Photo Editing Tutorial Part 2

Hey-yipee-oh...

Welcome to Part 2 of Photo Editing Tutorial.
In this part we're gunna look at touching up and colour correcting.
If you missed Part 1 be sure to check it out!

One of the easiest ways to colour correct is to adjust the levels and curves of an image.

These are pretty much the only things I ever touch on an image (after adjustments in Camera Raw) and what I always include in my actions. 

Usually I use Auto on the levels but sometimes if it's obvious, I adjust the levels by hand.

As you can see above, the levels are shown as a histogram and the right side of this is pretty flat. When it looks like this I usually drag the marker (that triangle thing on the bottom of the histogram) over to where the 'mountain' starts.  This kind of bumps the whites in the image up. If it's flat on the left I'll drag that over the where the 'mountain' starts on that side also, bumping up the blacks. Do a bit of experimentation and you'll see what I mean.

With the Curves, you can do all sorts of interesting things with the colour channels.  This is where you can have some fun with colour correction. At the moment I'm enjoying some cross processing (which is a term left over from the old days of film processing where a film was processed in the wrong chemicals.

As you can see above, the coloured curves are crossing each other. Below is a before and after of what this kind of processing does to an image.

Again, just experiment! You can also find heaps of resources on deviantART and other sites... Google is your friend!

Ok, now comes the time to touch up images of people... When you're doing wedding photos and the client wants some that are going on the wall, you want them to look their very best.  Sometimes when you're sitting funny or your head is on a certain angle you get lumpy, bumpy or bulgy bits that aren't very flattering. This is where the Liquify Tool (found in Adobe Photoshop) becomes very very useful!

Here's an example- 

It's that easy... try it! But don't go too heavy & be careful.. it's very easy to make it look fake!

Blemishes and stray hairs are a thing of the past with this tool.
Check it out -

It looks just like the brush tool, but kind of clones and blends over the blemish so you get a smooth appearance that looks like the surrounding area. Too easy! You can use the clone tool as well, but once again be careful or you'll make the skin look like plastic! 

And that ends this short tutorial on photo editing. 

Hopefully these short tips have helping in some way!

Photo Editing Tutorial Part 1

Hey Blog.

I just wanted to take this time to share a few of the things I have learnt about editing photos while being a photographer, specifically for weddings.  They are only short tips and if you want to know more, let me know.

You can see some of my work at Flashbox Creative.

Some of this stuff I'm sure you will know already but hopefully I can share something new with you. I've put together a list of top tools and processes I use to try and speed up the process of editing over 1000 photos per wedding. And if you know something I don't, please please let me know! Sharing is caring, and I don't think enough people (especially pros) do enough of that theses days! How are we supposed to learn things if people better than us aren't sharing and teaching?

So here goes:-

Taking a photo in RAW is similar to capturing an unprocessed negative on a film camera.  RAW does not compress or process the image at all (as JPEG does).  It captures a lot more information than a JPEG and thus gives you greater room for editing. Any decent DSLR camera will have the option to shoot in RAW.  

Once you have your RAW images you have to convert them into JPEG form to print or for general use.  But before you do this it's a good idea to do all your editing.  For this I use Photoshop's RAW editor called Camera Raw. Other programs have different plugins but Photoshop's version works great for me!

The easiest way to work through your RAW images is explained in my next point - use Adobe Bridge.

 Bridge comes with the Adobe Creative Suit and is excellent for processing your images.  You can do all sorts of things from Bridge such as give images labels or ratings so you know which ones need more work, or which ones you're happy with.

You can also do a Batch or use Image Processing which is very very handy when you have a lot of images to get through and want to apply similar editing for all the images.

So after you've selected your options you click run and Photoshop automatically goes through and applies these settings to the the images you want and you have time to get on with other work!

Actions are a great way to automate colour correction or processes you want to add to you images.  By saving your processes as actions you can achieve the same look with lots of photos without having to remember how you did it or run through hundreds of repetitive steps.  You can use these actions in conjunction with the Image Processor and Batch tools found in Bridge and edit 1000 photos with one click and a little bit of waiting time (in which you can get more important things done.. like knitting!)... very handy!

I'm not going to go through how to use them because there are hundreds of tutorials that already do that (and probably better than me). Try Googling it and I'm sure you'll find hundreds! This is mainly an overview of what you should be using to speed up the editing process.

Hopefully you've found these tips useful! Stay tuned for Part 2 in which we'll look at touching up images using Photoshop.