Feet on the Beach
By Brian Auer • March 13th, 2008
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This one was taken on the Torrey Pines State Beach near my home in San Diego. The feet actually belong to my Mother-in-Law. I spotted her walking along the water near sunset and I couldn’t resist trying to get some “walking on the beach” photos. I shot about 7 or 8 in rapid-fire mode and this one turned out the best from all of them. The reflection turned out better than I had hoped, and the moment in mid-stride made for an interesting photo.
All of the following post-processing steps were done with Adobe Camera Raw — no Photoshop was used on this photo.
- Untouched RAW Image
This is what the image looked like straight out of the camera. Not a lot of color to begin with, so black & white was a natural choice for me. - Black & White Conversion
Before doing anything, I switched to grayscale. I pushed the red, orange, yellow, green, and aqua to negative compensation while the blues, purples and magentas were pushed in the positive direction. - Basic Adjustments
I left the white balance set at a temperature of 5100 and a tint of -1. I left the exposure near zero, while I boosted the recovery to 33, fill light to 41, bumped the blacks up to 34, increased the brightness to 76, pushed up the contrast to 19, and I ramped the clarity all the way up to 100. - Tone Curve Adjustment
Using the parametric tone curve, I set the highlights to +22, lights to +49, darks to -33, and shadows to -47. This gave me the strong contrast I was after, and I actually pushed a few (very few) of the shadows off the histogram. Overall, the image is heavy on the darker tones. - Vignette and Sharpen
In the lens correction menu, I set the vignette to an amount of -70 with a midpoint of 20 — and this gave me the strong frame around the subject. As a last step, I set the sharpening under the detail menu to an amount of 50 with a radius of 1.5 pixels.
Enjoy!
Brian Auer is a photography enthusiast from North Idaho. He's also the guy behind the Epic Edits Weblog. As a hobbyist photographer since 2003, his passion has been to constantly improve his photography skill set, to share his own knowledge with others, and to become an integral part of the photographic community.
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Brian, for whatever it worth, this is one of my favorite pictures of yours
Antoine… it’s worth a lot. Thank you very much for letting me know! You made my day, buddy!
I love that you are so open about your work. I find it very helpful that you explain your post-processing steps…
Thanks!
Well heck, as long as somebody finds it useful I’ll keep doing it. Photography and post-processing shouldn’t be a secret. Artistic style and vision can’t be copied, so I’m not too worried about it.
Very very nice image! Loved the reflection!
Really enjoyed the way you turned a rather simple moment into art the explanations are most welcomed and I really appreciate the fact that you bring us into the process.
Brian,
I am a writer for a printer site and also a hobby photographer. We recently did some testing on the new Canon Pixma printers and I got to use one of the pro cameras for that (I only have the 450 myself). Went out to the beaches south of Oslo where I live + used your advice in this post. The results were absolutely beyond what I normally can do
Thanks for some great advice. Will continue checking in on your blog.
Regards from Norway.