Editing

Editing steps and Study Task 7/8

The following page will be a short walk through of some of the post processing steps I go through when editing my images.

The before and after example image can be seen below. 

Before 

After 

RAW File Processing

RAW Processing

After selecting the images to be edited in bridge I then open up the RAW file in Photoshop's RAW converter.

I make necessary changes to exposure, boost the contrast and increase or decrease shadows and highlights when appropriate. In some of the images I go further and create a gradient across the sky so I can make further changes to adjust the exposure of only the sky if it needs to be darkened or lightened, depending whether I used gradient filters on camera or not for the image. Once I'm happy with these basic changes I then open the image up in Photoshop. I make sure the images open are set to 300DPI and and 16bit for optimum quality while editing.

Dust and Scratches

Dust and Scratches

This particular image contained a lot of dust and scratches, especially noticeable in the sky, it took several different steps to remove them all.

The first step I did was to use Photoshop's filter used for removing dust and scratches. As this blurs the image I only wanted it used on the sky. To do this I used the pen tool to create a path so I could make a selection of where I wanted the filter applied, this can be seen as the red line in the image above. This step removed some but not all of the dust/scratches.

Clone Stamp and Patch tools

A further step I took to removing them was to use the patch tool. Selecting each individual imperfection and removing it this way took time, but was much more effective.

Again I wasn't able to remove all dust specs this way accurately so I had to use another step, this time I used the clone stamp tool to manually remove. The highlighted areas are where the density of the dust was most prominent.

Reducing Noise

Reducing noise

This particular image featured a lot of unwanted noise that I wanted to get rid of. To do this I simply applied the Photoshop filter used to reduce noise. Due to the previous steps done to the sky I only wanted the filter applied to the foreground. To do this I simply made the selection by using the inverse of the previous path selection I made. 

Black and White

Black and White

To make the images black and white I created a new adjustment layer and selected black and white. Then using the given filters I selected a red contrast filter. I used this filter because it darkened the sky and made the foreground brighter, an aesthetic I quite liked. I was then able to adjust the colour sliders if I didn't like part if the image.

Crop

Crop

I wasn't quite happy with the crop of the original image, so thought I would make an adjustment. To do this I simply selected the crop tool and made my adjustments. I tried to apply the rule of thirds to the images and I tried to keep the most interesting parts of the images on the intersecting lines of the grid.  

Sharpening

High pass sharpening

Once I was happy with all the changes I sharpened the images ready for printing. To do this I simply flattened the image and then copied the layer. On this new layer I used the high-pass filter which turned the whole image grey and left a feint outline of parts of the image. These outlines were the parts of the image that would be sharpened. The final steps were to make this over-pass layer a overlay so the original layer underneath could be seen while overlaying the new outlines created using the filter, resulting in the image becoming sharper. The last step was to flatten the image once again. 

Final image

I avoided any major changes in Photoshop. The processing was just small adjustments to correct exposure and contrast, converting to black and white and a general clean up of the images.