Image Evaluation without the mind games.

Have you ever found yourself post processing an image for a long time, adjusting colour, tone, cropping, exposure, contrast until you were happy with the finished product, only to find once you upload/print it, or come back to it later, the very thing you were trying to fix was out of whack?

Now I'm not talking about total accuracy or monitor calibration or any of that. I'm speaking subjectively, to get the image to appear to me the way I want it, not some software's idea of what's 'correct'.

It happened to me all the time, I was forever having to readjust the images after I thought I was finished with them.

The mind plays tricks on us. If we look at something long enough, it 'becomes' what we wanted it to be in our mind. But on looking at it again later. when you've had a break, it doesn't look like what you wanted at all.

I found something that helps to neutrally evaluate the image without the preconception from staring at it for a long time.

The last step in my post processing now is to close my eyes for 10 seconds or so and clear my mind (which isn't hard, not much going on in there), make the image full screen on my monitor so that there are no other distractions around the periphery to interfere with my judgement and then open them to view the image.

Generally, the first impression I get when opening my eyes is the most accurate, and not influenced by any ingrained expectation I may have had of it.

Work flow and post processing images in Adobe Lightroom.

Comprehending:
When I first met Lightroom a few years ago, I really didn't like it. I couldn't get my head around the concept of it's folder management and the way it didn't like files or folders being moved and tampered with in the OS. I was expecting it to act more like Adobe Bridge or  Windows Explorer, and I didn't know about having to export the image to make the editing changes permanent.

Yes - I am a dummkopf.

But I relented, bit the bullet and R.T.F.M. 
I then understood that it's basically a very efficient database management system that stores not only file and folder locations, but every detail of the 'virtual' editing done on the files themselves, along with the exif data of the shots, and just as importantly, a great image editor.

No wonder it got pissed off at me when I screwed with the database index by moving files and folders without telling it.

Peace:
I have come to use it for 95% of all my processing and image cataloging without a hiccup, and have learned more about it's likes and dislikes, as well as using some of it's features in ways unintended by Adobe. We are now good old friends.

Now to workflow, bearing in mind I'm an amateur photog and this may not suit everyone, but it suits me fine.

Importing:

Keywording:
I keyword everything, and I do it on import, it's quick, easy and invaluable for finding the picture or pictures you want quickly among tens of thousands of images.

A tip on key wording - use words, not strings of words as keywords or your keyword list will become a horrendous mess and hinder the search for your image later. It will also slow down the act of keywording itself while it tries to find a stored match for the keyword being typed.

I don't laboriously keyword each image individually anymore, I keyword the entire import group. For example if some of the images depict pets, some people and others food etc, I just add all the keywords to every image in the import. Some keywords won't necessarily apply to all the images imported, so I tend to get multiple hits for a keyword search, but I don't find that a problem for my purposes, I still end up finding the image I want, albeit a bit slower.

I also found that place names are often good to include along with the rest of the keywords relating to a subject. I can nearly always recall where a particular image of someone or something was taken, senility notwithstanding, but I rarely remember when or how.

Folders:
I arrange my general image folders by year, then months as sub folders. If I go on a planned shoot to some sort of event or specific spot, I'll create a folder for that named 01_10 (Araluen Tulips) under the top level folder of the year, the 01_10 being the month and day in that order.

Presets:
I also made a user preset that I use on import that does the 'global' initial conservative adjustments that I know each image will need, like luminance for noise reduction, sharpening and detail, set clarity to about 25 along with vibrance, and saturation to about 9. The preset on import can also be turned off.

I usually then quickly run through the images one by one and manually adjust exposure, shadow/highlight so that it looks approximately correct.

Rating:
Now,  I could make a preset for every situation, like when shooting high ISO etc, but I don't need that. All I want is to have the imported images looking good enough for the next step, to enable rating them.

I have found myself many times almost discarding dud-looking images that proved to be not only salvageable, but turned out quite good, hidden by some exposure flaw like bright highlights, in need of cropping or over exposure. I have trouble evaluating the potential of an image unless it's been processed, hence the reason for giving them a quick run through in the Development module before I rate them and mark the 'keepers'.

