Well I did promise some tutorials each week, but first I need to test the system to see if it works the way I like and in a user friendly way for you. So here we go.
Technique Tuesday – 1
The Shot:
I am using an image that I Photographed one Autumn afternoon in the Swan Valley region. This time of year there are plenty of these Autumn leaves around on the grape vines and what made this particluar leaf stand out to me was its vibrant colour caused by the a beautiful warm and soft backlight from the afternoon sun. This is a fantastic time to get the camera equipment out and start shooting. Today I am using the Canon 5D Mk2, with a 24-70mm F2.8 lens. This Lens gives me a sharp image with a non distracting back ground. To emphasize this effect, I need to get closer to my subject the leaf and I have opened the aperture to 4.0 as to not overdo the background blur and to get sharp detail on the entire leaf. (For more information see my tutorial on Apertures and F stops.) The other specs for this shot was a shutters speed of 1/80 and the ISO was set to 320. The image of course was shot in RAW so I can make smoother adjustment when editing and I set the White balance to shade as I did all the images I shot in that sequence so that colour corrections and adjustments will be consistent and easy.
Editing:
After selecting the image from my software of choice Photo mechanic (see www. photomechanic.com) I imported the image directly in Photoshop CS4(see adobe.com) and because I have photographed it raw and have photoshop set this way it opens directly in the camera raw dialogue. this is where I want to give my images attention and this is an important step in my eveyrday workflow (For more information see my tutorial on My digital photography Workflow). I see here that the tones are fairly good and with only a touch of colour correction (from 6250 to 5150 in the Temperature slider), a slight increase (+30) using the vibrance slider and a tiny lift (+20) in the clarity for added sharpness and subtle contrast (+50) I can create a beautiful Autumn leaf with vibrant colours just as I saw it on the day.
But with a little more of an adjustment I can create a more vibrant and bold image. This time I have adjusted the fill light +10, increase the black to +45, Brightness to +60, Contrast to +100 and Clarity to +30. What has made this adjustment much easier is that I have already saved these adjustments as a preset so basically I can click one button to achieve this look. (To see how to save this preset see out tutorial on Using camera raw presets).
Today though I want to be a little more creative and artistic and create an image that is a little more unusual with a photograph of a leaf like this. I am after something with a little more emphasis on texture, shape and form. So to do this I have decided to convert this image to Black & White with a little bit of toning. Again to make it easy for me I click once on my saved raw preset which adjusts the Recovery +50, Fill light +25, Blacks +50, Brightness +70, Contrast +100 and Saturation -100. In Split toning I have adjusted the highlight hue to 29 and the saturation to 22, and the shadow hue to 56 and the saturation to 22. This gives the Black & white image the subtle toning that I was after.
The beauty about using these presets is the simplicity and the small amount of time it requires, and if the image needs any further adjustments I can very quickly make those adjustments. In this case I want to make the image a bit more dark and grungy. To do this this I can either increase the blacks to about +80 or I can adjust the temperature and tint which I did in the case to 2850 and +38. With all the images I have added a bit of Camera Vignette to darken the edges and draw attention to the centre of the image.
In summary I have created 3 or 4 different looking images in a matter of a few seconds in a non destructive manner from working with the raw files. The images can now be saved ready for further use. From here it is a matter of cropping or removing any unwanted elements in the picture, but for now I am happy with the way these images look.
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