I’ve debated writing a post like this because I wasn’t sure anyone would find it interesting. I asked on Twitter and a few people said they’d like to see it, so here it is. I wanted to run through my process from the initial capture to the final, finished product, ready for print.
As you’ll see below, the image on the left is straight out of the camera and the image on the right is how its ended up once I’ve edited it. The photo on the left is nice enough but what I’ve actually taken is a photo that is perfect for editing. It isn’t too bright, it isn’t too dark and there’s also plenty of latitude in those highlights, which is perfect because I like to make the skies in my photos as dramatic as possible. One thing I always make sure I do is take a photo that’s ready for editing.
Next up you can see how it looks when imported into Lightroom. Lightroom is a God-send for photographers. Before Lightroom, I used to take an age to edit, organise and finish off my photos solely in Photoshop. Now half of that job is done automatically for me by using the Library to organise all the RAW and JPEG files and Presets to apply commonly used settings to a bunch of photos at once. I mainly shoot in Manual mode, so Lightroom makes it easy to edit a whole shoot’s worth of photos with one click.
The following settings were used once I’d fiddled and played around with Lightroom’s extensive Develop module.
And this is how the photo looks with the above settings applied. I’ve also applied a small Graduated Filter to the skies but only a slight one. The adjustments I’ve made to the blue channel in the Luminance slider mean that the blues of the sky darken down quite a lot anyway. Be careful when using the Luminance slider though because it’s really easy to introduce banding that isn’t immediately obvious until you’re viewing the 100% preview.
Once I was happy with the photo in Lightroom it’s time to move into Photoshop. As good as Lightroom is, I always do a little editing in Photoshop. For one, I’m not keen on Lightroom’s output sharpening. I’d rather sharpen slightly in Photoshop and then do a final sharpen when the photo’s ready to be printed. For another, Photoshop’s Layer Masks make short work of editing certain parts of a photo whilst not affecting others.
As you’ll see from below, I’ve meddled with the photo quite a lot. The entire edit below is contained in one action. I’ve been using Photoshop for years now and realised that I always carried out the exact same edits to a photo before doing custom bits and bobs. The action below adds a touch of sharpening and lifts the colours and tones adding a little ‘pop’ to the photo.
After the action has run, I then set about creating 3 Curves layers with Layer Masks to ensure that each Curves layer affects only a small area of tones in the photo. I find this method works well because you can always go back and readjust if you change your mind. With the photo now looking more dramatic and with those bright happy parts subdued, I’m finished.
All that’s left now is to save the image. When I get around to printing it, I’ll open it back up in Photoshop and sharpen it according to the size of the print I’m making.
So, what do you think? Would you have done anything differently? How does your approach differ from mine?
by Matt
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