Reading histograms is an important skill to acquire in the world of digital photography. Most images from digital cameras will require some amount of post processing, particularly if you shoot raw format. And most of the processing can be done by viewing the aesthetics of the image as you go, but having the ability to read and manipulate a histogram will increase your productivity and output quality.
The technique outlined here really just applies to a first round of processing — this might be acceptable for posting to Flickr, but a fine art print would require much more time and effort on your part. Also, I’m not talking about doing black and white conversions, crazy artistic interpretations, creative cropping, etc. We just want to make the photo look more natural at this point.
Here’s a small tip for using Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw presets for sharpening and noise reduction settings.
This article is a project entry from Martin Kimeldorf. He shares two of his Photoshop actions with us: exposure blending and shine reduction. The exposure blend action provides a means of combining and blending multiple exposures of the same scene to produce a higher dynamic range. The shine reduction action allows you to paint out and reduce the intensity of certain highlights.
I find resizing photos for web output to be one of the most boring and repetitive tasks in post-processing. My workflow consists of only creating JPEGs as needed, and deleting them when they’ve done their deed. My photo archive also consists of RAW (from the dSLR), TIFF (from film scans), and PSD files, in both AdobeRGB and grayscale color spaces. So with all these requirements, I found that a Photoshop action is the way to go.
Those who have used Photoshop probably know the power of actions. Some also know the power of LAB color mode. The problem is that LAB can sound like a scary thing, and most actions are “one hit wonders.” Neil Cowley has created something that will blow you away — The ONE Action. It’s an action set that guides you through the LAB colorspace workflow. I’ve worked in LAB for a few little things in the past, but I hadn’t realized the full potential until I started working with the ONE Action.
I’m pleased to announce, in the spirit of the holidays, an open source software development: The Epic Edits Action and Preset Extravaganza. In our last project, we did reviews of cheap film cameras. But in this project, we’re going completely the opposite direction — it’s all about Photoshop Actions and Lightroom Presets (or whatever other software you happen to use). In the end, our collective creativity will be pooled into a large Styler Package and be distributed freely. Oh, and we’re giving away over $1000 in prizes!!!
A quick tip for adding your personal information to the Photoshop Actions that you record and distribute.
As promised in the Spot Healing Brush Tutorial, we’re now taking a look at the Retouch Tool in ACR (and Lightroom?). This tool is a little more “hands on”, so I figured the best way to show it would be with a screen capture.
Over the course of seven articles, we’ve covered many features of Adobe’s file management software: Bridge. The links to each article are listed below, along with short descriptions of the content contained. And don’t forget to bookmark this page so you can refer back to the series later!
