rl Creative

Hy all How are you doing? Is every­thing going well? Well, I sup­pose the answer is yes, yes and once more YES

This week wasn’t so rich with updates, but still, I didn’t for­get about my blog As you all may have already noticed, now there are 2 authors on this blog, me and a good friend of mine — Dmitri who will write more about pho­tog­ra­phy And he already cre­ated his first post about Essen­tials of Macro Pho­tog­ra­phy

Well, I thought a bit and decided that I really have to write about how I enhance my pho­tos after tak­ing them Yeah…I’ll open some secrets and show you a real face of how pho­tos look like when they are not photo manip­u­lated

The most impor­tant part is photo shoot­ing. Even that Pho­to­shop gives you a lot of pos­si­bil­i­ties and even crappy pic­tures may look good enough after some clever improve­ments, you still have to shoot well enough, oth­er­wise there will be noth­ing to enhance

I don’t care what cam­era do you use of what set­tings do you use, try to get the best photo for post pro­cess­ing. We have two dif­fer­ent options here:

• to shoot pic­tures in RAW mode with a tripod
• to shoot pic­tures in RAW mode with­out a tripod

As you’ve noticed, RAW is a must-used func­tion if your cam­era allow you to shoot in it. Why is it so impor­tant? Well, in future reviews I’ll def­i­nitely write some arti­cle about RAW shoot­ing vs. JPEG shoot­ing. Now I would like to con­cen­trate on post-processing. So, just believe me and use RAW instead of JPEG. And don’t claim, that RAW files are so big, and you have to process in your PC what takes a lot of time + then your PC has to be very pow­er­ful. Well, yeah…I agree with you But if you want your pic­tures to be in high qual­ity and good-looking, for­get about all that small things USE RAW !!!

Why do we need a tri­pod? This is also a good topic for another arti­cle. For this arti­cle we need it, cause we need 3 pic­tures with var­i­ous expo­sure (-1, 0, +1). You’re totally right – we will use them to enhance Dynamic Range of our photos.

If you don’t have a tri­pod, that’s not a prob­lem If you are not try­ing to shoot at night or late evening or early morn­ing, then shoot­ing from hands is good enough. I made my shot from hands, cause I for­got my tri­pod at home. That day was a very moody weather. We went fish­ing but caught noth­ing. So, I took out my cam­era to catch some good weather moments I made about 20 shots but a lot of them were crappy. So, I chose the best one and now we will start work­ing on it. In my tuto­r­ial we will be using Adobe Light­room, cause this is awe­some soft­ware for a Pho­tog­ra­phers + Adobe Pho­to­shop and I don’t want to start explain­ing why

Orig­i­nal File

As you see, the pic­ture def­i­nitely needs some adjust­ment. It is so poor and gray. I don’t see emo­tions here And for me Land­scape should have emo­tions. Oth­er­wise, it’s not a land­scape — just a pop-art.

3 pic­tures with var­i­ous exposure

So, now the photo is uploaded. We need 3 pic­tures with var­i­ous expo­sures. In Light­room after load­ing all pic­tures go to Develop zone, here we start working.

I always cre­ate a Vir­tual copy, so there always remains an orig­i­nal file. Right-click on a thumb­nail in the bot­tom of the screen and take Cre­ate Vir­tual Copy — that’s in the mid­dle of pop-up menu. Let’s call itВ  – 0-exp file

Now to make the process a bit quicker we will take a pre­set (Left menu in Develop zone) — Direct Pos­i­tive. This pre­set makes a very cool adjust­ments in sec­onds but that’s not enough.

After it is done we cre­ate 2 Vir­tual copes of adjusted pic­ture and tweak their basic set­tings to make the:

• first photo darker and empha­size the sky – it will be “-1-exposure”
• sec­ond photo lighter and empha­size the ground and For­rest in the back­ground – it will be “+1-exposure”

So now we have 3 pictures:

• 0-exposure with Direct Pos­i­tive applied to it
• –1-exposure with adjusted basic set­tings to make pic­ture darker
• +1-exposure with adjusted basic set­tings to make pic­ture lighter

Export them as TIF files, or PSD or DNG but NOT JPEG.

Blend­ing in Photoshop

Now open all 3 files in PS. Drag light and dark pic­tures on top of orig­i­nal, so all the 3 pic­tures would be in one file. And place the lay­ers as it is shown on the pic­ture below.

0-exposure layer should be at the bot­tom –1-exposure after it and +1-exposure on top of all. We will start with our sec­ond layer that is darker than oth­ers. Click on the eye of the top layer to hide it, so we could work with the lay­ers below it. We will use the sec­ond layer to enhance sky details. First of all, cre­ate a mask for this layer Layer — Layer Mask — Hide all.

Now take a reg­u­lar brush, click on sec­ond layer mask and define a white color for the brush. Now begin paint­ing with it over the sky, reveal­ing the sec­ond layer and mak­ing sky darker. By play­ing with the mask I also empha­size dark col­ors on the ground to make them deeper. Now reveal the top layer and cre­ate the mask for it using Layer — Layer Mask — Hide all. And again, take white brush and paint over those spots, that you need to high­light

I gen­er­ally use it over the all over the ground + on sky high­lights to empha­size them more. Now look at the lay­ers with masks I got. I made them big­ger so it would be bet­ter to observe.

Com­pare before and after

And now we can com­pare the orig­i­nal photo and the one I got just by blend­ing 3 pic­tures into one.

Nice effect, isn’t it? So, as you see, it’s not so hard. I made this photo in less than 5 min­utes. Ok, let’s spend another 5 min­utes and play a bit with color, con­trast adjust­ments and so on…

Adjust­ments

Using Curves we add a bit of contrast.

Adding Lev­els we make the pic­ture a bit brighter.

Now the fun part begins I would like to add more green color and empha­size yel­low, because on our orig­i­nal pic­ture there was no green and no yel­low, there was one big mess of gray. It’s all because of light and because Cam­era matrix just can’t see all the col­ors So, a bit of adjustments…

And now, to add more yel­low I will use selec­tive color. Actu­ally, I began using it just some months ago and I blame myself that I didn’t use it before.

And one more com­pare before and after

Awe­some effect, isn’t it? I think it’s enough for today…next time I’ll write a bit about other tips and tricks I use to enhance my land­scape shots.

By the way, you can down­load a psd file to look at it more deeply. Sorry for Rapid­Share. If you need, I can put it in dif­fer­ent locations.

Take Care,

Roland

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