lets

photographers push many of these decisions

into the post-processing phase. Many

photographers, myself included, frequently

shoot in burst mode, where several photos are

taken in quick succession with the intent of

choosing the best one later. This can increase

the chances of capturing a better photo, but it

also increases the workload after the shoot.

After a big shoot, a photographer will need

to cull the worst photos and select the best.

There are many different ways of doing this,

and each photographer’s technique will differ,

but the result is the same: filtering the best

photos from the rest.

Flags versus StarsAdobe’s Lightroom and Bridge both have two ways of marking your photos for the cull and select process: flags and stars. Most other processing apps use similar equivalent features. So what’s the difference?

A white and a black flag allow you to mark photos as either ‘selects’ or ‘rejects’; unflagged photos are in between, not good enough to be selected, not bad enough to be rejected. A keystroke then allows you to permanently delete all photos flagged as rejects. Filtering by flag type lets you see only the photos you’ve decided as worthy selects. Quickly scanning through your shoot and pressing ‘P’ for selects (pick) and ‘X’ for rejects makes a first-pass cull and select easy.

The star rating system gives you a bit more control over how you rate the photos. The flag system has three levels (selected, rejected, and neither), whereas you can rate a photo from 0 stars to 5, six levels. How you use the star system to filter your photos is up to you, and the stars may have different significance to different photographers.

For example, unstarred photos may be those you plan to cull, one-star photos are those you don’t want to delete, two-star photos are those you process, three-star photos are good enough to upload to your online photo gallery, four-star photos are candidates for your folio, and five-star photos are the very best of your photos – the ones you show clients when you only have ten minutes.

The star system gives you a much finer scale of a photo’s worth to you, but it means a lot more consideration needs to be given to each photo to evaluate its level. This will probably add a lot of time to your post-processing, which may be a problem if you need to get the photos out fast. Mixing flags and stars might be a good solution, where you use flags to do a quick refinement before processing, and you then star rate the photos after processing for your later reference.

My personal practice takes the following route: I mark all photos to be deleted with a black flag; all photos to be processed score one star, and the best photos (typically ones to be emailed to the client as a preview for the whole job) get two stars. The very best photos of a shoot score three stars and photos which I want to put in my folio score four stars. I very rarely mark a photo with five stars; those are photos I consider among the best of my career.

24

The Cull and Select

Which Photos to Cull? These days there are lots of reasons not to cull at all, the most significant being that storage is so cheap. You may have tens of thousands of photos, but when you can easily expand your storage by adding more inexpensive hard drives, why would you need to delete anything?

Even apparently useless duds – accidental shots, highly over- or underexposed photos, pictures with people blinking, severe motion blur, or failed experiments – can end up being useful!

• Shooting in RAW affords a huge latitude for processing, so you might be able to salvage poorly exposed photos.

• New photographers can learn a lot from looking at the metadata of poor photos, as that can tell you what you did wrong and help you do better next time.

• If one or two photos of a burst are no good, you may still be able to use them in a composite. The baby may be crying in one family group photo, but the father blinked when the baby was smiling. Merging two or more dud photos can result in a great photo.

• A creative experiment or an accidental photo may look like a dud on the back of the camera, but some creative processing can bring an interesting photo out of it.

The Cull and Select

25

• Test photos taken early in a shoot can sometimes be the best, especially in portrait shoots, as the subject doesn’t think these shots will be used, and is not worrying about their pose or expression.

For these and other reasons, I usually prefer to be very generous when deciding which photos I delete. Photos I usually delete are:

• So far from the correct exposure they can’t be salvaged.

• A series of essentially identical shots from a burst shoot where I’ll keep one or two and delete the rest.

• Missed focus or significant blur, provided they don’t have any other artistic merit.

• Exposure and lighting tests that aren’t otherwise interesting or useful.

Why be Selective? One of my pet peeves is photographers who upload every photo they take to a shared gallery. Invariably, this is the new photographer who doesn’t have the time or inclination to sort through their work before they show it. It’s very frustrating paging through a gallery with hundreds of photos, most of them near identical copies of the one before. Your audience doesn’t want to see ten nearly identical photos, they just want to see the best of those ten. They will quickly grow frustrated, skip through your album, miss looking longer at the better photos, and might just give up and move on without seeing much of the shoot.

On top of this, showing every photo you take means that all of the not-so-good photos are there for all to see, and you risk being perceived as a less-skilled photographer.

Culling and selecting a shoot before you share it with others will make you look like a better photographer. Your audience will be more impressed with your work, and they’ll be more likely to have the patience to look through all of the photos. Sure, there’s more work in selecting and processing images than there is in just uploading the whole lot, sight unseen. But if you’re serious about photography you can’t stop halfway.

Deciding which photos from a shoot to select can be very difficult, and quite daunting if you have a shoot with hundreds of photos to choose from. The very first decision you need to make is what the photos will be used for. The kind of shoot you did will help inform you how to choose the best photos (see example at right).

Once you understand how the kind of shoot affects the approach you’ll need when selecting the photos, you need to start separating the wheat from the chaff. It’s a good idea to quickly run through the whole shoot first, without selecting and rejecting right away. This will remind you what shots you obtained, and prepare your mind for selecting, so that when you’re deep in reviewing the shoot you’ll have an idea what photos are coming up. You don’t want to have eight great photos selected out of the ten your client wants when you’re only a quarter of the way through the shoot. At this stage, you might also flag or star any exceptional photos that jump out at you as truly great shots or absolute duds.

Which Photos to Select? A party with friends, where you took photos of people you know having fun.

You’ll probably want to share most of the photos you took with your friends, but not spend a lot of time processing them.

Photos taken on a walk through a national park.

You might want to select a representative collection of photos to show off the park, including a few great photos that came out really well.

A product shoot for a client with a very specific look in mind.

Follow the brief, and select the best two or three photos for each ‘look’ the client requested.

An online project on a particular topic.

Although you may only upload one photo as your entry to the project, some of the work in progress photos or rejected ideas might make for a good blog post about the project.

A personal portrait session with a family member.

Choose the photos which best show your subject as you know them, and maybe let your subject choose some of their favourites as well.

A professional portrait session for a client with specific uses for the photos in mind for the images.

Similarly to a product shoot, select only the best photos for each look or use the client is after, but make sure to give them enough variety to choose from.

The Cull and Select

26

AFTER

BEFORE

Imagine you have a shoot of 200 photos, and you’re aiming to find the best 20 to show others: a ten percent ‘hit ratio’. You need to get rid of nine out of ten photos to end up with the ones you like the best, or that meet the goals of your shoot. So how do you tell that one good photo from the other nine?

When you were scanning through the shoot, you may have noticed that the photos were clustered naturally into groups. You might have taken a batch of photos at one location before moving elsewhere, or you may have taken a set of shots of a product with one lighting setup before changing to another. Using these clusters as kind of a mental chunk can help break down the daunting task of selecting from a massive shoot into choosing from more manageable groups of photos. Look at first only within that group of photos and pick which you think are the best one or few images, then move on to the next group.

After you’ve been through the whole shoot, working with smaller clusters of photos within it, you’ll probably find that you’ve narrowed down the photos a lot, perhaps to 10–30% of the total. If you need to further refine the selection, it’s a bit more straightforward now, as you already have the best few of each look or variation within the shoot. Cast your eye across the remaining photos and see if there are any photos that are redundant, obviously not as good as the others, or doubled up in terms of different looks, and de-select these photos.

By now you should be left with a much smaller set of photos. If you need to refine further, you have to make some tougher decisions. You probably like all of the remaining photos, otherwise they wouldn’t have survived the selection process thus far. It’s time to be ruthless with your selections and separate the good from the great. Which photos best represent the concepts you wish to show? Which portraits

show the subject at their best or show aspects of their personality better than others? Which product shots make the best impression with the greatest impact?

Using star ratings can be helpful at this stage, as you can mark the obviously superior photos with a higher rating to make sure they stand out above the rest, leaving you to eliminate the last few photos that aren’t up to the same standard. Culling the shoot to the very best photos will make you look like a better photographer, and impress your audience more.

Obviously, you don’t have to be as ruthless in your cull for photos from a birthday party or similar event, but even reducing the number of photos by half will save you processing and uploading time, and may make it easier for friends who don’t have the inclination to go through a couple of hundred photos, when one hundred would tell the story of the party just as well.

A Process of Refinement

The Cull and Select

Lightroom has a number of tools to assist with the selection process, including the Grid, Compare and Survey views. Other dedicated RAW processing and image viewing applications have similar tools. These can help greatly with the process of refining your photos to the best from the shoot.

Sometimes it can be truly difficult to narrow down a shortlist of your favourite photos to a much smaller number. You may not have a choice, however, if you need to submit just one

photo to a competition, or you’ve decided that a smaller number is best for showing your work. How do you resolve this dilemma? Here are a few suggestions:

Sleep on it.Put aside your selecting for a day or two and come back to it. Taking a break from thinking about it can bring a fresh perspective.

Ask a friend.Find out which photos they prefer and ask them why. Even if you don’t take their advice, another opinion can help you solidify yours, even if it’s to defend a photo they didn’t like.

Flip a coin.Tell yourself that you’ll let a coin decide. If you get a pang when you have to reject the losing photo, then it’s probably actually the one you prefer.

Flip the photos.A trick that painters and illustrators often use is to look at their work in a mirror. This can break the problem of familiarity that comes from looking at a work too intently for too long, and sometimes errors you couldn’t see before will jump out at you. Flip your photos in editing software, and see if one is stronger than the others.

Just pick one!If two photos are so similar to each other that you can’t decide, then it doesn’t matter which you choose; just pick one and move on.

Selecting is like any other skill: the more you do it, the better you get. Over time you may find that you make it through your selecting faster, and have less trouble choosing between good photos. Listen to the feedback you get on your selects (were there too many photos? too few?), and go back to look at whole shoots from a few months ago to see if you still agree with the selections you made. In time, it will become a much less painful exercise.

Difficult Selects

Practice!

AFTERBEFORE

28

The Cull and Select

BEFORE AFTER

WHAT is PROCessiNg?

From the very first photograph ever taken,

there has always had to be a process to take

the information stored in the light-sensitive

medium and convert it into an output which

can be viewed. In the case of film, processing

typically consists of immersing it in a series

of chemical baths, and then projecting

light through the developed negative onto

light-sensitive paper. In the case of digital,

processing requires interpretation of the raw

measured electrical levels of the sensor and

converting that into pixels of varying colours

in an image file. These are the absolute

minimum requirements to be able to look at a

photograph.

Within this process of creating an image from

raw light, there is great creative potential. In

the darkroom, photographers can make huge

differences to the resulting photograph by

using different chemicals, filters on the enlarger

when making a print, using their hands or

masks to cast shadows on the paper when

printing, and many other techniques.

Today’s digital photographers are granted

amazingly capable and flexible processing

software that’s both easy to use and doesn’t

require as much time, expense, or skill as

was needed in the darkroom. Additionally,

processing software lets a photographer alter

and tweak their photo in ways that darkroom

users once couldn’t have even imagined.

Film photographers moving to digital

processing may recognise the names given to

some of the controls in processing software

as having originated in the darkroom; for

example, dodge and burn, cross-process,

crop, and vignette. Adobe’s RAW-processing

application is even called Lightroom, a play on

the word ‘darkroom’.

CC BY 2.0 – User: dok1

At this point, let’s clarify a distinction in terminology. When producing a finished piece of photographic art, there’s almost no limit to what can be done to a digital image. The power of modern computing and software puts into the hands of photographers tools that have redefined what photography means. Digital composites of several photos, painting-like digital brushes, computer-generated imagery, and many other creative tools can render the act of capturing a photograph but a step in the creative process.

There is no distinct line when a photo becomes a digital painting created on the computer rather than in the camera. Elements from dozens of photos may be assembled to create an image that looks like a photograph, but was never seen by a camera. However, this is not what most people mean when they talk about ‘processing’ a photo. This kind of work is commonly referred to as ‘photo manipulation’.

On the other hand, many photographers will do some degree of photo manipulation on their images to improve them. They might clone out a car from a landscape, or remove a skin blemish from a portrait. Tools to do this kind of basic photo manipulation or retouching are available in most processing applications.

Photo Nuts and Post focuses on the processing end of this spectrum, rather than the photo-manipulation end. I’m not making a value judgement about whether photo manipulation or retouching are valid tools for photographers or not, I simply need to limit discussion to the scope of this book. Whereas typically a photographer would only go to the effort of extensive photo manipulation on a very few images, Post is about helping you to improve all of your photos through processing. There are many excellent books on photo manipulation out there for those interested in the myriad possibilities.

Processing vs Photo Manipulation

31

What is Processing?

While we’re on the topic, you may have encountered the common belief that an image which has been manipulated is somehow less worthy than one which has not. Photographers frequently take pride in stating that their photo was “straight from camera, no photoshopping”, referring to the powerful photo-editing software of Adobe Photoshop. This stigma can even go as far as some viewers commenting that a photo might look ‘over-saturated’, ‘photoshopped’ or that some other minor tweak to the photo makes it less deserving of praise.

I admit that I’m not immune to this myself. I strive to create an image in-camera that’s as close as possible to the final product I want, and this is a good goal to have, for reasons we’ll come back to later. This is especially true of remarkable-looking photos, with special effects, creative lighting, or of rare events or unusually beautiful scenes. I am proud when I’m able to capture something amazing without needing to significantly add to the photo in post-processing.

When it comes down to the final photo, however, isn’t it how the image makes a viewer feel that matters? We don’t criticise a painter who tweaks the lighting in their artwork, or moves around a tree or two to improve the composition. As we’ve already discussed, every single photo has to be processed to some extent in order to be viewed. Why should anyone begrudge the photographer some control over the process, so that the image looks how they intended it should? If you feel cheated that what you see in the photo isn’t the same as what the photographer saw through the viewfinder before they pressed the shutter release, perhaps the problem is with your expectations rather than the photographer’s work.

By the same token, don’t be hesitant or afraid to process any or all of your own photos in whatever way you feel they need to make the images you want. Photoshop, Lightroom, HDR (high dynamic range) tools, Instagram, or any other photography application are just tools to allow you to realise your photographic artistic vision. No carpenter would hesitate to use a bandsaw just because others are proud that they made a chair using only a handsaw. Use the tools you need to get the job done, and know that the critics are upset only because you created something in a way they don’t prefer.

The Stigma of ‘Photoshopping’

32

What is Processing?

What is Processing?

