Sunday, April 29, 2012

How I Process my Pictures

A few readers asked how I post process my pictures, and I was hesitant to answer.  Not because I want to keep it to myself, but because it varies, depending on the kind of picture.  I process people pictures slightly differently than say, flower pictures or landscape pictures.  You may be disappointed how simple it is, though.

I don't shoot commercial products, so absolute colour accuracy is not important to me.  I strive to make the pictures with the looks that I like.  This may include adding vignetting, boosting colour saturation and/or contrast.  We will look at one example for this post, but if there is interest, I will expand on the topic to cover people pictures, which, unfortunately, is not my strong topic.

I like pictures with more saturated colours, except portraits, which i try to make the colour as real looking as possible, except those I want to leave alone to preserve the atmosphere/ambiance.  I know saturated colours are not accurate, but I like it.  Same reason so many people who love Velvia slide film.

All my pictures are shot in RAW.  Not exceptions.  If I need a quick jpeg, I would shoot RAW+JPEG.

Before and after.  Note the crop marks
  
The screen above shows the picture before and after adjustment. You can see that the original looks pretty dull with the defaults.  I accidentally shot this series of pictures in 16:9 aspect ratio.  It's not a format I am comfortable with.  So I cropped to a more comfy 3:2 ratio.  What adjustment did I do?  Below shows all the adjustments I did in Lightroom. I only touched two area other than cropping: Basic and Tone Curve. 


That's it.  This is pretty much all the adjustments I normally do.  Depending on the picture, I may increase or decrease the above settings to fit my taste.  One other area I may touch is the vignetting section, but I don't do that often.  Below is the final picture, which I used in this blog post (picture is at the bottom): 

Finished picture.  Pretty, eh?


8 comments:

  1. Hi

    have you tried this method?

    http://cjeastwd.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/photomatix-4-tonemapping-and-raw.html

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    1. Thanks obakesan. I remember reading about this in your blog. I will consider it.

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    2. No wurries :-) also worth seeing how much (if any) your camera benefits from a wee bit of hue adjustment. My Panasonic seems to be regular about its needs in the Cyan to blue and the Red to Yellow department too

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  2. Thanks for the info.
    Your PP is rather similar to mine, though I use PS. I go a little lighter on the saturation, though :-)
    What I do, especially for portraits, is use the sharpen brush- sometimes exclusivey - on the face contours, emphasizing the DOF by that way. I also sometimes switch into CMYK color mode, and check that yellow is 5-20% stronger than magenta, cyan 30-50% of magenta.

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    1. Some pictures do not turn out well if pushed too hard. I am lazy and only want to do the mimimal amount of work if possible :)

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  3. Just and interesting tidbit: On the sony NEX cameras shooting a raw 16:9 image collects the entire image. Therefore it should be possible to access the 3:2 on lightroom, bibble and rawtherapee extract the 3:2 by default. It might be worth futzing with the metadata to foce lightroom to give you the entire image.

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    1. I normally don't shoot 16:9 so it's not a big deal for me. I don't have any good pictures worth the trouble of recovering the rest of the pixel. But thanks for the information. I did not know the RAW file was actually in 3:2 format.

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  4. linky:
    http://www.lightroomforums.net/showthread.php?15514-Problem-with-RAW-size-and-lightroom

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