Down the Garden Path – Step by Step

I still haven’t caught up on processing the photos from my holiday, but in the meantime, here’s a little Photoshop post to tide you over till I do…

I read a lot of photography and Photoshop blogs and I always love seeing the step-by-step posts where you get to see everything done to a photo from the camera to the finished product. I learn a lot from those kind of posts and it often blows me away how much you can do to a photo to enhance it, make it into something spectacular, or as is often the case with my photos, rescue it from oblivion! So, I thought I’d do one of my own (not because I am necessarily doing anything ground breaking, just to show you a few steps I use)

When I took this photo of Chiq walking down the garden path I was really disappointed. There are so many things I have to think about now that I have done my photography course and have a little bit more understanding of the settings. Sometimes my head feels like it’s going to explode, trying to consider exposure, shutter speed, aperture and ISO. (Not to mention trying to also make sure the kids are not getting too far away from me or getting into trouble!)

I was thinking about composition when I took it – I thought the garden beds on the sides were a nice frame and I like the way the path led off into the distance. Unfortunately, having just swung around from taking a photo in the other direction where there was lots of light I didn’t readjust my settings for the dark shady view this way and ended up with this as my original, straight out of the camera shot!

Looking at it in the viewfinder I almost deleted it on the spot, but since I have just recently taken the leap to shooting in RAW and am starting to learn about editing RAW images, I thought I’d keep it just to see if anything could be salvaged.

My first task was to open the RAW image in Photoshop. For those who don’t know, RAW images are a different format of picture (from say, jpeg) which is essentially like a digital negative. More data is recorded in the file, allowing you a lot more scope for processing on the computer. I still have heaps to learn about processing RAW but there are some basic steps you can take to improve most images. I now take all my images in RAW and process all of them using a RAW editor, even if it’s just the tiniest thing I want to correct. The downside of RAW is that they are huge files (from my camera about 14MB each) so they take up loads of space on your memory card and hard drive.

The RAW editor in Photoshop has an Auto button in the Exposure setting. You can fine tune the settings if you like, but I often start with Auto to see what the editor suggests.

Here’s how my photo looked after clicking Auto.

Can you believe the difference? I couldn’t! If I had any doubts before about how much control you get with a RAW image, I don’t now.

You might notice though that the image is pretty noisy (grainy). I’ll just say here, that I know that this photo is never going to be the sharpest, clearest photo I have taken and I wish I had checked the settings before taking it! The result won’t be perfect but it will turn what would have gone in the bin into a nice little shot (IMO).

A little while back I wrote a post about ISO and dealing with noise when taking photos at high (number) ISO. Then H&B sent me a link to a nifty little freeware program called Neat Image which reduces noise and it works a treat! I have been using it often to improve noisy photos and am loving what it can do. The resulting photo is quite soft so it might not suit every subject but for people a little bit soft focus is not necessarily a bad thing.

Here’s the photo after running it through Neat Image:

Finally, I opened it up in Photoshop again and ran a couple of Pioneer Woman’s actions. I use these all the time to lighten, sharpen, boost or soften my photos. And I put a “Quick Edge Burn” on just about all of them! (This is also called a vignette – where the edges of the photo are a little bit darker. It can help to focus the attention on the subject of the photo).

This photo had a “Define and Sharpen” (to counteract the softening of the noise reduction) and then a “Boost” at 71% (to deepen the colours) run on it, followed by an edge burn at 76%. The percentages refer to the opacity of the layer. I often play around with this after running an action if the effect is too much.

Here’s the final result again:

I still can’t believe I could salvage it from the original.