Ultimately, everything involved in obtaining the correct exposure comes down to the three values of the exposure triangle: aperture, shutter and ISO. In a beautiful instance of symmetry at the other end of the process, your photos end up comprising three further variables: Red, Green and Blue.

Every pixel in a digital photo file is defined by the values of the RGB triplet. By describing each value of red, green and blue, the colour and intensity of each pixel is defined. In the case of 24-bit images – the vast majority of images which are the ultimate product of digital photography – each value can have one of 256 values, and therefore each pixel can be one of 16,777,216 colours. A typical digital photo will consist of millions of pixels, or megapixels.

All processing – every slider you move, every effect you apply, every spot you clone – is simply changing the RGB values of the pixels in the image.

Since we’re only ever changing three values for each pixel, the key to successfully processing your image is to work out how to change the pixels, and which pixels to change.

There are only two types of changes you can make to pixels. If you change all three values of a pixel by the same amount, you’re changing its brightness. If you change the RGB values independently of each other, then you’re changing its hue and/or saturation. Many changes are made to the whole photo, changing the values of every single pixel; for example, exposure, white balance and saturation.

You mightn’t always want to change the value of every pixel in the photo by the same amount. To make changes to some pixels and not others, you must select the pixels you wish to change.

Given the simplicity of the fundamental changes that you are making to the photo, it may seem surprising how many controls and options you have in processing. When you add the 16 million possible pixel colours in 24 bits to the millions of pixels in an image, you begin to see that there is actually an astonishingly wide range of possibilities.

Just for a fun mental exercise, if we consider the number of possible pixel values in a 24-bit 10Mp image, we discover that there’s practically an infinite number of possible photos. It’s incredible that such a simple system of three variables can describe such a staggeringly huge number of images, and yet they can be so easily transformed via processing. That’s the power of the digital format.

Just Three Values Changing the Values

34

What is Processing?

There are many tools and techniques for selecting pixels, but generally they can be categorised as carrying out one or more of the following tasks:

• Directly selecting regions of pixels with selection tools like a lasso or brush.

• Selecting all pixels of a certain brightness range.

• Selecting all pixels of a certain colour range.

• Selecting all pixels which meet specific selection criteria, such as neighbouring a pixel with a specific difference in brightness.

It is important to note that a selection doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing. Pixels can be partially selected; for example, when using a soft-edged brush to paint a selection mask. The pixels which have a percentage selection (a pixel may be 50% selected or 10% selected, for example) are affected by whatever change you make to the selection by that percentage amount.

Once a selection of pixels has been made, some apps have tools which allow you to refine your selection. For example, the selection criteria might be changed after the fact, the selection may be expanded or contracted, or additional selections could be added to the existing selection.

Selecting Pixels

In Lightroom the Adjustment Brush is used to mask an area of the photo to which a change will be applied.

In Photoshop, the Colour Range tool is used to select all pixels in the image in a defined range of a chosen colour.

35

What is Processing?

Once the pixels you want to edit are selected, you’re free to make the changes to them simply by changing the RGB values of the selected (and partially selected) pixels. It’s quite simple at a fundamental level, but the multitude of ways that pixels can be selected, and the control you have over their adjustments, gives you unlimited creativity.

Now that you understand the mechanics behind processing a photo, let’s look at some of the types of tools you can use to process your raw digital images.

In Photoshop a Magic Wand selection of the white background is modified with the Refine tool. This allows better control of the edge of the selected area.

The Graduated Filter in Lightroom applies a change to one side of a slice of the image with a hard or soft edge.

BEFORE AFTER

PROCessiNg TOOls

In both previous books in this series, we touched on the histogram as a useful tool in the field when checking your photos on the back of the camera. Where the histogram really comes into its own, however, is when you’re processing your photos. Not only does it give you useful feedback on the tonal and colour information in the photo, but you can also watch it while you are editing to see the effect of your changes.

Let’s first do a recap of what the histogram is, and what it can tell you about your photo.

The histogram is a representation of the distribution of tones in the photo. The columns represent the relative number of pixels in the photo, with the darkest pixels on the left and the brightest pixels on the right. In the case of the Lightroom histogram, colour information is also depicted in the histogram – a feature shared by many post-processing applications. The values to the far left are called shadows, the values to the far right are highlights, and those in the middle are mid-tones.

The distribution of the columns in the histogram tell you about the type of image as well. Photos with values mostly to the right are bright photos, possibly overexposed. The reverse is true for dark or underexposed photos, which appear to have the columns pushed to the left of the histogram. If values are mostly in the middle of the histogram, the photo is low contrast. If there’s an even distribution of values, with pixels in the highlights and shadows and possibly the mid-tones as well, the photo is high contrast.

If the histogram ends abruptly at either end, with a steep cliff of pixels rather than a slope down to zero, this indicates clipping. Clipping represents portions of the image in the highlights or shadows which are outside the range of the image file’s ability to show, and therefore detail in these areas is lost. It’s preferable to avoid clipping in your photos, as these will appear as areas of white or black with no detail.

The Histogram

37

Digital photographers have an extensive toolkit available to them to process their photos. Although the specific tools available may vary from one processing

application to another, they work in very similar ways. Processing tools all perform the same basic function – to change the values of groups of pixels – but do so

in different ways that allow the photographer to carefully control the final appearance of the photo. This chapter covers the most common types of processing

tools, and how they affect the final image.

AFTER

BEFORE

One of the videos included in your purchase of this eBook is a tutorial on using the histogram in processing which can be found here.

Most processing applications include a feature to highlight clipping within the photo by overlaying a colour on clipped pixels. The small triangles in the upper corners of the Lightroom histogram do this. Hovering your cursor over the right-hand triangle will overlay red on white clipped pixels, and the left-hand triangle shows blue where there are black clipped pixels. Even more useful is a similar feature in most cameras, which will highlight pixels that are clipped or in danger of being so, usually with a flashing colour over those areas. This feature will help you to correct a poorly exposed photo while on location, rather than fixing the problem in post-processing.

It’s crucial that the areas of your photo in which you want to show detail are not clipped. Adjusting the exposure settings in processing will correct this. Typically, the aim is to end up with a photo that has no clipping, but rather a controlled distribution of pixel values from almost black to almost white. This isn’t always the case, of course, and creative decisions always take priority over preserving detail throughout the image’s tonal range. Unless you have a specific reason not to, however, your photos will look better if they resemble this ‘ideal’ tonal distribution.

38

Processing Tools

A low contrast image, with pixels represented more or less equally from all brightnesses shows a wide flat histogram reflecting that.

A high contrast image has more pixels in the brighter and darker values, rather than the mid-tones, so the histogram shows a peak at each end.

Let’s first look at processing tools in your virtual kit which affect the image as a whole, and don’t require you to make selections or use special tools to control which pixels are affected.

Exposure Controls The basic means of adjusting the tonal distribution of your photo is with the exposure controls. These tools adjust the RGB values of the pixels together, changing only their brightness, and not the value of individual RGB components which would change their hue and saturation.

ExposureThe most basic exposure control is to simply use the Exposure slider, which is like changing the ISO setting after the fact. This slider will increase the exposure on all pixels by the same relative amount, just as if you had dialled up or down the ISO when you were taking the photo. This can easily correct poorly exposed photos, but runs the risk of blowing out highlights (pushing the high value pixels past the maximum value and causing clipping) and can increase the visible noise in the shadows.

Assuming you are editing a raw photo, you may be surprised how much you can change the exposure setting, or indeed any exposure controls, to bring out hidden detail in over- or underexposed photos.

Selective Exposure SlidersBeyond the basic exposure sliders, processing applications will have other controls which affect the exposure of the photo, but limit themselves to different parts of the tone curve. In the case of Lightroom, Recovery changes only the highlights, Fill changes the mid-tones, and Blacks affects the shadows. Brightness in Lightroom is similar to the Exposure slider, but it ‘pins’ the highlights so that adjusting it increases the brightness of the photo in a non-linear way, affecting the highlights less and preventing clipping. Contrast shifts the pixels in the mid-range towards each end of the histogram, creating a photo with a stronger contrast.

Global Adjustments

39

Processing Tools

AFTERBEFORE

The sliders of the Basic panel in Lightroom 3.x each affect the exposure values of various brightness pixels in the photo. These sliders have been changed in Lightroom 4 beta, but still work in a similar way.

CurvesAnother way to change the exposure and tonal distribution of a photo is using the Tone Curve (frequently referred to as Curves). This tool shows a graph rather than (or overlaid upon) the histogram. The user can change the shape of the line which runs through the graph from the bottom left to top right, thus changing the tonal distribution. Moving the line below its starting point darkens the pixels, and vice versa. The useful aspect of this tool is that the line, or curve, doesn’t have to be one simple curve. The right end of the

curve, affecting the highlights, could be pushed higher; the left end, which affects shadows, could be pulled down. This gives fine control over the exposure of the image by freely choosing the parts of the tonal range you wish to affect. Subtlety is the key here, as dramatic changes in the curve can cause sudden shifts in exposure which appear as banding in the photo, resulting in a very dirty or strangely alien look.

40

Processing Tools

The Curves tool in Photoshop works in a very similar way. In addition the user can select which colour channel they wish to affect, in order to make changes to the image’s colour balance.

Curves tools are a different way to effect the same changes as exposure sliders. The curve represents pixels of different brightness, dark to light from left to right. Moving the curve up or down increases or decreases the brightness of pixels in each area. Shown here are the different areas affected in the Lightroom Curves tool.

Processing software will also typically include a very helpful tool called a colour picker, often represented pictorially by an eye-dropper.

This powerful tool allows you to set the correct white balance with one click by using it on a part of the photo with a known neutral tone, such as white paper or a gray shirt. It’s important to be sure the target is true neutral; otherwise any subtle colour will skew the white balance. A useful addition to your camera bag is a gray card, which is a colour-correction and exposure-calibration tool that has the specific neutral tone of 18% gray.

A key tip for using the eye-dropper to pick a neutral colour to set the white balance: avoid noise or texture in the target of the picker, as an oddly coloured pixel may be used as the target and cause erratic results. For this reason, it’s best to set the eye-dropper to sample a wider group of pixels, or if this feature isn’t available, blur the target object before clicking on it.

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Daylight white balance – 7500K Photo taken under mixed artificial lighting.

FTungsten white balance – 2850K Photo taken under mixed artificial lighting.

Colour AdjustmentsWhite BalanceWhite balance is the subject of a whole chapter in Photo Nuts and Bolts, but we’ll cover it briefly here in order to examine how the change is effected in processing software. White balance can be conceptualised as a temperature scale, from warm yellowish colours at the low end of the Kelvin temperature scale to cool bluish colours at the high end of the scale.

True white balance, however, isn’t just a linear scale; it’s actually a curve through the colour space (see diagram). This curve is the temperature scale drawn through the relevant colours in the colour space’s gamut; thus temp or temperature is the more correct name for white balance.

Custom white balance – 3400K. Photo taken under mixed artificial lighting.

In addition, there’s a scale perpendicular to the temperature scale, on a green through magenta spectrum, and this scale is referred to as tint. A true white-balance adjustment therefore allows for adjustments on both of these scales, as is offered in Lightroom, Photoshop and many other processing tools.

Observing the examples here, it would appear obvious when to change the temperature scale, but when would you want to change the tint scale? On the simplest level, temp corrects for colour casts on the green-magenta spectrum. Practically speaking, you might find this useful when shooting by fluorescent lighting, which has a green cast; if you’re in dense foliage, which can give a green cast to the ambient light; if a portrait subject has heavily flushed or pink skin; or if you want to exaggerate the pinks and magentas in a sunset photo.

Look for temperature and tint adjustments where the white-balance controls are located. You’ll likely also find a choice of white-balance presets, similar to those in your camera.

Rather than a line, as the white balance sliders may imply, the temperature scale is actually a curve through the colour gamut. The tint scale intersects each temp value in a roughly perpendicular line.

Processing Tools

SaturationThe Saturation slider adjusts the colourfulness of the image. A highly saturated image has richer, more intense colours, and a low-saturation image has muted, subtle colours. A completely desaturated image contains no colour information at all. Desaturating an image is a quick way to convert it into a black-and-white image, but often isn’t the best, as we will discuss below.

Over-saturating an image can cause problems, as some colours (the values of the red, green, or blue of the pixels) can easily become clipped. This can result in posterisation, or sudden changes in the values of neighbouring pixels resulting in banding or blocking of colour within the image, which can cause garish regions of colour. This can be a problem when you want to increase the overall saturation of a photo that already has highly saturated parts, such as a single flower.

Adobe has an alternative adjustment they call Vibrance which seeks to help with this problem. Vibrance works similarly to brightness in that the most saturated pixels in the photo aren’t affected. Thus, when vibrance is increased, most pixels become more saturated, and those which already are or become highly saturated are not increased any further. Other processing applications often have similar tools.

Saturation also has a relationship with brightness, such that changing the saturation can have an effect on the perceived brightness of regions of a photo, usually making more saturated areas look darker. The reverse is also true: decreasing the exposure of the photo, or parts of it, may increase the apparent saturation. For this reason, it’s often best to tweak the saturation and brightness together.

B&W ConversionIt might seem that desaturating a photo is the way to make it black and white (sometimes called grayscale or shortened to b/w) but fortunately there’s more to it than that, which means more creative options. Black-and-white images (in the RGB colour space) are still described with the RGB triplet, but the values of all three are identical – it’s the differences in the values relative to each other that define the colour. So how does one turn, say: 143, 132, 102 into a grey colour? Does it become 143, 143, 143, making the brightness of the pixel determined by its red value? Or does it become 102, 102, 102, a darker grey based on the blue?

When doing a b/w conversion, as the process is called,we retain complete control over what influence the different colours have over the final brightness values of the pixels. In a similar way that coloured filters are used in film photography, changing the effects of different colours can have dramatic effects on black-and-white photos, especially those with strong saturated colours. Adjusting the blue slider can make a sky in your photo become deep grey or bright white, while the green slider has the same effect on grass and foliage. Care must be taken when adjusting the red and magenta sliders in portrait photos, as blemishes on your subjects’ skin can be brought into dramatic contrast.

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Processing Tools

Sliders control how much each colour affects the brightness of pixels when converting to b/w.

Over-saturating pushes the reds close to clipping and shows posterisation, appearing as a sharp transition.

