Touching Up in Photoshop

Here is the direct link to Jesse Rosten's video, along with some good tips about the process.

Basic Photo Retouch from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

You said Histowhat? I said Histograms!

One thing that you will heard mentioned time and time again is that you should get the photograph 'right' in the camera before you take it home for post processing.  I suppose that in a perfect world you would not need to do any post processing at all. 

Fig. #1One tool that can be quite useful to that end is a Histogram.  Most cameras today have them, certainly if you use a DSLR you have one for sure (See Fig. #1).  Histograms also show up in many post processing tool such as Photoshop CS and Lightroom just to mention two, but these histograms are used during post processing. (See fig. #3).

A histogram is just a graph that will show you the tonal mapping of any give photograph you are looking at.  It is relatively easy to understand once you've used it.

This tonal map reads from dark (black) to light (white) from left to right.  See figure #2.  On your camera it is less dimentional, meaning it does not show you the color channels of blue, red and green.  It's primary purpose is to help you identify any photograph that you have taken that is either over or under exposed.  If there is a dramatic rise in either blacks or white atthere respective sides then photograph may have a significant amount of informatiion that is lost.  See figure #4, many highlights have been lost.

Figure #3The third histogram (fig. #3), was taken from a photograph in Lightroom.  This histogram contains the tonal mapping of all the color channels which you might use if you wanted to adjust each channel individually, but this is another subject.

In this histogram you can see that there are a lot of dark tones very close to but not touching the left hand side.  This photograph is dark but almost no information in the darks has been lost.  

Remember this is just a tool, a guide that you should become familiar with.  You may very well want to under or over expose any give shot.  

The next time you pick up your camera play with it.  Learn how to find your histogram and use it after each shot.  If you've learned even some basics about your camera and can use it in manual mode, take a lot of shots (of the same subject) adjusting the exposure in each shot.  See how it effects the histogram for each photograph.  

You may not always use this tool but it will be one that you are familiar enough with should you need it.

For another article on Histograms head to this Digital Photography School's article.

Next we'll talk about "Exposure Compensation" or "Exposure Bias" in which you need to know about the use of histograms.

Photoshop CS5 Content-Aware Fill

I installed Photoshop CS5 a few days ago but haven't had a lot of time to play with the new features. One of the new features I have played with is Content-Aware Fill. If you haven't seen the previews you may be wondering what this does. Basically you select an item you don't want in your image like a power line or in the example I supplied a rock. You select the object with the Spot Healing brush or the Lasso tool (among others) select delete or fill (depending on the tool) and Photoshop decides what would be behind the object being removed and fills in the space. Overall this has worked well but there are times it can be confused, but it's still better than previous versions of Photoshop. In the example it took about 20 seconds to remove the rock and I haven't done anything else to the photo.

Breaking the Rules!

Earlier today Tom asked me to do a short presentation on cropping photos at one of our meetings, anyway while doing a little research I came across this article on Digital Photo's web site.  It's short and right to the point, and it's called "Going to extremes for great rule-breaking photos".  Literally taking a mediocre photo and making it awesome!  Take the short read and try it out on some of your photos, you'll be amazed. The two photos I have posted here are not a great examples, but examples none the less.  The one on the left is kind of bland, and the one on the right which is done in black and white with more contrast added does stand out a bit more.  It's not the extreme they discuss in the article but it works...sort of.  A really excellent example is the one that Dave A. posted in "Critique It!".  It's a photo that he took of Tom at the Junior Olympics opening ceremony.  His before and after comparison is a perfect example.  Have a look.

Update on Wednesday, March 31, 2010 at 7:43PM by Tom S.

For three days now I've been looking at Peter's photograph that I added to his blog entry above.  And for three days I've been thinking that it was an example of something that I often do when I get a photograph that just isn't perfect.   So I wrote Peter a note before coming to read this entry.  I asked him if he had dramatically reduced the 'Clarity' of this photograph to create the soft, defused look it has.  Regardless if he processed it to create the effect or not, it demonstrates the fact that a really great photograph, like his, doesn't have to be tack sharp! 

I was curious because I've done this before as you can see in my photograph.  This shot of Tom T. was a 'pan' shot and like most of them if you don't follow through just right or have the shutter speed too low it will be blurred just a bit to much.... But I like the photograph none the less.  So as an experiemnt I took the 'Clarity' slider in Lightroom and shoved it all the way down... in effect I un-clarified the photogrph as much as I could.  It greatly softened the shot and I think greatly improved it.  I really like doing these sorts of things and I suppose it is why I tend to like many HDR photos.

Great topic Peter.  We need to talk about this more as a club!  Thanks!