I know a lot of people don't rate their images, but I found many uses for rating. When shooting, I usually shoot what I want multiple times with slight variations on composition and perspective, because sometimes a composition looks good in the viewfinder but not on the computer screen.

Rating during review in LR let's me quickly see what I liked the best, and I can also sort the entire folder in order of rating and many other criteria. It's an easy way to get your best work to the top of the grid of thumbnails, and the lower rated ones can be deleted as a group or whatever you want to do with them.

Final Adjustment:
Now it's time to go through the highest ranked and do the final processing touches, individually to suit each image. They say it doesn't really matter in what order things are done during processing other than doing the noise reduction and sharpening last, but I do like some order to my work.

My processing order:
Exposure
Clarity
Vibrance and Saturation
Curves
HSL (hue, saturation and luminance) on individual colours.
Detail (sharpening, detail, radius, luminance etc)

Just a note on using the Details panel. It often pays to use the 'masking' slider directly after luminance adjustment and prior to sharpening. If you hold down the shift+cmd+Left mouse button while dragging to the right, it masks what will not be sharpened with white and leaves the area to be sharpened as black.
This is handy because in areas of little detail, like sky, large shadow areas or water, artefacts can be created easily during sharpening, and this tool prevents that by only sharpening adjacent areas of high contrast, like edges and outlines etc, similar to the action of the Unsharp Mask in Photoshop.

Now, most of you will know, going gangbusters with any of these adjustments will give you artefacts and other nasties, so take it easy and check for artefacts after each step, it's difficult to tell what adjustment caused them if you just look at the end of all processing.

Spotting:
If for some reason the image has a lot of small unwanted details or spots from a dirty sensor etc, I tend to use Photoshop and the Spot healing brush tool, it does a much better job than LR and there are many related tools at the photog's disposal, including Content aware fill, which is indispensable for removing unwanted odds and ends seamlessly.

Flagging:
That sounds like about all there is, but I do one more thing, I use coloured flags to differentiate between images that have been;
Processed to finality. (green)
Exported to Jpeg. (blue)
Flagged for special treatment later (abstract or whatever) (red)

All the above sounds long winded and time consuming, but it's a lot faster doing it than writing about it.

Backup:
I keep a years worth of shots on my machine's hard disk which are backed up to an external drive a couple of times a month, also I don't delete the originals from the memory cards, at least until one back up has been done.
After my local drive has become a bit bloated, I move the folders and contents to a different external drive, as well as also copying them to my NAS, so that I can still access them over our local wifi network.

So I have a minimum of three copies of all my stuff, the local backup, the move to an external drive and on the NAS.


If anyone is interested, I subscribe to Adobe Creative Cloud and have Photoshop 2014 CC and Lightroom 5.7, all for the princely sum of AUD$9.99/month, the software is updated for free so I always have the latest versions.

I have no connection with Adobe by the way, I just like their products and especially this Creative Cloud plan.

(I could do without the slow loading web pages though Adobe!)



That's all there is, there ain't no more!

What attracted you to photography?

I get a great sense of achievement when I make a really good image and I'm proud of the handful of good ones I've made over the decades.

I think I was attracted to photography by the technical process, and the challenge of getting right the many variables that must come together to make a great shot, like light, it's direction and quality, a shutter speed and best aperture combination to capture it, the ISO or light sensitivity of the medium I used etc. I remember in the early days when out shooting,  trying to recall all the things I had read about how on how to take a good photo, but in the heat of the moment, all I had learned just evaporated as though I had senile dementia.

I don't think the 'art' side of photography initially attracted me that much, but that's not to say I don't recognise the artistry in a good image and appreciate it, I just suck at doing it.

I have instinctively come to recognise potentially good shots when I see them, including geometric shapes making interesting patterns, but I find most of my images are mired in the old 'rules' of photography, must have detail in highlights and shadow, the rule of thirds, the golden mean, the golden hour, balance the composition, get close to the subject, avoid poles growing out of people's heads etc....