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Processing Tools

The tools mentioned above all affect the whole photo, or broad groups of pixels based on their brightness or saturation. There are other tools that affect pixels far more specifically. Some of these tools are common to many processing applications, while others are unique features to specific applications. Let’s have a look at a few of the most common.

CroppingCropping is the simplest and easiest processing tool to understand. Cropping a photo is simply cutting off one or more edges of the photo, making the photo smaller and changing its composition. A crop can be locked so that it matches the photo’s original aspect ratio, or it can be unlocked, allowing the aspect ratio to change, such as for a square or panoramic crop of a photo.

The crop tool can also be rotated, allowing the composition to be tilted for creative effect or to correct a tilted photo. Doing so, however, requires the image to be made smaller on all four sides.

Cropping is a powerful compositional tool, and, for one so simple, it can have a dramatic effect on the photo; no other post-processing tool gives you as much control over composition. A careful crop can change the meaning of a photo by drawing attention to different elements, or imparting a different emotional context.

Selection & Specialist Tools

AFTERBEFORE

The Straighten Tool in Lightroom is a very helpful guide when levelling a crop, especially when the true horizon is hidden, as is the case here.

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Processing Tools

MaskingA selection mask is typically painted onto a photo with a brush tool, and can have a hard or soft edge, depending on the settings used for the brush. This is a quick but somewhat imprecise method to make a selection, which allows the photographer to directly control which part of the photo any changes made will affect.

Different applications have slightly varying controls to assist with masking, including changes to the brush to control the hardness of the edge and the density of the selection. Other controls can help prevent masks from selecting beyond high-contrast boundaries or into particular colours. A mask can also be refined by selectively erasing it with the brush.

Once selected, any changes made while the mask is active will only affect the masked areas. This can be a powerful tool to make subtle or dramatic changes to specific regions of a photo and multiple masks with different edits applied can completely transform an image. Great skill is required to make the most impressive masked edits.

The risks of editing a photo with masks can include:

• Sloppy selection causing unintended changes to parts of the photo.

• Extreme changes to the masked areas that lead to exposure or clipping problems which are made even more obvious when seen in the context of the rest of the photo.

• A lack of subtlety may distract the viewer from appreciating the photo as a whole, and draw their attention to the fact that it has been edited with too heavy a hand.

• Use of masked edits for the sake of novelty, because one can, rather than for the sake of the artistic message of the photo.

Direct SelectionDirect selection tools are more precise than brush masking tools, but typically take more effort and time to create. Most of these types of tools are typically found in photo-manipulation applications such as Adobe Photoshop, rather than RAW-processing software. This category of tools include marquee tools, selection lassos, magic wands,and path tools.

Multiple Adjustment Brush masks were used to create the unnatural look for this photo.

The Photoshop Path tool is best at creating clean-edged, highly complex selections..

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Processing Tools

Region SelectionOther tools offer unique selection methods, designed around specific concepts, to affect regions of the photo as determined by the specific tool. Tools such as these aren’t as common, and are often specific to a particular software package. The Lightroom neutral density filter is one, which mimics the effect of the graded neutral density filter a landscape photographer might mount on their camera. Nik Software’s Upoint technology is another, using control points to affect a circular area of the photo around a radius of the point.

Spot RemovalThe spot-removal tool, sometimes known as the clone or rubber stamp tool, is a kind of repair tool. The user selects a spot to fix with a variable-diameter brush, then either automatically or with a second click chooses a second point, which becomes the source for the area to be fixed. The pixels are copied, or used as a texture reference; the destination pixels to be fixed are replaced with these, and the result is blended. This tool is very useful for removing small defects in the photo such as sensor dirt, skin blemishes, or other unwanted features.

Care must be taken when choosing the source, so that it blends well with the destination. Spot fixes can become particularly obvious when the destination area is highly detailed, part of a repeating pattern, or on a high-contrast boundary. It is also inadvisable to use too large a destination or source selection, as the result may appear more visible.

Practice will improve your use of this tool, and it can greatly reduce dependence on photo-manipulation software.

Red-eye ReductionThis highly specialised tool is only used to correct the well-known problem of red eye seen in flash photos. Typically, a selection area is drawn around the subject’s eye and an algorithm attempts to identify and correct any red-eye problems. This can sometimes be a problem for the pattern-recognition software in the application, and the user may need to tweak the edit for the best result.

The iOS app ‘Snapseed’ makes use of a point selection tool, allowing for the adjustment of specific areas of a photo.

The highly specialised Red Eye Correction tool in Lightroom makes dealing with the familiar problem relatively straightforward.

The spot removal tool is used here to remove sensor dust.

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Noise Reduction and SharpeningThe digital noise generated by the camera sensor when the light levels are low has long been a problem for digital photographers. We talked about this issue in relation to the camera in Bolts and Shots, and saw that it’s always best to try to limit the noise in a photo before it is taken. However, modern digital cameras and modern processing software have become so sophisticated with noise-handling that it has become less of an issue in recent years.

Once the domain of stand-alone software packages, highly sophisticated and capable noise-reduction tools are now available in many RAW-processing packages.

The first step in dealing with sensor noise happens behind the scenes in the raw conversion process before you even see the photo in your editing program. Different RAW-processing engines have varying methods to extract detail and reduce noise, but ultimately the balance between noise reduction and image sharpness is a choice the photographer needs to decide for themselves.

Noise-reduction tools are usually paired with sharpening tools; noise reduction has the effect of smoothing the photo and reducing detail, which needs to be counteracted with sharpening. Conversely, increasing the sharpness of a noisy photo exaggerates the noise, so some noise filtering is usually required when sharpening.

The noise-reduction and sharpening tools generally also have a number of controllers and modifiers. These vary from application to application, so you should refer to your software’s manual for an explanation of how these controls affect the image.

A typical control you will see involves sliders for reducing luminance noise and colour (or chroma) noise. As you might guess, colour noise results from variations in the noise in the colour of the pixels, while luminance is noise in the brightness. Separating these controls is useful, as less noise reduction may be required for either of these types of noise, rather than adjusting both together.

Be wary of pushing the noise reduction too far. Over-correcting colour noise can cause a colour shift in small areas of the picture; for example, your subject’s green eyes may end up looking grey. Red colours are particularly vulnerable to over-correction. Pushing the luminance noise correction too far will cause a loss of detail in areas of fine contrast, such as hair or small patterns. As with everything, noise reduction is a balancing act, and depends on the particular photo and your personal preference for how you want the photo to look.

Just as balancing the noise reduction is important, so is the image sharpening. You may find yourself jumping between noise reduction and sharpening, tweaking first one then the other, then back again as you try to extract the most detail from a noisy photo. At one extreme, you may get a flat mushy image with no noise but little detail. At the other, you may have a crunchy shimmering photo with over-sharpened edges and exaggerated noise. As you become familiar with these controls, you’ll become more efficient and accurate at achieving the best compromise.

One thought to bear in mind is that any photo that you wish to share online will typically be reduced in size to make it easier to upload. Reducing the dimensions of a noisy photo will do a lot to hide the noise, as the random variations of several nearby pixels will become merged into an average of just one pixel in the reduced image. What may look like a horrible noisy mess when viewing a full-sized photo at 100% may be perfectly acceptable when viewed at 100% as a much smaller photo.

Left: As shot. Middle: With noise reduction. Right: Over-sharpened, exhibiting halo artifacts.

Processing Tools

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Processing Tools

Lens CorrectionIn both previous Nuts books, we discussed the shortcomings of lenses in terms of problems such as chromatic aberration, edge softness, and distortions of the image plane. Even though these flaws are hard to avoid given the laws of physics and the prohibitive cost of very high-quality lenses, computer power allows digital photographers to do much to address these problems.

As with noise correction, some software packages were originally developed solely to assist photographers to deal with lens issues, but more and more of this is becoming just one included feature of a RAW-processing application. Some of the major lens-correction options available in processing software include:

DistortionDistortion occurs when the lens can’t create a perfectly geometrically flat image at the image plane. This results in a bowing-in of the image, called pincushion distortion, or a bowing-out of an image, called barrel distortion. These distortions occur in a consistent and reliable way, and it is a straightforward correction, using something like a distortion slider. Correcting in one direction on the slider fixes pincushion, the other barrel.

Such correcting will straighten lines in the image which appear curved due to the distortion. It’s important to note that some amount of image data will be lost depending on the degree of distortion. Correcting for pincushion will push some pixels out of the photo’s edge. Correcting for barrel will pull in pixels, creating portions of the image at the edge with no data, which must then be cropped out.

Fisheye lenses are a special case. These lenses have a huge field of view, but do not have any kind of built-in correction for the moderate to severe barrel distortion they exhibit. Note that correcting for barrel distortion via optics in the lens has a similar effect to software correction, in that it pushes out the edge of the image to keep straight lines straight. That means that a 16mm fisheye lens will have a significantly wider field of view than a 16mm corrected non-fisheye lens. This is a trade-off to get the fisheye’s super-wide field of view, and cannot be avoided.

Nonetheless, barrel distortion correction can still be performed on a fisheye lens in post-processing, albeit resulting in a drastically distorted image, with only a fraction of the field of view and image information of the original photo. You will be able to restore straight edges, but much of the photo will be off the edge of the image, and most of the pixels at the edges will be highly stretched and may show significant softness.

As with all corrective controls in processing tools, there’s no reason why you can’t use them beyond their design purpose for creative reasons. Cheating the lens distortion corrections can create a very different kind of image by exerting a particular impact on its emotion and meaning.

The extreme distortions created by a fisheye lens are corrected with the Distortion slider.

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Processing Tools

Perspective CorrectionPerspective correction is related to distortion correction in that geometric transformations are applied to the photo. While post hoc correcting for distortion changes the curvature of the image plane, perspective correction changes the tilt of the image plane.

When shooting a flat surface, such as the front of a building or a poster on a wall, the edges of that surface will only be parallel if you’re directly in front and centre. You need to tilt your camera up in order to see the whole front of a building; as the top edge of the building is further away, perspective causes the left and right edges to appear to converge and look smaller.

Perspective correction tilts the photo and virtually brings the top of the building closer so that the sides run parallel to each other. To do this, the top of the photo must be stretched. This causes image data to be lost off the sides of the image, and may result in a visible softening as the original pixels are stretched to cover more of the photo.

This correction only works for the plane in the photo being corrected. Anything outside this plane, such as nearby buildings, or lampposts between the photographer and building, will end up sloping outwards or inwards. Perspective correction also works for horizontal correction as well as vertical, as you would need if unable to stand directly in front of the building.

All geometric corrections – distortion and perspective – are best done in small measures. Too much correction can cause significant stretching of pixels, resulting in loss of detail and softness in parts of the image.

Perspective correction can make diverging/converging lines parallel at the expense of a loss of resolution and a tighter crop.

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Processing Tools

VignetteVignetting appears as an uneven distribution of light across the image, resulting in a darkening of the corners. This effect is most noticeable in old or inferior lenses, and is especially common in telephoto lenses. Camera accessories such as extension tubes, teleconverters, and sometimes filters can also cause or exaggerate this problem.

It should be noted that of all the problems with lenses, vignetting is an especially subjective one. Many photographers like the look of a vignette, and it can be used effectively as a means of directing the eye into the centre of the photo. However, it’s best to control vignetting and make it a deliberate choice when processing a photo, rather than being subjected to it whether you want it or not. In other cases, a vignette can be detrimental to a photo, especially when it’s pronounced, or more visible due to the subject being evenly illuminated. Some other specialised types of photography, such as stitching images together to create a panorama, require even illumination across the frame for the best result.

Vignette correction simply increases the exposure for the corners of the photo, with decreasing effect towards the centre. A slider controls the intensity of this correction, so that the photographer has the option of dialling down the influence of the vignette or removing it entirely.

A vignette may be created in a photo, especially with telephoto lenses, and can be corrected in post-processing, as seen on the left. A vignette can also be added to a photo deliberately, as seen on the right. A subtle vignette is added to give a sense of intimacy.

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Processing Tools

Chromatic AberrationChromatic aberration (CA) is the result of the inability of a lens to bring all wavelengths of light to focus at the same point on the image plane. The result is the appearance of speared colours, or colour fringing on high-contrast edges, particularly in the corners of the photo. This problem is more common with older lenses than with modern lenses and their improved optical construction. Wide- and super-wide-angle lenses are more prone to CA. A chequer-tile pattern at the bottom of a fisheye photo is a worst-case scenario for exhibiting CA.

Like lens distortions, CA is a known physics principle, and occurs in predictable ways. Fortunately, the intensive calculations needed to correct this problem are all done by the software, with which you simply adjust a couple of sliders. To correct CA, find an obvious example in your photo, and zoom in to 100%. You have one or two sliders available to you, either just a red-cyan slider, or that and a yellow-blue slider. Tweak these until you see all colour fringes on the contrast boundary disappear.

One fantastic benefit of correcting for CA is an apparent improvement of image sharpness. Due to the lens being unable to focus all colours to the same spot, the light information for each part of the image is smeared over several pixels. Correcting for CA effectively focuses the affected parts of the image after the fact, improving image sharpness and the detail captured. If you ever find yourself with an image that looks unfocused at the edges, even if you can’t see any obvious CA, you might be able to eke out a bit more detail by playing with the CA sliders.

DefringingA problem sometimes encountered with digital camera sensors (more so with older technology) is that of fringing issues. Depending on the sensor technology and design, purple fringing can sometimes be apparent on very high contrast edges. A textbook example of this is sometimes seen in tree foliage against a bright cloudy sky. Also apparent is blooming, where a bright halo may extend from bright areas into dark areas at high contrast areas. Both of these faults are usually only visible at 100% zoom, and exhibit their effects on a pixel level.

The defringing tool can help correct fringing by desaturating and increasing the contrast of edges in the photo. Defringing may also be useful in eliminating any stubborn CA that can’t be removed completely via CA correction.

Automatic Correction from Lens ProfilesSome or all of the above corrections may be needed to give your photo the highest possible level of polish, and manually adjusting an image, or several, with these controls can quickly become tedious. Fortunately, some software manufacturers have recognised this problem and provided a solution.

Due to the fact that all these issues stem from the lens and camera in predictable ways, the corrections for them can be done precisely if the specific design of the lens and camera involved are known. Of course, every lens and camera design is different, even if they are consistent across that specific model. Using their own resources and expertise, some software companies have tested many different camera and lens combinations, and assessed them carefully to create a ‘lens profile’ for each model, which contains all the information needed to accurately correct with a single click a photo taken with that combination. This eliminates the guesswork for the photographer, and greatly speeds up the correction process.

