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From what I have gathered, there's not a lot one has to do to a photo in processing...and it's not that confusing or indepth. It is and it isn't I guess. I think I know most all I need to know, and I don't feel it is very much. I wish someone would have just told me from the beginning, and I hadn't wasted so much time figuring it out the hard way. So here's a not so professional explanation of processing and some of what I do. I think I'll be skipping RAW conversion steps, as I really do not do much in conversion of the RAW file. I may adjust the exposure compensation some, or the white balance, but really very little else as I really want to do those adjustments with mask layers available. All those settings are straight forward anyway. I just don't do much in there. I get my 16 bit TIFF file from there and open it in photoshop and do things in there. There aren't many things to do to a photo. You will resize(use 72 dpi for resolution on the web), maybe crop the image, adjust the contrast, saturation, white balance, and sharpness. That's not much, and most of those are amazingly simple to begin with. Adjusting contrast is straight forward. Adjusting levels and curves are just means of adjusting contrast. They are the other two main ways to do this. One can fine tune the adjustment with curves more than they can with levels or contrast, but we'll start with levels. It's really simple and will just take practice,...not reading lots and lots of webpages. While trying to figure any of this out in photoshop, don't forget you do have a history palette, so no need to fear doing something wrong.
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Now with your image open you can get to levels adjustment a couple ways. Image/Adjustments/Levels is one way. The best way to do adjustments is to do them on new layers called adjustment layers. So to do that you go to Layers/New Adjustment Layer/Levels. Then click ok. After clicking ok, you'd see a screen similar to the above. #1 on here is the shadows slider, #2 the midtone slider, and #3 the highlight slider. It's easy to see what moving them does. Move the highlight slider left and you start to brighten the image, shadow slider right and you darken things, and the midtone slider either way lightens or darkens the overall image. If you already have shadows that are black you won't want to move that shadow slider from the left side. If you do, you will gradually clip other shadow detail to complete black. If you don't you can move it right until it hits image data on the histogram(the black spikes and peaks). As soon as you'd reach that info you'd be making it black. It's really called the black point setting. If nothing in you image should be complete black, you won't want to slide it to the right all the way till it hits histogram data. You'd want to stop before that. The same goes with the highlights or white point slider, #3 above. In the above example you just aren't able to move either of those. You'll be clipping other picture data to white or black. You can move the midtone slider left or right to lighten or darken the midtones. Pretty simple.
See #4 above, that is pointing to this adjustment layer in the layers palette. The image can be seen below it called the "background". It's just pretty important to do things this way, on new layers. You can keep doing new adjustment layers, like saturation, curves, etc...like this. Once you had the levels adjustment like you wanted, you would click ok on that window. If you later wanted to change those settings, you'd simply have to double click on that box by #4 above that looks like a picture of a histogram. That will open that levels box back up. Also, if you didn't want the effect as strong as it looks, you can change the opacity of each adjustment layer by having it highlighted blue like show above, then changing that opacity slider above it, down from 100%. #6 above that is obviously the histogram for the image you are doing work too. You can keep an eye on that while you adjust these settings. Now that white box at arrow #5, that is the all important aspect of doing things on layers...or at least a big one. That is a layer mask. What it does is allow you to sort of erase those changes you made to just portions of the image. Say in the above image you wanted to darken everything but the tree area. So you move the midtone slider right(don't want to use the shadow or black point slider since you'd just clip more shadow info to complete black). But moving this midtone slider right made your tree area just too dark. Well you'd simply paint black onto that mask layer in the area of the trees. With layer masks all you have to remember is, white reveals, black conceals. Everything in white will show like you made the change. If you make some portion of it black, it won't show that change you just made, but will let the original image below shine through. And of course there are all the shades between black and white. All those shades of grey would just sort of reveal or sort of conceal. Say you made that layer mask a middle shade of grey...then it'd mask out part of the change you made in the levels adjustment. It's hands down the most useful tool in post-processing larger dynamic range photos, like storms, or sunsets, etc. This way you can adjust the contrast of an image, and then erase the parts that change made look too black or too white. |
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Here is what I mean by this. See how much lighter the tree area is in this one, compared to the ones up higher? Yet everything else looks the same. All I did was do the Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Levels and then pull the midtone slider way way left, lightening the whole image. Then clicked OK. I then painted black onto that layer mask where I didn't want areas to be lightened(I placed a full size copy of the layer mask I made, the one with the arrow pointing at it, next to the image above). In photoshop you have a tool palette. Mine starts on the left side. I paint using that eraser icon, part way down the tool palette. To pick your color(black in this case) you can double click on the bottom of the two overlapping squares, also in that tool palette. Or you can simply click on that smaller icon near them that says, "Default Foreground Background Colors". That makes them black on top of white. But we want the bottom one(the one we'll be using to paint with...using the eraser) to be black. Then just click on that other icon near them that switches them. That's the easiest way to get black on the bottom of those two. Then you can draw/paint/erase black right on your picture(actually it's painting this shade on the mask layer). All you have to do is click on that layer mask icon in the layers palette so it is highlighted blue like seen above. Then just draw away and watch the change take place. Some masks are easier to make than others. I'll explain later how I painted/erased the tree to black like that. But see how the areas in black look like they did before I brightened the whole image, while the areas covered with white let that change I made stand? You could brighten just the snow this way, or just the sky....or darken them each on their own....whatever you wanted. Layer masks allow this to be done. I started doing this with the eraser, as that's what it feels like you are doing(when it is set to black). You do your new adjustment layer, then when you place the eraser on there it feels like you are actually erasing that change in the areas of the image you didn't want to change. Again, white reveals black conceals.
