This Photoshop Tutorial will take you through the workflow and stage of editing a RAW file into an image that is true to its subject but captures a particular mood.

We are using images shot by Alan Davies, one of our students who enjoyed a one to one photography course at the forge with Ben Taylor our friendly and expert farrier.

Digital Cameras now allow loads of margin to experiment with our creative side, however, you also have to be selective and manage those images with a workflow, which should be kept fairly simple and not become onerous.

You can use any software to browse the images you have taken, here we use Adobe Lightroom (5.6) which provides us with a ‘filmstrip’ view along the bottom and an ability to view each image at full size (fig 1.)

A handy overlay can be applied to help you frame/crop your image, here I have used a ‘Rule of Thirds’ overlay on the original full sized image (images courtesy of Alan Davies).

Along the right you can see the histogram and basic edits panels which are fairly much the same as those found in Adobes RAW Editor as part of Photoshop.

The basic panels are used adjust the ‘White Balance’ and Basic Tonal edits prior to more enhanced work available in Photoshop.

Photoshop Tutorial Step by Step

 

 

Fig 1.

A key consideration is how you want your image to tell the story, cropping is often a consideration and with a good original image shot in RAW format as opposed to Jpeg you can consider the image and adjust to your liking including Cropping/levelling/straightening Fig 2.

Fig 2.

Basic Panel Edits.

White Balance is a key consideration setting ‘mood’ via the colour temperature and lighting conditions. Here if you shoot in RAW you can adjust the ‘feel’ of the image in post production with ease.  Default White Balance will be ‘As Shot’  You can change this using the temp and tint sliders or use the ‘eye drop’ tool and click it onto an area in your image that should be a light grey colour. In figure 3, I have done this on The Farriers T Shirt to set ‘feel’ to the image and then adjusted in sequence: Exposure, Contrast, Highlights/Shadows, White & Blacks and Vibrance (which subtly enhances colours).

Fig 3

The image now starts to take on some of the mood and action in the Farriers Forge.

Lens Corrections Panel

These are used to help correct some optical issues that come with digital image capture. In essence Adobe has store profiles for Cameras and Lens combinations which you need to apply to correct things like distortion and colour corrections such as Chromatic Aberration (CA). Both Lightroom and Camera RAW have the boxes for them Fig 4.

 

Fig 4

Pre Sharpening and Noise reduction

All digital images require sharpening in stages usually referred to as pre and post sharpening. If you shoot in Jpeg mode then the camera has already applied a degree of sharpening however if you have shot in RAW you will need to consider the image and apply an amount of pre sharpening. There are various aspects to this process including type of camera sensor; here we will simply go through what the pre sharpening process is. The default controls (fig 5) have four sliders: Amount, Radius, Detail & Masking.

• Amount is set at 25% by default and increase the overall effect as you increase it.
• Radius, affects the edges of the images determining the width of halos, thus a smaller setting concentrates around the fine edges having less impact on the wider, softer edges.
• Detail, suppresses halo effects allowing increases in amounts of sharpening whilst minimising halo generation.
• Masking, allows you to target the sharpening covering up what you don’t want the effect to be applied to.

 

In Fig 6 we have increase overall sharpening to finer detail and masked out the effect quite a lot to background areas.

Noise

Camera noise often varies subject the quality of the cameras sensor and what ISO setting the shot was taken at. All have a base level of noise however when ISO is increased (as in this image) to help achieve a shutter speed sufficient to capture the action noise becomes evident in the image. There’s plenty of debate on what is ‘acceptable’ levels of noise in images be they on screen or printed.

We can explain that the fine grain/speckled noise you see in images is/can be corrected using the luminance slider whilst the magenta/green speckles/blotches you see are caused by the sensors inability to differentiate colour in low light is dealt with by the colour slider.

Fig 6

 

Having completed basic adjustment in Lightroom or Camera RAW we will take the images to Photoshop for few final tweaks.

First I have changed the histogram to show luminosity, which as expected tells me there’s a lot of information to the left indicating shadows and dark areas. However in this image I am after such and will now further ‘punch’ that using a curves layer and change the blend mode to ‘multiply’ (56%) to enhance even further the dark areas.

Fig 7.

I then applied a 2^nd curves layer changing the blend mode to screen (15%) to enhance the lighter areas in the image.

Fig 8

The image is now taking on the feel I am after however, I want to give an extra bit of punch so here I will use on the excellent add on filters from Topaz Labs to help me achieve it.

Fig 8.

Applying a small amount of Topaz (spicify) and a vignette finishes off the image above.

Output.

Saving this high resolution file as a Tiff, we now have to decide is how the file will be used. In this case I am going to output it to screen for internet use.

 

Fig 9.

Here I have selected the Image resize option and reduced to 1200 pixels on the long side which is sufficient for general internet use. Having reduced the image size the last thing to do is apply output sharpening for the intended use. You can use a variety of approaches to this including Photoshop Smart Sharpen, Unsharp Mask and third party add on’s. Be sure not to over sharpen though.

In Photoshop, select ‘save for Web’ (fig 10.) and save to your desired folder.

Fig 10.

Fig 11.

Thanks to Alan Davies for the RAW images and Ben Taylor (Team GB Farrier).