Obviously the number of combinations of camera body and lens is staggering, but as time goes by more and more lens profiles are becoming available. Naturally the newest and most widely used combinations are being made available first, but the number is always increasing. If there isn’t a lens profile for your particular camera and lens combination, it’s possible to create one by performing the same tests as the software manufacturers, and creating a profile with a utility for your software. Check with your software provider to see if they have a lens-profile-generating utility available.

BEFORE AFTER

PROCessiNg WAlKTHROUgHs

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when first learning how to process photos is identifying what

could be improved in the photo, and how to do it. This may seem like an intimidating chicken-and-

egg problem – and a very steep learning curve – but it’s not nearly as difficult as it seems, for several

reasons:

• Processing is highly subjective. Some problems with photos are obvious and important to fix, but

most of the time, any changes you make in the processing are completely subjective and a matter

of personal taste. If you are happy with how the processed photo looks, then it is right.

• Processing is playing. There’s no one right way to process, and there’s no best order or technique

to do it. Play with the various sliders and see what the effects are. Push things to the limit and

see how it looks, bring it back the other way, then find the setting in between that you like best.

Experimentation and learning will be slow at first, but the process is great fun.

• Understand that you’ll get better. After a few months of practice, you may look back at your

first processed photos and see room for improvement. Processing RAW files is (typically) non-

destructive, so you can go back and tweak those photos again. You don’t have to be proficient

from day one. You’ll learn as you go, have fun doing it, and retain the option of fixing your mistakes

later. Life isn’t usually this easy when learning a skill.

Processing Walkthroughs

Now that we’ve covered the basic concepts behind processing, and the tools to edit your photos, where do you start? The best way is just to jump in with some examples, so next up is a series of walkthroughs of my processing for a few photos. I use my preferred processing application, Adobe Lightroom, and the processing choices I make are to my personal taste. Nonetheless, I keep it as general as possible, so that the examples can apply to your chosen application, and of course you’re free to process your photos to your own preference.

Videos I recorded while processing these examples are included in your purchase of this ebook. I highly recommend watching them as well as reading the examples, so that you can see the process ‘live’ and perhaps pick up details you may miss from just reading the walkthroughs.

Click here to go to the videos page.

You may not agree with how I process my photos. Perhaps you think the colours are over-saturated, or you might prefer a more artistic style, maybe even a black-and-white conversion.

Those are all options available to you, and you have huge latitude for experimentation, especially when processing RAW photos.

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BEFORE

ROCky COASTlINE

AFTER

1. When processing photos I like to start with the most obvious problems and correct them. A glaring problem, such as the tilted horizon you can see here, can distract you from more subtle issues while it’s staring you in the face, so my first step in processing this photo is to straighten the horizon. This is done via the Crop tool, and in Lightroom the handy Straighten Tool, which lets you draw a line to be defined as horizontal or vertical. Note, because of straightening, you will lose a small portion from the edges of the image.

Everyone comes away from a trip with many photos of sights seen, but it can be difficult to capture the scene as you remember seeing and feeling it. The photos usually end up looking a bit flat and dreary. In this walkthrough I show how to tweak such a photo to give it a bit more impact and feel more like you remember it.

Steps

2. After straightening, the biggest problem I see in the photo is that it has dull and muted colours. I prefer to use the Vibrance slider to pump up the colours significantly. Saturation is an alternative, but it risks clipping colour channels. Your editing program may have something similar to Vibrance.

3. Already the photo is much improved, as is the way when the most obvious problems are addressed first, but there’s still room for improvement by making small selective tweaks. I like skies in my photos to really pop, especially blue skies. A favourite technique of mine is to make blue skies richer by adjusting just the blue colours. The Colour Panel in Lightroom allows for this, and by simply reducing the luminance of blue in the photo, the sky colours become deeper, richer, and more saturated. Going too far, however, can look artificial, and potentially cause colour fringing at the borders of that colour.

4. At this stage I think the photo looks a little dark, so I lighten the mid-tones while preserving the highlights and shadows. In Lightroom this can be accomplished with the Fill slider, but it can also be done by adjusting the Tone Curve. For this photo I’ll just nudge the mid-tones a bit brighter.

Processing Walkthroughs

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5. I’m satisfied now with the overall tone of the photo, but it lacks oomph. A look at the histogram shows a slow fall off towards the left, indicating that there aren’t many pixels in the shadows. Increasing the Blacks slider will darken the shadows and increase the contrast of the overall photo, making the photo pop more. Again, the Tone Curve can be used as an alternative.

6. This playing around with the whole image’s tonal distribution doesn’t separate out any parts of the photo that might need a different treatment. I like the overall tone of the image now, but I want to make the bushy hill above the horizon a bit lighter: too much of the detail is too far into the shadows. A local adjustment to the image tone is required; in Lightroom this is achieved with the Adjustment Brush. Using this tool to affect the Brightness of the selected areas lets me brighten just this part of the photo.

7. It’s at this stage that I usually zoom in to 100% to check the fine details. In particular, I’m looking for any obvious problems with noise, sharpness or other small-scale problems such as chromatic aberration. Having shot this photo at 160ISO, I don’t think there’s a problem with noise; with the aperture at f8 the lens was performing at its best, so aberrations aren’t an issue either. I think the photo could benefit from a little sharpening, as is often the case. This time, I decide only a small amount is needed, and apply that. I’m now happy with how the photo looks, and a comparison of the original and processed photo (see page 53) shows me a significant improvement.

Processing Walkthroughs

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56

BEFORE

AllEy PORTRAIT

AFTER

1. A first look at the photo doesn’t reveal any glaring issues that need to be fixed, so we can have fun playing around with creative processing. At the very least, however, I tweak the crop to better balance the composition, and use lens corrections to make sure all the vertical and horizontal lines are straight.

This portrait was taken on a job with a client who works with street kids and the homeless. She wanted a new series of portrait photos for use in her work and with her online presence. We found a great location in an alley, and took a few photos in this alcove. Given the gritty, high contrast nature of the location, I think this photo would be well suited to some creative processing, perhaps conversion to black and white.

Steps

2. A look at the histogram shows that the photo is underexposed, with the majority of pixels to the left of the histogram, and none in the highlights. I increase the exposure to fix this, which makes the photo a little too bright to my eyes, so I correct by reducing the brightness. Remember that this attempts to preserve the pixel values in the highlights, and affects the mid-tones, in this case reducing the overall brightness while keeping the contrast.

3. After testing how the photo looks with increased Vibrance,I decide that the photo would look best in black and white. Using the B&W panel I make a few small tweaks to the colour mixing to obtain a black-and-white image that I’m happy with.

4. I want to emphasise the gritty nature of the photo, so I push up the Contrast. This causes the shadows on the face to become too dark, so I compensate by increasing the Fill light and Exposure.

Processing Walkthroughs

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5. I’m pretty happy with the overall look of the photo now, but it’s obvious to me that there’s a lot of competition for the viewer’s attention. The highly detailed background is distracting from the main subject, the model. To help with this problem, I apply a fairly heavy creative Vignette. This darkens much of the background, and helps lead the eye into the centre of the composition.

6. To further draw attention to the subject, I use an Adjustment Brush to lighten her whole body. This helps separate her even more from the now-darkened background.

7. The background detail still presents too much competition for the subject, in my opinion, so I again use an Adjustment Brush, this time to reduce the Clarity, Contrast, and Brightness on the background. This gives me a separation between background and subject that I’m happy with.

The final photo is dramatically different from the original, but I like the result and think it suits both the context and the client’s needs.

Processing Walkthroughs

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59

BEFORE

HERON lANDING

AFTER

1. A quick assessment of the photo reveals that it needs a good Crop, as is so often the case. When processing older photos, I’m a bit more reluctant to crop as there are fewer pixels to work with, and cropping will limit the reproduction size of any prints. This photo can be significantly improved by a crop, however, so that’s what I’ll do. Cropping puts the bird near the intersection of the one-third lines, and banishes most of the distracting weeds to the lower left.

I took this photo a number of years ago with an older camera, the Sigma SD10. The main difference with the photos from this camera compared to my current equipment is that the resolution is lower, and the noise handling is significantly poorer. These issues will affect how I process the image.

Steps

2. The next obvious issue with the photo is that it is quite low contrast. Sometimes this is desirable, but I think this photo could be improved with higher contrast. Looking at the histogram shows that the majority of the pixels are clustered in the middle, with very little at either end. Increasing the Exposure and Blacks extends the exposure range to better fill the histogram, and increasing the Contrast slider distributes the tones better. The result is a punchier photo.

3. I like my photos to be colourful, and there’s not much colour in this image. Increasing the Vibrance slider helps, but going too far looks artificial and exaggerates the colour noise, so I find a happy medium.

4. I notice that the white balance is quite warm, and the water in particular looks a bit muddy. Adjusting the Temperature slider to cool off the white balance produces a nice blue for the water, and makes the whites of the bird look crisp and clean.

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5. Taking a closer look at the photo shows just how little resolution we’re working with, and also the quite significant noise values. Adjusting the Noise Reduction and Contrast sliders in the Detail panel helps a lot, but it’s never going to give the same results as a modern camera. A bonus to dealing with the noise is that the eye of the bird is now clearer and sharper.

Processing Walkthroughs

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BEFORE

PORTRAIT OF ANNIE

AFTER

1. The first thing I notice is that the right edge of the frame is quite busy and distracting. The shoot’s location was in the city by the river, and there were lots of people around, so it was hard to keep the shot simple and clear. Therefore, I’m going to Crop the photo to eliminate as many of the distractions as possible, and also to make sure that Annie is positioned well within the composition. The crop brings Annie closer, and eliminates distractions from the right, as well as getting rid of much of the distracting tree trunk.

This portrait of my friend and fashion designer Annie was taken on a shoot of some of her design work to add to her portfolio. The shoot was in the afternoon on an overcast day, so the light was nice and even, and the white balance was fairly cool.

Steps

2. The second obvious issue is the cool White Balance. As it is, the mood of the photo is colder and less friendly than I want, so I warm up the white balance, as well as tweaking the Vibrance. The result is a lovely warm glow, as if the photo had been taken during golden hour.

3. Once again, fixing the most obvious problems first results in a great improvement to the photo. From here comes the tweaking of smaller details to improve the photo. I think the Contrast could be increased a little to improve the impact of the photo, but since the deepest shadows are already quite dark, I’ll adjust the contrast slider, rather than my usual go-to method of increasing Blacks.

4. Increasing the contrast has made Annie’s face a bit too dark, so I use the Fill slider to brighten the mid-tones. This helps, but also lightens some of the shadows, requiring a tweak of the blacks after all.

Processing Walkthroughs

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5. I’m now happy with the overall look of the photo, so it’s time to zoom in and study the details. Given that this was a hand-held photo on an overcast day, the image could do with just a little of the Sharpening tool. Increasing the sharpness helps, but brings out the noise. This is dealt with by increasing the Noise Filtering, but that shows too much sharpening of the skin. Applying a Sharpening Mask to the sharpening has just the right effect of keeping the skin texture smooth, while sharpening the eyes and hair nicely.

6. Finally, I think the lighting has caused Annie’s eye to become slightly lost in the photo; I prefer to have the subject’s eyes bright enough to catch the attention of the viewer. I’m very careful whenever I adjust the brightness of just the eyes, as it is easy to overdo the effect for a very unnatural look. Using the Adjustment Brush, I selectively increase the Brightness and Contrast around the eyes, just enough to make them pop out of the photo a little more.

7. I think the photo is much improved on the original; however, there is still one distracting background element on the right I’d rather remove. Lightroom performed poorly for this task, so I export the photo as a high-resolution master and load this file into Photoshop. Using the selection and clone tools, I get rid of the distracting feature to end up with the finished photo.

Processing Walkthroughs

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BEFORE

BEACH SuNSET

AFTER

1. Once again, I first like to get a photo’s crop right; there’s an obvious horizon in this image, which makes straightening it easy.

For this example, I’ll show you how I might process a photo emphasising a creative processing style, rather than a more realistic one. Typically I prefer to process my photos so they are more contrasty and with greater saturation than a strictly ‘natural’ style, but in this case I want to take it even further.

When I took this photo, I already had an exaggerated creative look in mind, and I chose settings on the camera that would cause the waves breaking on the beach to be blurry and soft. To achieve this, I set the lens to its minimum aperture, allowing me to use a longer shutter speed to create the effect. A side effect of this is a huge depth of field, which unfortunately highlighted a significant problem with dirt on my sensor. I didn’t see the full extent of the problem until I viewed the photos on my computer screen once I’d returned home. I cleaned my sensor before my next shoot, but I liked this photo enough to keep it despite the sensor dirt. Hence, dealing with the sensor dirt on this photo became a post-processing issue.

A quick overall assessment of the photo also reveals a couple of issues to be aware of: the area around the sun is overexposed, and probably clipped, and the darkest areas of the pier are very dark. Care must be taken not to push either ends of the exposure any further, or detail may be lost in these areas.

Steps

2. My intention for this image is to create a hyper-real look to the image by over-saturating the colours. Using the Vibrance slider, I dramatically increase the colours by taking the slider almost to its limit. Going too far causes the blues in the water to become clipped, so I bring it just back from the extreme.

3. I feel that the overall brightness of the photo could be increased, so I adjust it with the Brightness slider. This gets the bottom half of the photo where I want it, but the sky is now too bright.

4. I use Lightroom’s Graduated Filter to adjust the brightness of just the sky. The same effect could have been achieved in the field with a graduated neutral density filter fitted to the camera, if I’d had one handy.

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5. I think the photo could be improved by increasing the Contrast slightly. There are already pixels at the extreme ends of the exposure values for this photo, so changing the blacks or exposure should be avoided. Using the contrast slider emphasises the contrast in the mid-tones without affecting the shadows or highlights too much.

6. At this point it’s apparent that the pier itself is too dark, especially the beam which has been affected by the graduated filter. Using an Adjustment Brush I selectively increase the brightness of the pier, especially the darkest parts, to reveal more detail in this area.

7. Zooming in to 100% reveals a small amount of noise. Having shot this at a low ISO, the noise is very subtle, but due to the subject including soft fluffy waves, it’s more visible than it might be otherwise. Also, I’ve pushed the exposure in some of the dark areas enough that the noise becomes more apparent there. Some moderate Noise Reduction paired with some masked Sharpening is a good combination for this photo.

