Digital Diversity

So you have been out taking photos of your family, friends or even for a client. You get home and you have plenty of decent single portrait shots but not a single decent group shot. They are looking the wrong way or pulling faces, generally not giving you the picture you want.

Well you can always save the day by replacing the heads using some other shots you took that did come out well.

Using a combination of photographs that already match up, colour & light correcting, some clever masking and a bit of cloning you should be able to get a result your happy with.

For this tutorial it will help if you already understand the following.
• Layers and masks
• Adjustment layers and colour correction
• Cloning and healing

The images in this tutorial are the property of Blueberry Moon Photography. She was kind enough to let me use these shots for this tutorial. These in no way represent her high standard of work. You can view her excellent photography work here.

Using this technique you can go from this

To this

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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.
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This is going to be a fairly long one so I would make sure you have some supplies ready. Maybe a snack on stand by and your favourite method of getting your caffeine fix at the ready.

I want to cover several key areas:

RAW and Jpeg – whats the difference?

An introduction to Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)

Processing your images from RAW to final Jpeg

This should leave you understanding what a RAW file is and what advantages and disadvantages it gives you. The processing tutorial will also be more advanced than my previous article on basic photo processing.

RAW and Jpeg – Whats the difference?

If you have picked up and used a camera before you will have heard of a Jpeg. It’s the file type that the picture is saved as. It is a type of file that can compress an image reducing its file size so it uses less space on your hard drive. It does this by deleting data it thinks is not needed and then mathematically attempts to restore this data when the file is opened. You can also choose the level of compression. You can have a Jpeg that hardly compressed at all as well as one with huge compression. The difference is that a largely compressed file will lose quality. If you looked at a very high quality and a low quality Jpeg side by side there would be a large difference.
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