Lightroom and photoshop are very powerful applications for photo editing and can seem daunting at first but I promise that it’s worth figuring out! Hopefully this how to can spark some ideas or teach you something that you didn’t know before. Now people inevitably complain to me that editing like this isn’t ‘pure’ photography because you should be able to get the perfect shot in camera without editing. In my opinion, those people can take boring images and ignore that even the best photographers (Ansel Adams) spent hours in the dark room to finish a print from photographic film! Because this images was taken with a Fujifilm x100s (Digital Camera) using a RAW image the file right out of camera is designed to lack contrast and color in order to get the best image quality possible. So here’s the way I take my RAW file and make it into a final image.
For this specific image I went through 7 basic steps some of them are necessary for any image and some could have been avoided with a different camera, lens, or approach and I will do my best explain which parts of the process can and really should be done in camera if possible. First this image was taken on a leisure bike ride through Forest Park. Therefore, I took my little Fuji since I didn’t want a camera bag to worry about. So I was limited to the 23mm F2 prime lense and took this image with the following setting hand held: 1/1250 sec, F 2.8, ISO 200. The RAW file out of camera is what you see below.
Step 1: The first thing I do with any RAW file is to change the highlights and shadows. This further flattens the images pulling more details from the sky and from the dark shadow areas. So usually I always decrease the highlights and increase the shadows.
Step 2: Once the details are back the next step is to make sure that the dynamic range or the range from total white to absolute black is maximized. This is the best way to get contrast in a photo without losing detail.
Step 3: This is where you need to make changes to the tone and colors of the image. I usually do this in lightroom as it is easier but if it becomes a hassle go directly to photoshop and do it there. For this image I warmed it up because the day the light was soft and warm with very little blue in the shadows. The Basic panel for the image above is shown for reference. Additionally, I brought down the saturation on the blues chanel as well as added some orange to the shadows using split toning.
Step 4: Change the tone curve!. It looks scary and you don’t have to move it the way I did, but this is the second and final way to achieve the contrast you want in your image. I personally drag up the furthest circle and level the curve so that nothing is clipped. This effectively gets rid of total blacks and makes a faded look. For my cameras this also smooths the grain in the shadows which makes the images feel more clean and sharp. Using a more modern sensor or film, this faded would not be needed unless you want it.
Step 5: This next step comes from my limited lens choice, I couldn’t fit enough sky and foreground into the composition I wanted (lense was too tight). Knowing that I had Photoshop and the sky wasn’t super complex (little clouds) I knew that I needed to squeeze as much foreground into the composition because I knew that if I needed more sky I can make it in Photoshop. Alternatively, if I had a wider lens I could have gotten the right composition in camera. In the end I needed more sky for the composition and for vertical transformation (next step) so I went ahead and used the content aware crop to get more blank space above the building.
Step 6: I imported the image with the new composition back into Lightroom to do lens corrections and more importantly to add more vertical shift. While this lens isn’t really wide (35mm equ.) the lines in the first images above aren’t straight and appear to fall over. To correct this I added more vertical shift in the Transform module, effectively standing the building straight up. It is subtle but once you see it any image without this correction looks really wrong. This shift can absolutely be done with the right lens or camera, in fact the only movement my 4x5 camera has is a vertical shift.
Step 7: This final step often takes the longest time and is the most important. It’s called local adjustment: where you change exposure, color, and contrast in local areas. The goal is to draw the eye where you want it and in this case I wanted it on the entrance of the greenhouse. You can do this many different ways, I mostly use the graduated filter tool and the radial filter to add or subtract light. Here I darkened and desaturated the sky and added some brightness to the shadow areas in the front. All in all I love the result and as always in love with what the little Fuji lets me do.