Processing Walkthroughs

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8. While zoomed in, it becomes apparent that there’s some chromatic aberration visible on some of the high-contrast details near the corners. Using Lens Corrections compensates for this.

9. Finally, there’s the problem of the sensor dirt. When the issue is as significant as this, I find that Photoshop does a better job of cleaning up sensor dirt than using the Spot Removal tool in Lightroom, mostly for performance reasons. So for the last step, I export the photo at full resolution and use Photoshop’s Spot Healing Brush to clean up the image.

Processing Walkthroughs

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BEFORE AFTER

COmmON PROBlems AND sOlUTiONs

In processing there are really two main problems to worry about with exposure: clipping and noise. We’ve talked a bit about clipping already, but it’s such an important concept to understand that it’s worth explaining in a little more detail to make clear the implications.

We’re already familiar with the concept of noise when we think about ISO and the trade-off between sensitivity and noise, as well as applying noise reduction and sharpening across the whole photo. When processing, however, we can inadvertently cause noise to become more apparent in particular parts of the photo, rather than across the whole. So let’s revisit noise and clipping to discover these ramifications for processing.

ClippingImagine you’re a gardener for an eccentric millionaire, whose pride and joy is the hedge along the front of her property. The millionaire is also an avid climber, and loves the shape of the horizon as seen from the tops of mountains, looking out to the range. The millionaire brought back a photo of her latest conquest, and has instructed you to cut the hedge to exactly match the shape of the mountains on the horizon. You cut the hedge accordingly, with the highest point being the limit the local city council will allow.

As time goes by, the hedge grows and the shape of the horizon gets higher and higher. One day the council do an inspection, and tell you that the hedge is taller than the legal limit allowed. You’re forced to clip the tallest parts of the hedge, or face an immediate fine. Now the line of the

mountain range has been irrevocably damaged, and the shapes of the peaks of the tallest mountains represented in it have been lost. They’ve been ‘clipped’.

This analogy demonstrates what it means when the highlights in a bright photo are clipped. The photo sites on your camera’s sensor can only differentiate between a fixed number of brightness values, so if any one of them is filled to capacity, it cannot capture any more. A group of nearby pixels which become fully exposed, or saturated with light, will all report the same brightness: white. Even if there was a variation in the actual brightness in that part of the image, your camera won’t record it, because all those pixels are clipped, and will be recorded simply as white.

Exposure

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Having all those tools at your disposal gives you huge creative potential. You have the ability to make your photos take on a new life just by how you treat them

in processing. However often you may be required to salvage a photo that didn’t turn out how you wanted, that suffers from challenging conditions or an unseen

issue. Shooting in RAW and processing your photos gives you huge latitude for rescuing an otherwise problem image.

One of the videos included in your purchase of this eBook is a tutorial on processing a high contrast photo which can be found here.

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Common Problems and Solutions

Clipping doesn’t only occur when taking the photo – it can also be introduced in processing. If the brightest parts of the image are already very bright – towards the top end of the highlights – increasing the exposure of the photo in post can cause these areas to become clipped, and to fail to display the detail that was captured.

An overexposed photo of the sunset caused clipping in the highlights. Processing to attempt to bring out details in the highlights shows severe posterisation. Processing the photo as a high-key image, with no detail visible in the highlights, hides the posterisation and results in a perfectly acceptable image.

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Common Problems and Solutions

While clipping is sometimes considered a mortal sin of photography, it is important to remember that this isn’t always the case! Sometimes clipping is impossible to avoid – for example, the sun will always be clipped because it’s so bright. Sometimes clipping is desirable, such as when doing product photography against a pure white background for

printing on a white page. Sometimes it just isn’t important that parts of the photo are clipped; a portrait in a shadowy doorway against the bright outdoors may show a clipped background, but what matters is that the subject’s face is correctly exposed.

The key is detail. Is it important to the photo that detail be preserved in the highlights? If so, make sure you expose the photo to eliminate clipping. If not, set your exposure based on keeping the detail where you need it, and only worry about blown highlights after that.

If you have clipping in one of your photos, there’s not a great deal you can do. If highlights or shadows are clipped, then there’s no data in those areas which can show any detail. Clipped areas will all be the same value and will effectively appear as solid white or black. Changing the exposure will simply make those areas grey – a result that will look worse than leaving the pixels exposure values at the extreme. This is particularly unsightly on overexposed areas of skin.

Clipped photos are not always a bad thing. A clipped sun during sunset is unavoidable, and looks perfectly acceptable, as seen here. The clipping is clearly seen with the red clipping warning.

A product shot against white is processed so that the background is fully clipped. This allows the object to stand alone against a clean background.

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Common Problems and Solutions

Clipping becomes most obvious when the pixels near the clipped areas are close to the same exposure. Over-processing to try to recover detail in clipped areas can make the transition to clipped values abrupt and obvious. One strategy to save a clipped photo is to process it so that the clipped pixels are de-emphasised.

For example, a strong backlit portrait may show a clipped halo of hair around the subject’s head. You can process the photo so that the highlight tones are bright enough to ramp up smoothly to the brightest clipped values. The viewer expects these areas to be bright, so may not notice that the brightest pixels are clipped.

A similar strategy is to conceal the clipping as part of an effect, such as making the photo high key (photos that are very bright or mostly over exposed). High-key photos can look great with the right subject, and since everything in the photos is light and bright, the clipped areas won’t be as obvious. Not every photo will suit this treatment, though, and overusing this technique to hide technical flaws in the image won’t fool your audience for long.

By far the best way to cope with clipped photos is to avoid it happening in the first place by keeping a close eye on your exposure when shooting.

The subject’s hair is clearly clipped; however, the face is correctly exposed and shows full detail. There is no posterisation around the clipped highlights, so there’s no reason why this otherwise beautiful photo should be rejected.

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Common Problems and Solutions

NoiseWe all know that increasing the ISO will increase the amount of visible noise in the photo. As described in Photo Nuts and Bolts, ISO is just digital gain – essentially turning up the volume. When the gain is increased, the noise is also increased. The higher the gain, the greater the apparent noise across the whole image.

As mentioned earlier, unlike aperture and shutter speed, the ISO can be changed freely during the processing stage. It’s not labelled as such in processing software, as it’s achieved in a different way than in the camera, but the effective result is the same. Changing the exposure or brightness of the whole or part of the image increases the gain of the affected pixels, and also increases the noise visible in those pixels as a result.

Imagine you took a photo with the camera set to ISO400; the photo is underexposed by one stop, and there are some areas of deep shadow. Using your processing software, you increase the exposure of the whole image by one stop. The photo is now effectively an ISO800 photo, with a similar level of noise. Now imagine that you want to selectively brighten the darkest parts of the photo to reveal some more of the detail there. Using a selection or adjustment brush or similar tool, you increase the exposure of the darkest areas by about two stops. Those areas of the photo are now effectively ISO3200, and the noise visible there will look similar to that in an ISO3200 photo!

By increasing the exposure in the dark parts of the photo, you are increasing the value of both the signal (detail in the photo) and the noise. It may be that you are unable to reveal any detail in dark areas without also emphasising the noise to unacceptable levels.

Most processing software has tools to help reduce noise, and these can often do a fantastic job to improve the signal-to-noise ratio – revealing true details while minimising the visibility of noise. That said, you need to be aware of the issue of noise in processing and decide when shooting where it’s most important to capture detail – in the shadows or the highlights.

A photo shot at ISO400 in very dark conditions is underexposed. Increasing the exposure in post brings out some of the noise. Selectively increasing the exposure in the dark areas exaggerates the noise further.

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Common Problems and Solutions

CompositionCareful thought when composing a photo can maximise the impact, or better tell the story you’re trying to convey, but sometimes you’re unable to get exactly the composition you want, or you discover in processing that changing the composition can improve the photo. The composition of your photo can be changed quite significantly in processing by cropping the image.

Obviously, a crop can’t change the position of the camera, the arrangement of elements in the scene, or the shape and direction of lines as they were when photographed. However, it is quite amazing how significant an impact an appropriate crop can have on a photo.

As previously mentioned, any crop will be discarding some of the image, and a photo that might benefit from an aggressive crop could lose a substantial proportion of the original content. For example, a crop of a landscape-oriented composition into the largest possible portrait orientation on a typical DSLR removes 67% of the image. The more an image is cropped, the smaller it must be reproduced (printed or displayed on screen) without losing resolution. The freedom to crop in post-processing is one of the most important reasons to ensure taking high-resolution photos.

Tilted HorizonMost obviously, a tilted horizon or any photo taken where the camera is not level can be corrected by a rotational crop. Doing so will require that some of the image be lost in the cropping; how much will depend on how far you have to rotate the image to straighten it.

Of course, a perfectly straight image isn’t always desirable, so you don’t have to crop to straighten the photo if you don’t need to. Sometimes a tilted composition can even improve a photo that was taken with the horizon straight; in this case the crop tool can be used in reverse to achieve the effect. Once again, note that doing so will mean that some parts of the photo at the edges will be lost.

A dramatic crop focuses the attention on the bird. Changing the crop from landscape to portrait improves the composition. Straightening the horizon causes some of the edges of the photo to be lost.

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Common Problems and Solutions

Shifting the CompositionIn Photo Nuts and Shots we talked extensively about various compositional techniques to help communicate your message with your photo, and to create a pleasing image. Many of these techniques involved careful positioning of the subject in the photo in the camera. A great many of these can be done to varying degrees by changing the image’s crop in post-processing.

When cropping, you’re either changing the position of the image elements relative to the edge of the frame or eliminating them entirely. In this way you can change the balance of the photo, retrospectively use the rule of thirds, remove distractions at the edge of the frame, expand or move negative space, make an inward looking portrait look outwards or vice versa, or any number of other subtle or drastic changes.

The best way to demonstrate this is with some examples. The only difference between each of the following pairs of images is the cropping.

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Common Problems and Solutions

ColourWhite BalanceIf you’re shooting RAW, white balance (WB) is almost a non-issue; you can pick any white balance you like when processing. You could set the camera to completely the wrong WB setting when shooting, and correct it perfectly with no problems, although it’s usually best to set the WB where you think it looks best for the photo you want to create. So does that mean that WB is never going to present a problem when processing? Not exactly. There are a few special circumstances when you’ll need to be more careful when setting the white balance.

Accuracy NeededAccurate colour for photos can sometimes be very important. Perhaps you’re shooting clothing to be listed on eBay, or you want to create digital backups of a friend’s watercolour paintings. You want to be sure that the colours captured by the camera are as accurate as they can be. In these cases, be sure to include something in one of the photos under the lighting you use that is colour-neutral, or grey. Then once you’re processing the photo you use the eye-dropper tool, or similar, to sample the neutral colour and the software will then correct any white balance or colour-cast issues.

There are a couple of issues you need to be aware of when attempting this. Firstly, your neutral reference must be in the same lighting as your subject, or it will not accurately reflect any colour cast. For this reason it’s best to put your reference right next to the subject. Secondly, your colour picker may only sample a single pixel rather than an area. If there is any texture on your reference, or noise in the image from a high ISO setting, this could mislead the colour picker. For this reason I recommend taking the colour reference shot at the lowest ISO with the reference out of focus. If you need to take colour-accurate photos, you will find a white balance reference card, or grey card a very useful reference object.

Use of a grey card allows for an accurate white balance to be taken, correcting the warm mixed artificial/daylight light colour (top right) to a daylight white balance (bottom right).

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Common Problems and Solutions

Mixed Colour LightingSometimes you’ll find yourself shooting in situations where there are light sources of different colours; for example, rooms with mixed fluorescent and tungsten lights, indoors under tungsten light near a window with dusk outside, yellowish streetlights against a moonlit sky, or multicoloured advertising and business lighting in a busy city street. These many-coloured lights can make for an interesting photo, but they can often be a headache when trying to get a pleasing white balance.

If you need to control the white balance of the photo to get the look you’re after, you have a few choices with how you deal with such situations.

Pick a WB

You can simply choose a white balance for the part of the photo which you think is most important, get that right, and accept that the portions of the image illuminated by different-coloured lighting will be heavily coloured. This is often the best choice when shooting a portrait under mixed light.

You could also split the difference and choose a WB setting that isn’t perfect for any of the coloured light sources, but is an acceptable compromise between them.

Add Your Own Coloured Light

This option must be used when originally shooting the photo. To do this, move your subject out of the light from one of the light sources and then add your own artificial light – such as a flash – with a coloured gel that matches the colour of

the predominant light source. This is a particularly good choice for indoor mixed artificial lighting, especially if you can turn one of the light sources off. Then in post-processing, set the WB to match the colour of your artificial light, and your subject is correctly balanced.

The white balance for this photo was set to match the interior artificial light, rendering the dusk light outside a very cool colour.

Warm sunlight illuminated the background, but the subject was lit by a much cooler light in the shade. A warming gel was added to the flash used as the key light to compensate.

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Common Problems and Solutions

Use Selective Colour Correction in Post

In your processing software, pick a white balance as in the first option above, and then selectively correct the parts of the image illuminated with different-coloured lights. By using selection tools in your processing application, as described in an earlier chapter, you can then make WB changes only to those areas. Unfortunately my preferred program Lightroom currently doesn’t allow for the adjustment brush or other selective editing tools to alter the WB, instead only offering to change the colour – a less preferable alternative. Photoshop, however, can apply WB adjustments to any selection. When using the Photoshop option, be sure you are editing a 16-bit image, or you lose the benefits of shooting in RAW.

Golden Hour LandscapesThe light from the sun in the first and last hours of daylight – referred to as ‘golden hour’ – is much warmer than the light in the middle of the day. This can be problematic when trying to choose a WB to accurately represent the scene. Landscape photographers may encounter this issue when shooting a composition that involves a blue sky during golden hour. If the white balance is kept warm when processing, the blues of the sky can end up looking too muddy and desaturated as a result. Fortunately this can be dealt with in a similar method to the mixed lighting situations mentioned above, either by changing the colour values of blue pixels in the photo, or by selecting and editing the sky to cool the WB.

Creative Use of WBOf course, correcting the white balance of a photo isn’t the only purpose the WB adjustments are good for. You’re free to change either of the WB sliders in any way you like for artistic effect. As discussed in Photo Nuts and Shots, the use of colour in a photo can have a powerful impact on the message and meaning of the photo. Cooling or warming a photo in particular can change the mood of an image. Feel free to experiment!

Blue was added to the sky to prevent it from going a muddy yellow during the warm golden hour light.

The cool toned light in the shade was warmed significantly in post to create the effect of glowing golden hour light.

