Editing the Janet’s Foss Photo
Good processing can make a huge difference
Below you can see the starting image prior to any processing being carried out.
The image at this point is full of harsh shadows and contrast and whilst the location is beautiful, this picture certainly doesn’t convey this. If I didn’t have a vision for this image when I shot the photography, I would probably overlook the image or even delete it. As a photographic
Image Capture
The image was captured using an Olympus OMD EM5 digital camera. This is a Micro 43 camera with a 16Mpixels sensor. The lens was an Olympus 12-40mm lens set to 15mm. The camera ISO was set to ISO200 which is the base ISO for this camera and should
The lens aperture was set to f/7.1 and the point of focus placed on the rock in the foreground. This gave an excellent combination of quality and depth of field. A slow shutter speed of 12″ was used to allow the movement in the water to become evident. It was necessary to use a 6 stop filter (a Lee Seven 5 little stopper). With the shutter speed so slow it was necessary to mount the camera on a tripod and use a remote release to trigger the shot.
Processing in Lightroom
The image above was captured in RAW format to produce the highest quality image and also provide more flexibility in processing. The conversion from RAW was carried out in Lightroom before the resulting image was transferred into Photoshop for further adjustment.
With the image (RAW file) selected in the Lightroom develop
You can change to another profile (if you have one installed) using the “Camera Calibration” tab as shown below. You will find any other compatible profiles installed to your computer, in the “Profile”
Changing the profile is not essential but I have found the custom profiles perform better than those shipped with Lightroom.
Having changed the colour profile I start to edit the image using the controls in the “Basic” panel which is shown below.
I started editing by increasing the contrast (+25) as
This image is quite green from the surrounding foliage and the shade was also causing a strong blue tint in some areas. I
The next group of sliders to be adjusted was the Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation levels. There is no secret here other than to say don’t go too string with any of the sliders and to simply judge when you are happy.
Local Adjustment Brush
The other area of adjustment I want to make is to the dark shadow areas around the waterfall. You can see these in the following screenshot.
In the following
A further adjustment is them made to the water in the waterfall to add definition using the clarity slider. This is done by adding a “New” adjustment brush. You can see the adjustment settings and where they have been applied in the following
Notice also how the contrast has been removed from the water
With the RAW adjustments complete the image is as shown below together with the starting image, and is ready for further processing in Photoshop.
Processing in Photoshop
The intention in Photoshop is to process the image using the Nik Color Efex plug-in filter. I am a big believer in using plug-ins from the likes of Nik, Topaz and others. You can read more about the filters I use on the Useful Software page of Lenscraft.
Nik Color Efex
Nike Color Efex offers a huge range of filter adjustments which can be rather confusing. If you would like to know more about the range of filters and what they do, please see my books which cost about the same as a photography magazine.
For this image the three filters I want to use are “Pro Contrast” and in particular the Dynamic Contrast slider, Detail Extractor in order to open up the shadow detail further and the Lens Vignette filter to darken the edges of the image.
In the following
The following
This also necessitates a further contrast adjustment otherwise the image becomes too open.
The image adjustments are now complete. The OK button is clicked to return to Photoshop.
Conclusion
The finished image appears natural yet is a huge improvement on the starting image. The final image can be seen below with the original image inset bottom right.
Learn More Lightroom
You can learn more about editing photos in the Lightroom by reading my Overview of the Lightroom Develop Module tutorial. I would also recommend my book Mastering Lightroom’s Develop Module for in-depth coverage of the Lightroom editing tools. You can find this and other photo editing books in the Lenscraft Shop.
More Lightroom Tutorials
You’ll find more high quality, free tutorials on my Adobe Lightroom Tutorials page.
More Photoshop Tutorials
You’ll find more high quality, free tutorials on my Adobe Photoshop Tutorials page.
More Nik Tutorials
You’ll find more high quality, free tutorials on my Nik Collection Tutorials page.
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[crp]
I like most of what you have done to the image, but I find in the end it has a yellowy-green cast which I don’t find natural. The water looks like there’s an algae bloom going on. Does anyone else have a concern about the color cast? Otherwise, very informative, Robin. Thank you.
Interesting comment. I hadn’t really noticed the “colour cast” when I was editing the image but now you mention it, its a little more obvious, especially in the foreground. I will put it down to artistic intent 😉
Thanks for your helpful reply.
For color management, I was also wondering which plugin from the nik collection would be the best to start with: Vivara or color effex. I must confess colors mamagement is the post-processing part I am the least comfortable with.
I have noted you have used color effex in your tutorial. Do you prefer it to vivara?
The thing with colour management is that you don’t need to use any plug-ins. It’s all about how you set up and configure your system. Once you have it congigures you can then start to edit your images with confidence. For that you may find plug-ins helpful. Personally I tend to correct all colour problems in the RAW converter (Lightroom) or using curves in Photoshop. Sometimes I find that a couple of the filters in Color Efex work well and help me.
Thanks again!
Good clearing up.
Francis
Hello Robin,
Very nice picture, as usual, as well as extremely useful description of your post processing and the rationale behind each step you got through.
I have one question:
I uses LR for a while, plus the Nick plugins since I follow your blogs :-).
I don’t have PS, only PS elements That I have never use so far.
Would you have achieved the same result by using the color effex plugin in LR instead of PS?
Are the Nick collection plugin compatible with PS elements?
Thanks for your answer
Francis
Thanks for the positive feedback.
To answer your question, the Nik Plug-in’s will produce the same results in any of the supported applications. You might see some small variations if the host application can’t support 16 bitt files or larger colour spaces (e.g. Elements). The Nik collection can be used with Elements (since version 9 I believe) with the exception of HDR Efex Pro. I suspect this is because it needs to produce a 32 bit file and Elemetns is limited to 8 bit.
Hope this helps.
Very interesting Robin, thanks.
Pleased you enjoyed it.