A Scenic World

One of the Pentax forum members at dpreview asked me about the post-processing of some of my photos from northern Europe, and unfortunately I haven’t had time to make a detailed response.

Until now.

Hold on to your seats, fellas, because we’re going to take a wild ride through Mr. Adobe’s Lightroom Extravaganza!

Seriously, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to make my post-processing process a bit more universal. It’s straight-forward enough if you also use Lightroom, but how to make it transferable to users of Photoshop or Elements or GiMP? I took screenshots of the tonal curves and histograms this time; hopefully that helps. If you have any other ideas, please let me know!

Now, for the actual photos =)

Case Study #1: Fisherman on the River Meuse

Original:

I loved the framing of this one, but it definitely lacked punch as I shot it - not surprising, actually, since I have all my settings in-camera set to either 0 or negative values (saturation, contrast, etc. etc. ). I like to add all of that in post-processing.

For this one, I added almost all of the punch by adjusting the basic values.

Exposure: +.38
Recovery: 0
Fill Light: +31
Blacks: +57

Brightness: +32 (this actually decreases blackness, as Lightroom starts at a value of 50)
Contrast: +41 (from a Lightroom start value of +25)

Clarity: +17
Vibrance: +67
Saturation: -45

This gives us rather slight modifications, as evidenced here:

Next we have the Tonal Curve adjustments (”curves” in almost every other software). I made the following adjustments, all from start values of 0.

Highlights: +25
Lights: +12
Darks: -14
Shadows: -50

The tonal curve went from this:

to this:

and the photo looked like this afterwards:

We’re getting there…

Next I made some adjustments to the Hue/Saturation/Luminance as follows, all coming from a start value of 0:

Red:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: 0

Orange:
Hue: +33
Saturation: -7
Luminance: 0

Yellow:
Hue: -12
Saturation: +100
Luminance: +100

Green:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: +100

Aqua:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance:0

Blue:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -52
Luminance: +64

Purple:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: 0

Magenta:
Hue: 0
Saturation: -100
Luminance: 0

The reds, purples, and magentas were desaturated fully because there was some chromatic aberration on the fishing pole, and as nothing important in the photo were those colors, I just did away with them.

The photo now looks like this:

Next, for the split toning. When I want a duotoned photo, I find its easiest to add by using split toning rather than adjusting the individual colors. In this case, I wanted yellowish-green highlights and blue shadows. In Lightroom, I chose a value of 60 for the hue of the highlight, with a saturation of 80. For the shadows, I chose 240 as the hue with a saturation of 85. To give you an idea:

I adjusted the balance between highlights and shadows to +17 (the highlights have more weight when it comes to the distribution of color), and the photo looks like this now:

The next category in Lightroom is Noise Reduction and Sharpening. I have a confessions: I never adjust these or even bother looking at them. So, moving on to the next:

Vignetting! My favorite!

Once again, Lightroom has a start value of 0 for the vignette amount.  Negative amounts refer to a dark vignette added; positive values add a white vignette. I added -88. The other adjustment you can make in Lightroom is to adjust the midpoint of the vignette - whether the vignettes starts from the middle of the photo or affects only the corners. For this, Lightroom’s start value is 50, which is a pretty standard vignette. At 0, the vignette encroaches to the very middle of the photo; the edges are entirely black and all shadow detail in the bridge is lost. At 100, the vignette just barely darkens the edges of the photo. I opted for a value of 100. Here’s what the photo looks like now:

And that’s actually the finished version!

The histogram, by the way, started out looking like this, which I think would generally be considered to be an acceptable histogram for the challenging contrasts in this photo:

to this:

which is basically an example of what a histogram should NOT look like. ;)