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Common Problems and Solutions

SaturationSaturation can be tricky to deal with in post-processing, because it’s often very subjective. New photographers are often accused of over-saturating their photos, creating a hyper-real look. A recent trend has been to desaturate photos to create a kind of retro effect, especially with smartphone camera apps such as Instagram. A related fad in the 1990s was the spot-colour effect, where the whole photo except for one object, such as a red rose, was desaturated to draw attention to that object.

How a photo is saturated or desaturated can have a significant impact on its mood and the message it conveys. Stronger saturation usually feels more lively, cheerful, and jubilant. Less-saturated photos can feel emotionally distant and melancholy. Combining a saturation treatment with a colour tint can emphasise the effect; a warm-tinted desaturated photo, for instance, will look very retro.

Whatever you choose to do with your photo’s saturation, some potential problems can arise which you may need to deal with.

Clipping and Posterisation

We discussed clipping extensively above in the context of the exposure of the image. Clipping can occur in the individual RGB values as well.

When we look at the histogram of the photo on an older camera or in many processing apps, we’re typically looking at the combined RGB values of each pixel, so in a sense the histogram is monochrome. In reality, the image is not monochrome, and that histogram won’t show some potential problems in the colours.

Imagine an intense burnt-orange colour, such as you might see on a rusty shipwreck lit by the midday sun. The brightness of the orange areas might be something like

80%, and be represented on the histogram in the upper mid-tones. The saturation on these colours, however, may be at 100%, and subtle differences in these colours may be hard to distinguish. The problem grows worse if you want to increase the saturation across the whole image, in which regions are already highly saturated. This can result in the most highly saturated parts of the photo becoming patchy and showing bands or sudden changes in colour values. This problem is called posterisation, and it can be very ugly and distracting.

This crop of a photo of Christmas lights on a tree is a challenge with bright, highly saturated colours. Posterisation is visible around the lights and on the brightest parts of the tree bark.

Image processed with Instagram.

Many modern processing tools and cameras are now capable of showing a full-colour histogram. This is achieved by either showing three smaller histograms, one for each of the RGB channels, or overlaying the histograms for each of the colour channels and colour-coding them in the histogram. Some cameras have this feature too, although it’s rarely as helpful as it might seem.

So what techniques can we use to limit the effect of posterisation? There are two opportunities to tackle this issue: when shooting and when processing.

Common Problems and Solutions

When Shooting

Firstly when shooting, as always, shoot in RAW. The amount of extra data captured and encoded by the camera will eliminate this problem in all but the most extreme colour situations. If you have the choice of using different colour gamuts when shooting, use the widest one available; for example use Adobe RGB rather than sRGB. A wider gamut means more colour values can be represented at the extremes.

Finally, if you are shooting with extreme colours in your shot that must be captured with maximum colour detail then expose for those colours. For example, if you are shooting a storefront at night with bright coloured neon signs, underexpose the photo to ensure that the sign isn’t overexposed, and the colour detail will be more accurately captured.

When Processing

Unlike the camera histogram, your processing software will accurately display the colour histograms for the image, if that feature is available. You should immediately be able to see if there are clusters of pixel values pushed towards the right of the histogram, which indicate any colour channels that could give you a problem. Keep an eye on any such pixels when processing, and try to ensure that your edits don’t force them to be clipped.

Applying saturation to the whole image will affect all of the pixels, including any that are at risk of being clipped. Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW users have access to the Vibrance slider, which is very helpful in these situations – this tool increases the saturation of pixels throughout the image but leaves those in the highlights relatively unchanged.

Most processing tools will allow you to affect the saturation of pixels in the image by colour. In this way, you can increase the saturation of blues throughout the image including the sky, while not changing the reds in a field of blooming poppies. Conversely, if the red in those poppies is dangerously close to being clipped and subtle colour variations are being blown, reducing the saturation and perhaps brightness of only the red pixels may bring those pixels back from the edge and reveal more detail in those areas.

Finally, selection tools can be used to define areas of the image where you can then make changes to the saturation. This allows you more creative control over saturation effects, so that you can deal specifically with problem areas without affecting the image as a whole.

An important caveat! The histogram displayed on your camera is generated from the JPEG preview rendered from the RAW data. How this preview is generated is determined by the image settings in your camera, and will not be a completely accurate representation of the true distribution of colour values in the photo. By default, most cameras render JPEG previews with enhanced contrast and saturation. Unfortunately this makes the RGB histogram display almost useless, especially if you want to avoid clipping colour channels. The over-saturated JPEG preview may have clipped colour channels, but the RAW data itself will contain far more image data, which may not be clipped at all! As such it is not recommended to use the camera’s histogram display to gauge colour channel clipping problems.

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Common Problems and Solutions

Lossy CompressionIf you are forced to work with a lossy image format, such as JPEG, you are severely limited with regards to how you can process the image due to having so much less image data to work with. On top of that issue, there is another problem: Many lossy image formats, JPEG in particular, will perform more poorly with some colour channels than others. In the case of JPEG, highly saturated red colours will show compression artefacts much sooner than anywhere else in the image. This effect is most visible at the boundaries of solid blocks of strong reds, and will become apparent even at relatively high-quality settings.

The only solution to this particular problem is to use very high-quality settings when saving the file. This is something to be aware of when preparing your photos for use online, a topic we will return to shortly.

Problem Colours and Sensor IssuesDue to the nature of digital photography, and specific issues related to the methods of camera sensor design, sometimes you’ll discover that it’s impossible to capture particular colours in a photo as they appear to your eye. This is a problem related to the limited gamut of the digital camera sensor and the RGB format.

The gamut of colours a camera can record and store is quite wide, and the majority of colours we see day-to-day are easily captured. It’s at the extreme edges of the gamut that you can run into trouble. Typically, even out-of-gamut colours won’t be visible as obvious flaws in the final photo: perhaps the grass isn’t quite as vividly green, maybe a ripe banana isn’t as yellow as you see it in person. But there are occasions where the photographed object won’t appear at all as you see it, or in extreme cases it’s impossible to avoid clipping the colour.

Personally, I’ve found that neon blues, such as those you see on tropical fish or certain flowers, give my cameras the greatest difficulty. Naturally this isn’t something I can clearly show by example, as the photos captured would need to be compared with how I saw the subject with my own eyes. You’ll have to take my word for it that the subjects shown in the photos to the right looked different to me at the time than they do to you here!

Heavy JPEG compression is particularly apparent in reds, with details disappearing into blocky artefacts.

To the eye, the sea star (above) and the flowers (left) were a vivid strong blue, rather than the purple-blue that was recorded by an older digital camera.

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Common Problems and Solutions

This problem is one that can vary from camera to camera, depending on the design of the sensor chip. My first DSLR, the Sigma SD10, was a particular culprit with this problem, possibly due to the nature of the Foveon chip used in its design. A similar problem can be introduced by the RAW processing engine used. Seen here is a comparison of photos of the same scene, taken on two different cameras

and processed in different RAW applications. The differences in the extreme colours of the building lights can be obviously seen.

What can be done about this? Unfortunately, nothing – it’s an inherent limitation of the current technology. As sensor designs improve, new file specifications are developed, and better display systems are conceived, we can expect

a widening of the gamut of colours which can be captured, recorded and displayed. If it is vital that you capture the precise colour of your subject accurately (for example capturing artworks or fabric samples), you may be forced to try shooting it with a range of different cameras with different sensor designs to see which does the best job. Even then, you’ll likely need to accept that no consumer digital camera can yet match the human eye for colour fidelity.

Sony, Adobe Camera RAW

The clipping observed in certain colours varies significantly across both cameras and RAW processing engines. All examples above were generated from unprocessed photos at the default values upon import.

Sony, RAW Photo Processor Canon, Lightroom 2003 Process Canon, Lightroom 2010 Process Canon, Lightroom 2012 Process

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Common Problems and Solutions

Spot CorrectionsEditing a photo to change the details in the image, rather than general adjustments to the colour and exposure, has until recently been the sole domain of image-manipulation programs such as Photoshop. In recent years, however, some of these features, such as Lightroom’s spot-removal tool, have been making their way into RAW-processing applications.

These tools are very useful for fixing small contained problems – blemishes on the skin, spots caused by dust on the sensor, a small stain on a smooth surface, or other similar infelicities. That such issues can be easily corrected in a RAW-processing application is a boon for a photographer’s workflow, if you consider the alternative of exporting the RAW file as a 16-bit TIFF file, opening that in an image-editing program, making the edits, then importing the edited file back into your RAW-processing program, and somehow indicating which is the original file and which is the edited version. Lightroom is capable of doing much of the file-handling automatically, but you’re still left with two versions of the original picture.

In addition to the awkwardness of this procedure, you pay a further price in that the RAW data must be rendered into the TIFF file. Even though the TIFF file can represent the full dynamic range of the original photo, modern RAW-processing applications are able to work directly with the RAW data to provide more accurate adjustments. This is particularly true when dealing with noise reduction and sharpening. If you need to send your photo to an image editor, it’s therefore wise to do this as your last step in processing.

The advantage of spot-removal tools in RAW-processing software is thus the reduced overhead in the processing workflow and the quality of operations that leverage the RAW data. Of course, spot-removal tools are useful only up to a point. More complicated or sophisticated image manipulation will necessarily require a program dedicated to this task. Going forward, however, it’s likely that we can expect RAW-processing software developers to continue to further enhance and upgrade the capabilities of image-editing tools within their applications.

I use the spot removal tool regularly to remove dirt or unsightly elements from within the photo (top) as well as cleaning up sensor dirt visible in the image (bottom).

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Common Problems and Solutions

Soft ImagesThe bane of the photographer is the soft image. Whether it be from camera shake, motion blur, or simply missed focus, there’s very little that can be done to recover lost image detail. The bottom line is that unless the parts of the image you want sharp are only slightly soft, you’re not going to be able to make them sharp enough for your liking.

Having said that, it may be worthwhile sharpening your image in your processing workflow. At first glance, you may be content with the sharpness of your photo, but usually a sharp photo can be enhanced with some sharpening. Details which may have been visible but subtle can be made more obvious.

An important point to note here is that sharpening will only have any effect on an image viewed at 100%, zoomed in to the actual size of the photo. The effect of image sharpening is generally subtle, and works on the pixel level. Viewing an image zoomed out to 50% means you’re seeing only a quarter of the detail in the photo, and very few photos can be sharpened enough to show four times the detail of the unsharpened image. As such, sharpening is only worthwhile if you intend to create a high-resolution print of the image, or you’re preparing a digital image at the size you intend for it to be viewed.

Sharpening can be applied at different stages for different reasons. The camera itself can sharpen the JPEG image generated as its output or the preview image created in-camera; this is controlled via the settings menu of your camera, and it’s important to note that this sharpening does not affect the RAW data whatsoever.

Creative sharpening is undertaken by the user when processing the photo. This can be applied to the whole image, or to selected areas for greater control. Again, this sharpening is only apparent when the photo is viewed at 100%. Output sharpening is applied in the final step of post-processing, when the image is being prepared for its ultimate use, after any image resizing in order to counteract the resultant softness. Creative and output sharpening can both be applied to the same image, although only the effect of the latter is visible on resized images.

Sharpening works by increasing the contrast between neighbouring pixels of different values, especially on already high-contrast boundaries. Various sliders control the effect, including its intensity and quality, as well as how much existing contrast is required before sharpening can be applied. In general, it’s wise to err on the side of subtlety when sharpening, especially in the output stage. Excessive sharpening can make an image look crunchy, with obvious sharpening artefacts.

Though subtle, good sharpening adds to the depth of a photo, and especially photographic prints.

The Smart Sharpen tool in Adobe Photoshop.

Sharpening can make subtle improvements to small details, like eyelashes.

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Common Problems and Solutions

Getting it ‘In Camera’Many of the most difficult processing problems can be avoided with a bit of forethought. With the amazing capabilities of modern cameras and processing software, it can be tempting to look at a photo that’s not quite right on the back of the camera and think, “I’ll just fix it in post.” While this may in fact work much of the time, it’s far better to get in the habit of taking the effort to get the photo looking as close to your vision as possible when you capture it.

Sometimes a photo can surprise you: you might be shooting in difficult lighting conditions, making the screen on the camera hard to see, concealing a problem you don’t see until you’re on the computer and it’s too late to re-shoot. Or perhaps the conditions are very straightforward, and getting your settings somewhere near right is good enough for the photo to look fine on camera, but when processing you realise that your editing latitude isn’t so great, and you’d have a better photo if you’d perfected the exposure. Other times you might have had a bright idea for a creative look in processing, but because you were lazy when shooting, that option isn’t available to you.

Earlier I mentioned photographers who proudly proclaim that their photos are ‘un-photoshopped’. While I don’t think this is necessarily something to be proud of, getting the shot you want as close as possible in-camera is a worthy goal, for the sake of processing. Having the most freedom for correction and creativity is about the latitude available to you. The changes you can make to a photo have their limits, as we’ve seen. If you can get your photo close before post stage, you have the widest possible latitude for editing. If you’re lazy and get it just close enough, you may find yourself butting up against the limits before you can achieve the look you want.

This philosophy is particularly important when you’re shooting in challenging conditions, or with complicated scenes or lighting schemes. If you don’t have much latitude when shooting, chances are you won’t gain any more latitude when processing. You have to try to shoot in the middle of that window, so that you have room enough to move in post.

Weddings are one event when ‘getting it in-camera’ is important. Key moments like the ring exchange or ‘kiss the bride’ are very quick and you need to be sure that you have captured it in the best way possible.

BEFORE AFTER

CReATiVe PROCessiNg

So, you’ve learned a lot about processing tools, how they work, and what they do to the pixels

in the image – but all that is irrelevant to the viewer. Unless they’re another photographer or an

art critic, they’re unlikely to scrutinise your photo and ask, “How did they do that?” or “I think

this photo needs more saturation.” You simply want the viewer confronted with your photo to

feel and think what you meant them to feel and think when you created it. How on earth do you

accomplish that with processing?

If you own Photo Nuts and Shots, now would be a good time to go back to the chapter on

‘Meaning and Message’ for a refresher about communicating with your photography, and how

you can tell a story, set the mood, and elicit emotions from the viewer of your photo.

As I’ve said all along in this book, processing is a crucial aspect of producing a photo, and that’s

just as true for creative aspects as it is for technical. While you’re shooting, it’s vital to be aware

of the creative processing tools you have at your disposal, so that you know what you can do to

the photo after it’s been captured.

