April 2016 – Post Processing, Sunsets, Lightroom Tricks

One of the things I’m always looking for is instruction and techniques to improve my post processing.  When you shoot in RAW you have a tremendous of detail available to you in your images over shooting JPEG’s but the downside is that the RAW images look pretty flat coming out of the camera.  To have the ability to create art and have your images reflect your vision you have to skip the camera providing sharpening, contrast and saturation and take control yourself.  This control is known as post processing.

Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from Ansel Adams:

“Dodging and burning are steps to take care of mistakes Nature made in establishing tonal relationships”

 “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.”

Here’s an article posted on Photzy giving a link to download a PDF guide titled “How to Improve a Wildlife Photograph with Post-Processing” written by Kent DuFault.  The article gives a quick rundown on what the PDF guide covers.  At the end of the article is the link to download the free Guide.

http://photzy.com/how-to-improve-a-wildlife-photograph-with-post-processing/

One of the things we as photographers love to do is take pictures of sunrises and sunsets.  Which you prefer may be related to how much trouble it is to get up in the morning.  Here’s a link to an article by Michael Fraiman on PictureCorrect discussing a video Marl Wallace did for Adorama TV on improving sunset pictures.  The video is also posted at this link.  http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/how-to-take-better-photos-at-sunset/

I’m a big fan of Lightroom.  Every image I take starts its life on my computer in Lightroom.  If you haven’t tried it it’s something you should look into, It’s a great database manager for all your images and the develop module in Lightroom is exactly the same as Camera Raw in Photoshop but with a much more elegant and intuitive interface.  Most photographers can do 90% or more of their post-processing work in Lightroom.  Another of my favorite quotes by I don’t remember who, said “There are two types of photographers in the world, those who use Lightroom and those who should”. 

So for you Lightroom users, here’s an article posted on SLR Lounge titled “Lightroom’s Dark Knight | The Alt/Opt Key Transforms Lightroom In Ways You Likely Don’t Know”.  Suffice it to say, the article covers a variety of changes to the controls in Lightroom that happen by just pressing the Alt/Opt key.  Here’s the link.  https://www.slrlounge.com/lightrooms-dark-knight-altopt-key-transforms-lightroom-ways-likely-dont-know-part-1/

Well we’ve all been there.  We’re out shooting on a beautiful day where the weather conditions are pleasant, our subjects are cooperating, we’ve charged our batteries and we’ve brought the right gear.  Don’t laugh; I forgot my tripod head once.  How can you bring your tripod and forget the head.  Oh well, a perfect opportunity to practice hand holding.  But I digress.  Now after a perfect day shooting, you get home and download all your fantastic images to find you’re stuck with a boring sky.  No clouds, nothing but blue.  But we don’t panic because we shot in raw right?  So we can fix it.  We have skills.  And most important, we have Photoshop.  Remember Ansel’s quote “You don’t take a photograph, you make it.” Here’s a quick tutorial found on the PictureCorrect site titled “How to Add Graduated Sky Effects with Photoshop” by Karl Taylor.  The site has both a video of the tutorial and the steps laid out in print format.  I liked the video better but you have to listen to his opening advertisement before you get to the good stuff.  Karl does a great job in making what could be a tricky problem very simple.

That’s it for this month.  If there’s anything you like to see, email me at shooter@gate.net and I’ll look for it.