Digital Diversity

There are 2 areas I want to cover here.

• My workflow from start to finish

• Do I really want to delete that shot?

What shots do you delete? Do you shoot Jpeg and keep them all? Do you shoot RAW, save just the keepers in RAW and Jpeg the rest? Do you keep all the RAWs? Do you delete all your out of focus and badly exposed shots but keep the rest?

We all have different ways of choosing what to delete and what to keep and sometimes it can be a hard decision. I have kept many pictures in the past that I will possibly never look at again. They just sit there on my hard drive taking up space. Only recently have I formed a solid set of rules for my self to abide to stop this happening. I have mentioned it before briefly but this is the work flow I tend to follow.

My workflow from start to finish

First point to make is this! Wait till you get home before you delete anything. Unless you are really pushed for space on your memory card, leave them on there. Shots that look bad on the small LCD screen may turn out OK when viewed large.

Once home I download all the images I have taken onto my hard drive. I create a folder for the RAWs in the right category. For my recent trip to the zoo I created a folder simply called Whipsnade Zoo RAWs inside the folder for animals in captivity.

With these downloaded I then transfer the RAWs into adobe organiser (comes free with elements). The main reason for this is it allows me view all my RAWs with my ACR pre-sets in place. As well as this it helps when it comes to the deleting stage. More of that in a bit.

Now to delete the shots that really are a lost cause. For example shots that are totally out of focus. When you select an image or series of images in organiser and hit delete you are given two options. You can simply delete just the preview from the organiser or you can delete the preview and the original file. In this case I will delete both as they would just be taking up hard drive space.

With those deleted, the next step is to batch process the rest of the images at my ACR default settings. This means that I have a record of all images I took on that shoot that weren’t terrible.

After that is done I will get to work on picking out my favourite shots that I want to take the time to process properly. Once each shot is processed I will delete its RAW file preview from the organiser but not off the hard drive itself.

This leaves me with a list of RAW files of all the shots that would be classed as snaps. I will now select all the remaining files and delete them from both the organiser and the hard drive.

The final result is that you have no shots that you deem terrible. You have Jpegs of all the snaps and you have the RAWs, retouched Jpegs and standard Jpegs of all the keepers. If you want you can now go back and delete the standard Jpegs of the shots you retouched if space really is an issue.

Do I really want to delete that shot?

What each person will class as a keeper can be different but don’t judge to quickly on what is and isn’t worth saving. Once I have retouched all the obvious keepers I then take my time to go through all the remaining images and try things out. A shot that at first glance really doesn’t grab you can be completely transformed with the right treatment. Open up each image you think may have some slight ray of hope and try things out. Cropping, black and white, colour casts, colour fixes, filters….. anything you can think of. You will be surprised with what you can do with some practise.

Here are 3 examples of shots I saved from my recent zoo trip.

This shot I very nearly left to be deleted. In-fact it was even worse than this at first. This is after some fairly heavy cropping. Unfortunately I cropped the shot in ACR meaning it saved that to the RAW file. That being said the image still isn’t exactly great. The colours are all a bit bland, detail on the rhino is a bit blurred and the fence in the background is fairly off putting. The Masses of rhino poo don’t really help either.

However I did see some potential. I do like the way it’s staring me down and walking towards me. It gives the impression its coming to see you off his territory. I need a way to bring out the detail of the rhino and really make it stand out from the background.

With this in mind I did the following:
• Basic lighting and contrast correction with the levels.
• Use a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer to convert to black and white. Then adjust the lightness of each colour from the drop down menu to lighten the rhino and darken its surroundings.
• Increase the contrast to start bringing out that detail on the rhinos armoured skin.
• Adjust the shadows and highlights.
• Sharpen the rhino only to make it stand out even more.
• Lastly I added a very subtle reddish brown cast to the image using a colourized Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.

I feel the final result is an image that has a lot more impact with your attention drawn straight to the rhino and the strength it portrays. The fence blends nicely with the background and the random droppings are much less obvious and distracting.

This next image is a shot I actually liked and processed anyway. However I hated the ugly building and fencing in the background. These really took something away from an image that I really liked apart from those elements.

What I needed to do was change the background to something a lot less distracting and ugly.

To do this I first found myself a suitable background image. Try to find one that’s taken at the same angle and has similar lighting.

• Once I found a suitable image I positioned it in the photo at the right level. Then I added a mask and carefully Worked my way around the elephants till the blend looked natural.
• The new background made the red chromatic aberrations on the elephant’s trunk stick out so I got rid of those using a Hue / Saturation adjustment layer.
• The blend was now starting to look more natural but the new background was too sharp. I applied a slight lens blur to match it up with the rest of the shot.
• Next I duplicated the new background and mask. Altered the mask so it was only showing the trees in the far distance and blurred even further. This was to give the feeling of a smaller depth of field.

With the new background in place the image had a much more natural feel with no more ugly distractions.

The last image I am going to show you really did almost get deleted from the start.

So many things were wrong with this shot I had a hard time working out if it was worth trying to save. The main reason I even bothered was because I didn’t have a croc picture and I wanted one. This one would be a challenge though. So many things wrong with it.

• Cropped off its nose (amateur mistake)
• Horrible lighting, those red lights washed out everything.
• Noisy – shot at ISO 400 in low light, this means noise and lots of it.
• Taken at a fairly slow shutter speed of 1/50 a second while hand held. This means more blur.

Despite all this I was determined to achieve something.

First step was to sort out the lighting and colour. I did this using levels and Hue / saturation adjustments. I played around with the various different colours until I got the result I wanted.

Next I needed to do something about the cropped of nose. To fix this I increased the canvass width on the left side to give me some working space. Then I did a lot of cloning and healing. This was tricky but I think it worked reasonably well.

Now for the noise. I used Neat image. I played around with the settings until I had a decent balance between noise and detail.

Lastly I sharpened up the image slightly.

In the end im glad I saved this image. Its nothing special but it is a nice clear portrait of a croc. Something I didn’t already have. It shows off the great texture of the crocs skin and its sharp teeth.

So next time your about to press that delete key, stop and have a think. Is there really no hope for this shot?

Tags: adjustment layers, blur, bokeh, colour correction, colour pop, colours, contrast, croc, elements, highlights, hue, layers, levels, lighting, masking, masks, panasonic fz28, panasonic lumix fz28, photo editing, photography, photoshop, saturation, saving pictures, shadows, sharpening, telephoto, thoughts, tutorial, tutorials

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 14:06 and is filed under photography, photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.