You may hope to capture a true representation of the scene as you saw it,

and you’ll need to work with the file the camera creates to have it reflect

that subjective reality. Alternatively, you may have an image in mind that’s

significantly different from what you see before you, but because you

know what you can do with the photo later, you can shoot it with that

in mind, creating the best possible source material for the processing

techniques you’ll apply later.

BEFORE

AFTER

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Capturing RealityFurther to the first scenario mentioned above, in which the photographer wants to capture the scene as they saw it, some of you may be thinking, “The camera doesn’t lie, an accurate representation of a scene will require no processing.” To be blunt, this simply isn’t true, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, no camera is perfect, and every model is slightly different. A scientifically precise rendering of a scene will require steps to calibrate the camera and ensure that the algorithms that expose and record the light are accurate, and no errors or variations in each step of the process – from capturing to viewing – are introduced.

Secondly, and more importantly to most non-scientific photographers, is the human dimension. Perception is a highly personal, subjective and emotional thing. In addition, we’re biological organisms, not machines; our bodies function in a different way than a camera.

The human visual system is more than a biological camera (the eye) and processor (the brain). It’s a complex system of systems – a meta-system – that derives the conscious experience of perception unconsciously by committee and serves up to us what we believe is reality, but is in fact a very brief shorthand of the same. For example, when we watch the sun set, we may be aware that the sun is bright, and it’s hard to see into it, but unlike a camera, we don’t see the

entire world in silhouette, just because the sun is in our field of vision. The shadow details which we can also see are built up by the brain when we look directly at them, and our eyes adjust for the lower light. The whole scene is assembled piece by piece, and we perceive detail across a dynamic range far greater than our vision is capable of actually detecting all at once, and far greater still than a camera can detect in a single exposure.

Our experience of reality is greatly influenced by our emotional state. How we are feeling when we look at something, and how what we see makes us feel is a complex, subjective, and constantly changing experience. This should not be ignored when considering the ‘reality’ of a scene. To use the sunset example again: the subjective emotional experience of watching a sunset can be intense and affect not only our memory of the scene but our subjective experience of it. Imagine asking two photographers – one who has just been married and one who has just been divorced – to shoot and process a photo of the same sunset. You should not be surprised to see two very different images.

The experience of reality is inherently subjective and to ignore this fact is to miss a great opportunity when communicating with an audience through your photography. We’ll discuss this shortly.

Reality is very subjective. Even though the top photo is an accurate capture of the light in the scene, the processing of the bottom photo more accurately reflects the emotional impact of actually being there.

Creative Processing

AFTER

BEFORE

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Returning from our little side-trip, how do we process our photos to better communicate our message to our viewers? Well, to be able to elicit the emotional response we want in our viewers, we need to understand how we respond emotionally. If you’re taking the advice from Photo Nuts and Shots, you should already be looking at a broad range of other photographers’ work. When you do, take note of how these photos make you feel. Obviously the content of the image has a huge part to play in this, but the processing is important as well, however subtle it may seem.

Your photo is conveying a message, be it a simple or complicated one. And how you process the photo is a vital part of that message. Different processing can convey a completely different meaning with the same photo.

You might be reading this and thinking that it’s a lot of pretentious arty-farty talk – all you want to do is make your photos look good, like those awesome images you see on Flickr or Google+. Do you really need to be thinking about ‘meaning and message’ to do that? Well, no, not exactly. But when you do create an awesome photo, even though you may not be aware of it, you are communicating a meaning, even if that meaning is as simple as ‘This looks cool!’.

Look at an unprocessed photo next to one processed for maximum impact, and you’ll clearly see the difference. The changes made to the original aren’t random, and they don’t just follow optimal rules that apply to every photo. To best understand what makes each photo look its best, and thus how to process it, you’ll find it easier and more effective to be aware of what it is you’re communicating. Eventually,

Creative Processing

Communicating via Processing

What are you Trying to Communicate?

as you become familiar with the tools and techniques of processing, this will become a largely subconscious process, and you’ll know what a photo needs to make it ‘feel right’.Until then, and on the occasions where you need to think carefully about what you want to convey in a specific photo, it’s important to know how to process photos to better carry your message.

So what is your message?

You might not consider most of the photos you take to be extraordinarily significant – the family events, pet photos, outings with friends. The most important thing here is to be sure the photos are the best possible representation of how you remember that moment. Correcting technical faults, such as underexposure, is going to be your most pressing concern, so perhaps these kind of photos don’t pose much of a creative challenge.

However, other photos (or perhaps most, depending on the kind of photography you do) will warrant special attention. It is with these photos that you should slow down, have a longer look, and consider what it is you are trying to say, what it is you want your viewers to feel and think when they see them.

AFTERBEFORE

Making this image b/w and applying a vignette isolated the subject better and put her in her own world.

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Processing to CommunicateHaving said all that, it’s actually quite difficult to say, “This is how you process your photos to convey your message.” How you enhance a photo depends a great deal on the photo, and what you want it to convey and how you want your viewers to feel. Also, a lot of it is necessarily subjective and depends a great deal on that elusive matter of ‘feeling’. Perhaps more so even than capturing images, processing them is more an art than a science, and a real sense for how to create this art is something that comes over time and with experience.

Just as a starting point to get you thinking about creative processing, here are a few examples of some basic techniques to enhance the message and the mood of your photos through processing. You may disagree with my ideas, prefer a different way of processing, or think you could do a better job – if so, great! It means you’re thinking about creative processing, and have an idea of how you would go about it.

A sepia tone and strong vignette suits the retro styling of the model. High contrast and a dramatic colour treatment create a fashion magazine look.

Creative Processing

A cloudy sky is overexposed in the original photo, so processing to bring out the contrast and menacing feel of the sky on the day is appropriate when the subjects are carrying umbrellas.

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Use of partial desaturation again creates another interesting look – this time transporting the model to another era.

Harsh contrast and a colour shift give this photo a ‘cyber’ feel, appropriate to the computer game origin of the character.

Processing this photo with a high contrast b/w look completely alters its mood.

Desaturating this image but leaving a small amount of colour reduces the busyness of the background and helps to create a sweet romantic feeling.

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In an extreme example of ‘creative processing’, six photos are stitched into a panorama, processed to suit the subject, and the panorama is then warped to create a ‘little planet’ style image.

An exposure bracketed set of photos is taken of a high contrast scene, which is then merged into an HDR and processed for dramatic effect.

Creative Processing

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your Processing StyleJust as you should imitate other photographers’ work when learning how to shoot, so should you imitate as you learn processing. Find great examples of photos that you liked or brought out an emotion in you, and try to recreate that same feeling with your own work. Chances are that your early attempts will look derivative and unimaginative, but you have to get your mind around the techniques before you can expand upon and reinterpret your inspirations in order to develop your own style. There’s no shame in copying another’s style, as long as you keep some measure of humility about it. Every photographer has gone through the same process themselves, even the ones who inspire you.

Changing RealityWe’ve talked quite a bit already about the subjective nature of reality, and how we have to keep that fact in mind when we try to capture our reality in a photo. However, there’s no rule that says you must try to replicate any kind of reality at all. This should hardly come as a revelation, of course, especially when you look at the recent explosive popularity of retro-style processing, particularly with popular photo apps on smartphones.

Though it may seem superficially surprising, photography is an incredibly subjective art form. Even though we already understand that reality differs from person to person, there is

a lingering perception that photography is less subjective, less creative than other forms of art, such as painting. While one person’s artistic interpretation of reality in their photos may be controversial, it can be even more so for photos processed in such a way that the photographer had no intention of creating a realistic photo at all.

Photoshop stigma is one example of the resistance a photographer may encounter, but whenever you try to push your creative boundaries, even if it’s as simple as increasing the saturation on a landscape, you’ll find everyone has an opinion. My advice to photographers experimenting with creative processing of their photos: don’t take criticism too seriously, especially from the opinionated critic. The most important person you need to please is yourself, and although you may never be satisfied with your work, if you compromise your vision to satisfy others, you’re creatively doomed.

Creative Processing

This photo is processed to create an alternative cartoonish reality, added to by graphical elements.

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PresetsMany processing tools make available very helpful processing presets. A preset is a saved set of processing values that have been created and saved beforehand by another artist. The saved preset can then be imported into your editing application and applied to your own photo, changing it instantly and sometimes dramatically to match the look intended by the artist who created the preset.

Presets are very popular for a number of reasons:

• They let you create a cool look for your photos without understanding the process of doing it yourself.

• They can be applied very quickly to a large group of photos, allowing time poor photographers to quickly process a big shoot, and still achieve creative results.

• With the huge range of adjustments that can be made to photos and saved into a preset, the variety of looks that can be achieved via presets is endless.

• Very specific looks can be created, so much so that there are literally hundreds or thousands of presets that exist to replicate the look of many types of films in your digital photos.

However, there are some limitations to using presets to bear in mind:

• Adjustments by presets are mostly relative, changing the existing values of your photos up or down, and as such you must already have a reasonably correctly exposed photo.

• Not all presets will work with all kinds of photos. Applying a light and bright look to a high key photo may cause it to become strongly overexposed.

• Even though there are unlimited looks that can be achieved with presets, there are definite favourites and fads. You need to be careful to avoid making your photos look too clichéd, unless that’s the effect you want.

• Presets aren’t a magic wand that can fix any photo. Boring photos will probably still be boring with a preset. It is far better to choose a preset carefully and with thought as suits the photo, than to blindly slap them on every shot you take.

• The way presets are applied to your photo may cause problems depending on the order in which you edit the photo yourself. You may find that basic processing of the photo yourself before you apply the preset works better; or it may be the other way around. Experiment and see.

Using presets is a lot of fun, and they can open your eyes to new and creative ways of processing photos. However, it is far better to use them with a creative eye, than as a crutch to rescue a dull photo.

A range of presets is applied to the same processed base image (far left) for a huge range of creative alternative looks.

BEFORE AFTER

PROCessiNg As AN iNTeRmeDiATe sTeP

Photo processing is but one step in a complete process, naturally. Most of the time it’s relatively straightforward: you correct the exposure, tweak the colours,

maybe perform some selective adjustments, then export the photo. But sometimes you may need to take a more complicated multi-step procedure to reach the

final image you envision. In these cases, processing the photo is an intermediate step in a larger, more involved procedure to create the final product.

Some examples where processing an image is one step in a larger project to create an image include:

Bracket exposures to be blended into a high dynamic range (HDR) image.

A group of overlapping images which will be stitched together to create a panoramic photo.

A series of images that tell a story, and will be presented together as a sequence.

Photos of various elements which will be used to create a single image in a photo-manipulation tool such as Photoshop.

Many almost identical photos to be stacked or blended to build up the final image – for example photos of the night sky which can require many hours of exposures to collect enough light to show very faint objects.

ApproachIn cases where the processing step is only a part of the larger process, a different approach is required. You need to be aware of the specific requirements of the other steps and take those into account. For instance, it may be appropriate to perform creative processing on a series of photos to be stitched into a panorama, but there’s no point doing any processing on the series of photos to be merged into an HDR if the blending program only uses the RAW data and ignores any processing you may have done.

As such, it’s best to take the time to understand the full procedure your final image will require, so that you can do things in the correct order and with most efficiency without doing useless or potentially destructive work at the wrong step. Sometimes specific procedures can be difficult to understand, and problems which arise from mistakes may be hard to track down to their origin. Therefore, I recommend

that before you attempt to create any critical or complicated finished pieces from your source photos, practice on some simpler examples in order to fully understand and master the workflow.

A wise step in any new process is to create a backup of the original photos – or work on copies – so that in the worst-case scenario you can be sure that the original images are always available. In fact, as you become expert at the new complicated processes you may choose to return to your original photos and work through the whole process again to end up with a better result. I’ve found this to be the case myself – with the skills I’ve learned over the years and a better understanding of what creates the best end result, from time to time I’ve returned to the source files of my favourite early panoramas and generated a superior final image.

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Processing as an Intermediate Step

An exposure bracketed set of photos is taken of a sunset and manually combined in Adobe Photoshop to create a single image with detail in both the shadows and highlights.

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Workflow When working with a group of images intended to eventually become a different product, your workflow can become very complicated very quickly. In addition, the workflows for various processes can differ significantly from one other, and keeping track of which images are intended for what process can cause confusion – or worse, missed steps in the process. It’s vital to have a clear idea of the workflow for a given process, and to take steps to keep it organised.

For example, when I shoot the source images for a 360-degree panorama, I frequently take a group of three exposure-bracketed images at each position in order to blend into HDR to overcome the problem of a huge dynamic range, common in panoramic photography. I often end up with 24 photos to be used in the creation of one panorama. Here are some of the steps I take in this workflow, which stem from the problems I’ve discovered and my solutions for avoiding them.

Example 360-degree HDR workflow

1. To assist in keeping the groups of exposure-bracketed shots together, I group them using the Stack feature in Lightroom. This also allows me to use the batch-merge feature of LR Enfuse, my HDR plugin of choice.

2. The TIFF files generated by LR Enfuse are named for the first photo of the stack that comprised them, and are appended ‘hdr’. They’re then automatically re-imported back into Lightroom.

3. I mark these TIFF files with one star and filter the catalog to show only starred photos. This helps me to focus on the images I’m working with. The original RAW files are kept in case I should need them for any reason.

4. I choose one of the eight HDR-blended images which shows the most typical exposure range for the whole scene, and process that.

5. I sync the settings from this photo to all the other photos and check each one to make sure the synced settings are appropriate.

6. The processed TIFF files are then exported as maximum-resolution JPEG files for stitching into the panorama.

7. Once the final panorama image has been created, I delete the exported JPEG files. They’re no longer needed, and no specific process was done to them, so if I ever need them again for whatever reason, I can just re-export the TIFF files.

Processing as an Intermediate Step

When I first started creating HDR panoramas, I tried stitching the groups of exposure-bracketed images so as to end up with three panoramas – an overexposed one, an underexposed one, and a correctly exposed one. I then tried to blend them into the final HDR panorama. I quickly discovered two major problems: each panorama was stitched slightly differently and, as a result, the images

weren’t aligned well enough for blending. Also, blending from the RAW photos provided much more dynamic range information for the blend to use, and the result was significantly better than blending JPEG images. In this way, trial and error helped me to work out the ideal order for the process; over time I developed a workflow that best suited creating HDR panoramas, and the quality of the output improved.