But I see many people ignoring these conventions and making great images in spite of the 'rules', I can't naturally bring myself to do it, I have to force myself.

I see people new to photography make stunning images,  they are natural born photographers. Others like me bumble along doing things mostly following the rules and a good shot is the exception rather than the rule.

Adding colour and contrast to a flat image non-destructively

Fishin’ by the Bridge

I shot this on a fairly dull and overcast day, and the picture was lacking in some contrast and vibrance. I went to Photoshop and made a layer mask (Shift+CMD/Ctrl+N, overlay mode and filled it with 50% gray.

I added contrast by setting the foreground colour to white (X), selecting a brush with opacity about 15% and lightened the highlight areas in the foliage, grass, tree trunk and bridge, then reset the foreground colour to default black by CMD(Ctrl)+D, and painted the same opacity black on the layer mask in areas where I wanted the tones darker. 

Each new stroke of the brush adds 15% to the previous stroke. This method will only lighten light areas and darken dark areas, IE, if you paint white on black, it has little or no effect, which negates worrying about painting 'outside the lines'. Also it can’t add shadow where none exists, and the converse for highlights.

This fixed the contrast, but I still had flat colour, so I flattened the image, repeated the above steps but using a colour selected from the swatch corresponding to the area I wanted to saturate a bit more, like brown for the muddy banks, and tree trunks, green for the grass etc.

The good thing about using a layer in overlay mode, is that it doesn’t affect the underlying image the way just increasing saturation and contrast normally would, it adds no artefacts to the picture.

I learned this technique some time ago from a blog, but I fail to recall which one so I have to give credit to Mr Anonymous.

G.A.S. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome)

Yep, I have a terminal case of this :(

When I began an interest in photography in the early 80s, I started with a nice Pentax ME Super with a 50mm 1.4 lens.
Back in those days, the kit grew only slowly and modestly, I never had more than two SLRs, and each had a 50mm prime and I had one Vivitar series 1 70 to 210 zoom that I bought second hand.

I built a darkroom in the shed and stocked it with the usual stuff, a couple of enlargers, extractor fan, paper, chemicals, beer fridge etc. But never really had G.A.S. back then. Maybe due to financial constraints.

When the digital age struck and I got my first DSLR around 2010,  a Canon 450D, I was sucked in by the technology and the number of features that enabled me to control my shots in ways that the old film cameras lacked, in short, I was gobsmacked. I still have that camera by the way, it's light and It does what I want.

I began looking at lenses and they were all too expensive, especially good ones.

Then I became aware of adapters that could be used to fit the good old prime glass from the old days onto my modern DSLR - then the floodgates opened. These great old lenses were plentiful and (relatively) cheap, I was happy as a pig in plop.

This was pinpointed as the Typhoid Mary of my G.A.S.

I accumulated a prime lens of each focal length, mainly because zoom lenses of the day were considered not the sharpest and had problems with flare.

Then, my satisfaction from shooting digital waned, I would set the camera to AV, selected an aperture, frame and press the button. It seemed like I had little involvement in the process and it gave me little satisfaction.

Now, I admit, this is not the fault of the digital camera, it was my fault. I could have been using manual mode and I could have spent more time composing and thinking about the image, but the nature of digital seems to make that hard to do, it's instant and quick and it didn't seem right for me to 'hinder' that instant procedure. It's like driving a Maserati and never changing up from first gear.

I began to long for the involvement of shooting film, where I had to take each shot with great care, because film isn't cheap and the effort of developing and scanning were significant. But that very fact made each shot more important to me and once again I had the satisfaction of crafting an image.

So, in my mind it follows that if a couple of film cameras and prime lenses are good, more must be better.
I began being interested in the old film gear, The  history and story of the camera and the manufacturer, and I found it fascinating. I would discover all I could about each camera I purchased, downloaded and stored that information and the user manuals I bought from lifesaver  Mike Butkus.

I really enjoyed shooting very old and primitive cameras and making an acceptable image with them, soft as they were, they had character, and no more controls than were necessary to take a picture.