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Now above here is an example of curves. I did this like levels, went to Layers/New Adjustment Layer/Curves. Clicked OK. I then made my curves adjustments as seen above. First off, #5 is this new layer placed above our previous one in the layers palette. The mask next to it again, and blank white still. The curve starts as a straight line in here, with two points, #1 the black point and #4 up there the white point. I then clicked where #2 is and pulled it down a small amount(it's not there till you click it there). I then clicked number #3 and moved it up a bit. That's a curve adjustment. They most often don't need to be too wild looking. What it does is try and hold certain light amounts in place while adjusting others between them. If you leave the black point where it is, it will keep those values of black black, and try and gradually move the ones near black towards black....to the point where you have the curve going back up. It then lightens those amounts further till where number 3 is. #4 is the highlight or white point and is held there. This curve is making the lower midtones darker and the brighter midtones brighter...all while trying not to make things near black turn completely black, or things near white turn completely white. It's sort of like levels, but gives you much more control. It's more kind to the data in general as well. It takes some practice, but overall, it's best to do little curves. You can also move the black and white points to the sides if you wish. Also, sometimes it helps to add in more anchor points and try and hold a section where it is...like maybe placing more anchors between 1 and 2 here, to keep that dip out of the shadows. So like levels, curves is another way to add or take away contrast. Cameras simply can't always know what should be near black or near white in the same image, as they only have a certain dynamic range they can fit to begin with. So in those cases it is forced to make things close to black that shouldn't be, as well as white. I've found some fog scenes to be the opposite, where the camera wasn't contrasty enough and that data needed contrast added. And even when the scene is too dynamic, like the above examples, they often need contrast inserted between the black and white clipping points. |
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If you are adjusting levels and curves, you are also adjusting color amounts. Often as you add contrast using these tools, you'll be adding saturation at the same time. But at the same time, if you didn't add saturation in RAW conversion, then you may still need to add it, as with RAW it wouldn't have added it in, where it would have with a camera created JPG. So when that is done, it's not like you are making something fake by increasing the saturation, you are simply developing it to where it needed to be(or beyond if you want)...since unlike other means, RAW has not had that done to it yet. Like I mentioned earlier in this, I don't do much to saturation, contrast, etc in the RAW conversion process. I want the layer mask tools available when I do that with the higher dynamic range scenes. This photo at this point had the snow a bit too purple I thought(some of that added purple came from adjusting levels and curves). So in this saturation adjustment(Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Hue/Saturation) I'm actually decreasing it. You can see in this above capture that the snow isn't as purple or saturated as the one before. I have an arrow pointing to this adjustment layer, including the layer mask I created. So, I decreased saturation to the image, but I didn't want that done to the sky. So in the mask I paint the sky black, to conceal that decrease in saturation I made. The sky stays saturated while the snow's purple cast is removed. With storms I find I rarely ever need to add any saturation to the clouds. It makes things too blue or green in most cases. But at the same time the foreground desperately needs that increase applied(again, it had not yet been applied via the camera, nor in RAW conversion....it's RAW flat data). So I raise it and mask out the sky/storm in those cases. If you ever want your image flattened again, and to get rid of all these layers, you go to Layers/Flatten Image. If you aren't yet done and want to keep it like it is to finish later, I'd just save it as a photoshop file. |