A bit of forethought about file naming and directory structure can go a long way towards keeping everything organised. You may find yourself with many files, each at different stages in the process, all grouped together in your folders. Typically, any file which has been exported from Lightroom after processing will go into the relevant folder on my DERIV HDD. The exception to this is TIFF files or other high bit-rate files that are best processed in Lightroom – those files will be stored in the same master directory, and will be reimported into the day’s shoot. I distinguish these photos from the masters with a suffix on the file name. If I need to make them stand out even more, I’ll assign them a colour code so that the thumbnail in the catalog is immediately obvious. Other processing applications have similar or identical tools to help keep you organised.

Exported JPEG files that need further processing, or are an intermediate step in the whole process of creating the final output, will go into a subdirectory of that shoot on my DERIV HDD. If the files themselves don’t need extra processing, but are used to generate the final image, I’ll usually delete them afterwards. Always be careful when deleting files that make up part of your process. I recommend only deleting files which are not altered in your process; otherwise, you’ll have to redo work to them if you ever need to go through the process again.

Processing as an Intermediate Step

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A series of more than twenty night sky photos (a sample shown at right) is stacked to create a brighter, higher contrast, more detailed single image of the Milky Way.

BEFORE AFTER

THe OUTPUT PROCess

File SizeFile size is a concern mostly when you’re planning to put a photo on the internet, but it’s also something to think about when saving a larger version to your computer for your own viewing. Today, with faster internet connections more widely available, and the decreasing cost of storage in your computer, keeping file sizes small is nowhere near as important as it once was. This gives us the luxury of leaning towards higher-quality, larger-file-size images which allow our photos to look their best.

In the vast majority of cases, we’re talking about the JPEG format if we’re saving our images for anything but the most demanding of uses. Given current less restrictive limits on file size, we almost never need to use the highest levels of compression that JPEG allows. In fact, I usually save my photos, whatever their final use, at 80% quality – ‘high’ in the Photoshop save dialog. The exceptions to this are when the photo needs to be of the highest quality, when I will save it at 95% quality, or when economising on file size is essential, in which case I typically save at 60% quality.

Note that as you increase the quality setting in a JPEG file at the high end of the scale, the file size will rapidly become larger, typically without showing much improvement to the eye. A file may double in size from 90% to 100%, but you would be hard-pressed to discern the difference. At the

other end of the scale, highly compressed images rapidly lose image quality at the lowest settings, but file sizes aren’t significantly changed. Also note that some colours, and images featuring those colours, may display the ugly compression artefacts at higher quality settings than others – reds and high-contrast boundaries are particularly vulnerable to this. I find 80% quality to be the best of both worlds.

The Output Process

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So you’ve spent the last two hours (or two

minutes!) processing your photo, and your

masterpiece is complete. Now all the work

is done and you can sit back and enjoy the

fruits of your labour! Well, not quite.

Processing software is great for polishing

your photos, but not so great for viewing

them. If you want to show your photos to

anyone else, you’re going to have to dig them

out of the processing app. This last step is

called exporting, also referred to as ‘the

output process’.

So what’s the best way to export your photo?

That depends entirely on where and how you

intend to show it. How you prepare a photo

for printing is different from how you prepare

it for emailing to friends, and that’s different

again from uploading it to an online gallery.

In fact, it’s best to assess your output

process on a case-by-case basis, depending

on the specific requirements of the image’s

final destination.

Following are some of the main points to

keep in mind.

A great deal of control over the image is provided in the Adobe Photoshop Save for Web export dialogue. Compression settings and image size can be changed to create a suitably sized photo for upload.

Image DimensionsMatters start to become a bit more complicated when you need to decide on the size of the image itself in terms of its pixel dimensions. First of all, I’ll address one of the most common and frustrating misunderstandings I see concerning the output process: the concept of image resolution.

In the most basic sense, the resolution of an image refers to how much detail it shows. Digital cameras are advertised by how many megapixels (Mp) they are. If we’re to believe the advertising, the more megapixels you have, the better.

This isn’t the whole story, however. Putting aside the issues of camera and lens quality and process sharpening, the degree of detail actually visible in the photo when your audience views it depends on where and how they are looking at it. There’s absolutely no difference between a 2Mp camera and a 20Mp camera if you’re looking at the photo on Facebook.

I own a Canon 5D MkII, which has a 21Mp sensor, but in the vast majority of cases I never export my processed photos at this resolution. There simply isn’t the need for all that extra data where my photos will most often be seen. In fact, downsizing your high-resolution photos can subjectively increase their ‘quality’, due to the fact that many imaging artefacts such as lens faults and noise can be largely concealed at lower sizes. This is only possible with a higher-resolution source file, of course, so all other things being equal a higher-resolution-capable camera will give you more potential for a high-quality image up to the point where your budget limits you.

The Output Process

The Image Size dialogue in Adobe Photoshop lets you control the size of your image, with feedback on print sizes and a choice of resizing algorithms.

Just to clarify a point on terminology – as mentioned above, the word ‘resolution’ refers to how much detail an image contains. Common use is far more varied than this, and can lead to confusion. Throughout this book, when I talk about an image’s resolution, I’m usually referring to the image’s dimensions or the number of pixels in the file. A ‘high-resolution’ image might be 3872 x 2581 pixels and 10Mp in size, while a ‘low-resolution’ image might be 800 x 534 pixels and 0.4Mp in size.

What Dimensions to Use?An image will look its best when viewed at the same resolution (image dimensions) as it is saved, especially if it has been prepared that way by the photographer. In days gone by, the size you saved the image was the size it was viewed, but in recent years most websites and email clients have taken control of how images are displayed.

In order to enhance the viewer experience, images which you upload to the web are usually resized by the site upon which they are displayed to fit the user’s screen. Theoretically, this is a good idea – it means you don’t have to worry about the many different monitors and user preferences for display sizes in order for your image to be seen. However, the software these programs use to resize the images is a one-size-fits-all solution. Even worse, to save file size on the vast databases of images these services must store, the JPEG compression of uploaded photos is often very heavy, resulting in soft, mushy-looking photos. Facebook is a particularly notorious offender, and it’s no exaggeration to say that I’m dismayed at how poor my photos look on Facebook compared to other services.

Every service is different with regard to how they process your images for display, so it can be a frustrating experience to get your uploaded or emailed photos to look their best. So what can you do?

My personal solution has been to give up, to a certain extent. I prefer to use the professional image-hosting service SmugMug, as I believe their service best presents my photos for others to see. I won’t go into great detail, as I don’t want this to become an advertisement, but you can see for yourself how my images look by visiting my folio here: neilcreek.smugmug.com/Folio.

I upload 10Mp-sized versions of my photos to my SmugMug gallery, and they’re then prepared for display by generating a variety of different-sized versions to be displayed depending on the visitor’s preferences and display hardware. My watermark is also added to the photos at this stage. I then download the large preview size of photos I want to upload to other services, and let them do their worst with how they’re displayed. A photographer who has serious concerns about how their images are presented may export their images in many different sizes to match the default size of different services; this will give the best possible quality, but I find that too tedious a task.

The Output Process

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Among many other options, the Export dialogue in Lightroom can resize your images upon export for various uses.

So what should you do? My rule-of-thumb suggestion for putting your photos online would be to export your images at 2000 x 2000 pixels (as a maximum for the longest dimension) for whatever services you use, and let them resize.

For printing your photos to whatever size, it’s more straightforward: simply export at the maximum image size to guarantee your photo looks the best it possibly can at whatever size it’s printed.

SharpeningWe’ve talked about sharpening a number of times in this book, but this will be the last time. Previously I mentioned ‘output sharpening’ in passing, and it’s to this we now return.

Sharpening your photo during processing will maximise the detail you extract out of the master image, but downsizing an image inevitably causes it to look soft. This is a result of the algorithms used to shrink the image, and it’s mostly unavoidable; therefore, it’s almost always a good idea to apply sharpening upon export. All image-processing tools should have this option available. How much sharpening you apply at this stage is up to you, but if your photo is destined to end up online, I suggest sharpening a little more rather than a little less, so that as much detail as possible will be preserved when the image services process your photo again.

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Output sharpening applies a user-controlled level of sharpening on an exported image after resize to compensate for the softness introduced in that step. The sharpening on this low-resolution image is apparent here. The bottom image has had output sharpening applied. Images shown at 200%.

The Output Process

MetadataWe talked about metadata early in the book, and how it’s best applied to your files as you import them. The metadata applied then should travel with your image through all the processing stages, and still be preserved within the image as you export it. Along with whatever metadata you added will be included the ‘EXIF’ metadata. This contains information pertaining to the technical specifics of the photo, including what camera it was taken with, what the camera’s settings were, and a long list of other more-or-less interesting information.

As a photographer, this information is worth preserving in your photo for a number of reasons:

• Your name should be embedded within it, which both protects your photo from being stolen, to a certain extent, and also allows others to credit you and find you if they want to know more about your work. Due to the fact that this information remains with the photo from when you added it, you should be careful only to add information about yourself that you’re happy for the world to know. Your email address might be useful, but you may wish to keep your phone number and address private.

Most image programs allow the user to inspect embedded metadata, as seen here with ACDSee.

• You’ll be able to sort and search your exported files by these metadata, making it easy for you to keep your photo library organised.

• You should already know how valuable it is as a learning tool to be able to see the settings other photographers used to create photos of theirs that you like. By preserving the EXIF data in your photos, you give others the opportunity to learn from your experience. It’s good to give back a little.

The only arguments against including metadata are privacy concerns and reducing file size. If you’re smart and methodical about how you apply metadata, you’ll be in control of what information you include, so I don’t see privacy as an issue. As previously discussed, storage costs and data transfer speeds make file size concerns a thing of the past, at least for the tiny difference a little metadata makes. So my advice is include your metadata, and make your photos more useful.

The Output Process

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WatermarkingI briefly mentioned above that I watermark my photos. A watermark is an embedded graphic or text that is included in the image, either overlaid on the image itself, or displayed in a border. The use of watermarks is a hotly debated and ultimately personal decision for photographers.

Those that argue for them may say:

• Digital files are so easy to steal that watermarks are the only deterrent.

• Copyright law (at least in some countries) makes the very act of removing a watermark a crime, so the deterrent there is even greater.

• Even if a photo is used without permission or payment, a watermark will mean that at least the photographer is credited.

• The social nature of photos means that even if users don’t think they’re stealing your photo, sharing them widely is inevitable, and few users remember to credit a photographer.

• Watermarks can drive business to you, by letting those new to your work know who created it, with any luck spurring them to contact you.

• Some watermarks can be beautiful and add to the aesthetics of the photo.

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I choose to use a simple, easy-to-read watermark containing my website URL for both protection and promotion.

Those who argue against may say:

• My photos aren’t good enough to be stolen anyway, so why bother?

• Most watermarks are ugly and ruin an otherwise beautiful photo.

• If people are going to steal your work anyway, they’re not likely to let a watermark stop them, and no one will take legal action for the illegal use of one photo.

• I don’t mind my work being distributed outside of my control – the more people who see and enjoy my work the better.

• Watermarks are a pain to add to a photo, and just create an unnecessary additional step in processing.

Most processing tools should have the ability to add a watermark, text, or image, to your photo as you export it if you choose to do so. For the reasons mentioned above, I choose to watermark my photos. It’s entirely up to you to decide which of the arguments I describe are most persuasive, and whether you watermark your photos or not. Either way, you’ll probably get people offering their advice to you about your choice.

The Output Process

Other Output DestinationsMost photographers only need to output their photos for uploading or printing, but there are many other potential destinations for your photos. Here are a few examples from my own experience, and how I prepare photos for these uses.

Delivery to ClientsMost of my paid photo shoots are portrait photos to be delivered on CD as digital files for the client’s various uses. Unless I know that the client specifically wants to make very large prints of the photos, I deliver 10Mp-resolution images, an ample size for almost all uses. The client is free to request the full-resolution 21Mp files if they need them.

EbooksObviously, I write ebooks, and a lot of my photos are used to illustrate them. Working with my designer (my wife, as it happens!), I prepare the files so that they are of sufficient resolution to look good in the final PDF file, but not so large that they consume too many resources. The final size of the embedded photos is determined by Adobe Acrobat when the PDF is created, and is determined by the quality settings and the size of the image on the page.

Printed BooksSome clients, especially for wedding shoots, order printed book albums from me. The output file sent to the printers is also a PDF in this case, but the images embedded are of much higher resolution to take advantage of high resolution printing. Typically the 10Mp size is ideal for this use but some images, such as a cover or a double page spread, will be larger in size.

Art PrintsFine art prints for mounting and display are the most demanding application for your photos. They’ll be seen up close at a large size, so every detail – and every fault – will be visible. For photos such as these, I usually spend a little more time processing to ensure the image is as polished as it can be. Any faults or problems are properly addressed, and particular attention is paid to image sharpness. These photos should be exported at the maximum size possible, into a high bit-rate format such as TIFF, and with the widest colour gamut possible, so I export with the aRGB colour space if the photo was shot that way.

Choose a printer with experience in this process, and if possible, be present when the image is prepared and printed, so that you can ensure it looks how you want it to. Listen to the advice the printer gives you, as they have probably printed more fine art photos than you have seen in person yourself.

The Output Process

Processing digital photos is an important step in creating the best possible images. Face it, a photo gets processed by the camera, the computer and even the medium via which it is eventually viewed. Isn’t it better if you take control of it?

Understanding how to best process a photo to show the result you want gives you an incredibly powerful tool for communicating and to inspire others.

As a beginner photographer, processing RAW photos will give you much more room for mistakes, and still create great images. The learning feedback you will get from processing your photos will quickly enhance your skill in using a camera.

No matter your skill level, processing will make for better looking photos and make you a better photographer. If you haven’t processed your photos before, or struggle with the techniques, stick at it and you will soon see the results.

Now that this series has taught you about how the camera works, how to be a better photographer and how to take your photos to the next level with processing, what comes next?

Gear. Having more or better gear won’t make you a better photographer, but it may help you take better photos, or take photos that aren’t possible

with the gear you already own. But how do you know what piece of gear to buy next, and which is the best choice for you?

The fourth and final book in the series, Photo Nuts and Gear will tell you what you need to know. With chapters on knowing when it’s time to upgrade, what is the right piece of equipment for you, how to read reviews and detailed discussion on what each piece of gear does, the book will probably end up saving you a great deal of money, and open up whole new horizons of photography for you.

Thanks for reading!

Conclusion

BEFORE AFTER

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Happy snapping! Darren Rowse

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