My aim became to own a representative camera  from each major marque, and I did,
And then I did some more, ad infinitum :(

Now when I see an item for sale that I don't own, I almost need to be 'chained to the mast' like Odysseus when he saw the Sirens, to prevent myself buying more stuff.

Unfortunately, I ran out of chain and now own a humongous collection of film cameras and lenses.

The Sirens won.

Straight out of Camera (S.O.O.C.)

Today I 'd like to touch on the subject of editing images after making the shot, and I'm talking from a photographer's perspective and about photographers.

Some people take pride in the fact that the images they upload have undergone no editing, which is fine if you shoot jpeg and the editing has been done in-camera.

I don't have a problem with that. The ones I refer to are possibly of the opinion that what the camera 'sees' is what their eyes saw,  and any editing would take away from the perceived 'reality' of the scene.

I say to this - Bullplop!

No camera has ever seen what the eye saw, it doesn't have anywhere near the qualities of the human eye. For one, the eye has increased dynamic range to the camera, it constantly scans the scene in front of it, and the brain does the background 'editing' to enable us to see what we see.

The camera just records an instant in time, confined by it's available technology. It's then up to us how we display the image, to enhance the part that drew us to the scene in the first place, to make less prominent the things that take away from the composition or subject etc. I mean, who wants to be a button clicker and nothing more?

It's not that rewarding.

Jpeg:
For the jpeg group, they're happy with how the camera and it's firmware interpreted the image, but that's not really serious photography, of course excluding photo journalists that shoot and document news for a living, accuracy and expediency is the requirement there, not 'artistry'.

Just be aware if you get home and your image has a serious problem,  you may not be able to do anything about it in editing. Jpeg compression removes all the data it doesn't need in the final image, so there's not much left to play with. At least shoot in RAW+Jpeg if your camera allows it, you can always delete the surplus later.

RAW:
Now, photographers that shoot RAW have also submitted images with the same proclamation, but in their case, there is a very good reason for post processing being required for these images.
A sensor converts what it sees to little square dots, called pixels. Being square, the pixels on the edge of an oblique line in an image are not smooth or straight, they are stepped, or 'aliased'. In Jpeg, the image processor in the camera irons these out, it is called not surprisingly,  'anti-aliasing'.

But in Raw, no such in-camera processing takes place (other than LE noise reduction etc which can be turned off), you generally get100% of what the sensor saw, and it's up to you to apply luminance smoothing, sharpening, contrast, exposure, colour balance, warmth and an endless number of changes that you make to this RAW data is what makes your final image, not the camera's, - yours!
Create a preset in Lightroom or whatever software you use to do the basic adjustments, fine tune the ones you intend to keep or post.

Film:
I also see the resurgence of film shooters, including myself.
Many of them also proclaiming the posted image was not edited after scanning the neg, as if that's some sort of achievement, but it isn't.

What they did was probably get the exposure correct, which is a good thing and to be expected, but in my and many other photographer's darkrooms back before digital,  a good amount of time was spent on each print, doing test strips in many areas of the print to get the best exposure in each area. Little pieces of cardboard were cut out to match a shape in a part of the image, so that dodging and burning could be used during exposure under the enlarger, to give each area of the print the optimum amount of light to produce the image the way the photographer envisioned it to begin with.

Worse still in my opinion, is the wide-spread practice of doing no spotting or hair removal on an image when posted, saying that it added to the film 'feel'. Now I'm not talking about applying editing techniques to force an 'aged' look or apply a texture for a more abstract image, just straight images.

But, from what I can recall, a good print from film was never required to be covered in crap to 'feel' right, and I don't really see it enhancing the medium.

Geez, buy a giant Giotto blower already, it saves heaps of time in editing, and if you don't care, at least the image will have less garbage on it.

The 'retro' attraction of film has also caused some people to be so happy to see any sort of an image produced on film, they will post anything, and some are truly crap, with blown highlights, featureless shadow, covered in hair, fingerprints and a bit of a Potato crisp and a drop of soft drink to round them off.

Excusable for a beginner maybe, but not a serious photographer.

And finally:

If you are happy with the images your camera produces on it's own, what do we need you for?