I thought it would be fun to break out of my normal format for the day and talk about photography a bit. I should start with the disclaimer that I am not a photographer. I am a graphic designer. Any good shots you may see on my site were either luck, or heavily tweaked in post (usually the latter). I have attached my Photoshop cs3 file here (or the unedited jpg here) so you can follow along if you wish. All of these practices are general and could be applied to any pro-level image editor but I will be giving the locations of items in Photoshop.

The first part of editing a photo in post is getting a good picture. If you have a great image, all of this is not even necessary. Jaden already showed us that the 3 steps to getting a good shot are: Light, light & light. Here are a few other photo quick tips that I have picked up. Manually set the white balance to the type of light you are using. Sometimes the auto white balance on cameras will mess this up, which will explain why you are getting green or blue photos. You camera is adjusting for halogen lights and you are shooting in tungsten or sunlight. Another trick is to set the film speed to the lowest number. In my experience higher film speeds on digital cameras just add grain to the image. If you are using a higher film speed to get more light into the shot, add a real light instead.

 

 

Ok, so you have your almost fantastic image shot and loaded up in Photoshop. My first step is always to take a look at the histogram. This can tell you a lot of information about the brightness and contrast of the image. This is a good time to mention, NEVER EVER USE THE BRIGHTNESS AND CONTRAST PALETTE. Sorry for yelling, but that thing is just garbage and you are literally throwing away valuable pixel information if you use it. Instead lets open the levels palette (image > adjustments > levels).

 

 

What you see above is called a histogram. It gives you an advanced set of tools to work with your highlights, midtones and shadows, as well as the depth of your whites and blacks. An ideal histogram will have color information along the whole graph, but you can see here that there is a huge chunk of missing information on the right hand side (which is the whites). What I will do is pull the white slider over to the last spike of white information, and pull the black slider in to the last spike of black information. You want to watch your image and make sure you don’t blow out the whites or darken the blacks at the cost of loosing clarity of image. Once I have the whites and blacks set I will move the midtones around until they look good. In the attached psd, I opted to use adjustment layers to apply all of my filters so they remain dynamic and I can change them throughout the process. If you double click on the layers, you can still edit them.

 

 

It’s pretty amazing what just applying levels can do for your photo, but I can see in my image that it is a little too much yellow and red. Before I make changes to the color balance, I try to work out in my head what is wrong with the colors. It really helps to have a game plan for the colors once I start editing them. In this case I can tell that yellow and red dominate the photo and it needs more blue and cyan. The silver platter the turkey is resting on should not look like gold! A lot of designers prefer the curves (images > adjustments > curves) palette for editing colors, but personally I use the color balance palette (images > adjustments > color balance) it just feels more intuitive for me to see the color labels. I will go into the shadows, midtones and highlights and adjust each slider until it suits my needs. If you double click on the color balance layer in my example file you can see the exact setting I used. Since I used adjustment layers to apply my filters, I will sometimes tweak the levels filter again after the color balance has been set.

 

 

My final step for image correction is adjusting the sharpness. I often do not even realize the image is blurry until I play with the sharpness. If you plan to resize your image for the final version, I would resize the image before I apply the sharpen filter, since that tends to disappear with scaling. The more powerful of the sharpen tools is the unsharp mask (filter > sharpen > unsharp mask) but sometimes if you have a really low resolution shot, the sharpen filter is sufficient. I can’t really tell you any method to sharpening, just play with the settings until you reach the desired results.

 

 

If anyone found this helpful, let me know! I would love to see some before and after shots. For more photography resources, everyone should read Strobist.

February 18th, 2008 by John (Cho-Tabetai)