Lessons
Posted by: Rich in Digital Cameras, Digital Photography, Photo of the Day, PhotoshopI’ve played with Scott Kelby’s 7 point system for a while now. Still, I’m only in the “Photoshop Experimentation” mode. It’s hard choosing photos to edit. Looking through my favorites I find myself saying, “I don’t think I need to edit that…..do I?”
Well, today I decided to apply some of the techniques.
The original photo I picked was one of Bert Gildart. You remember him, don’t you? Well, on our hike into the Promised Land I got a few interesting shots of Bert & Janie as we hiked around.
One favorite was Bert at the edge of a small cave we explored. I liked the photo right off and never adjusted it, just posted it onto the blog. You’re looking at the photo right now.
Unfortunately the lighting wasn’t the best. The sun was above us and slightly behind the rock formation. The plus was we weren’t staring into the sun, the minus was a lack of good light shooting into the cave.
Looking at the shot I thought a little more and found everything to be slightly bland. Except Bert of course, he’s just not a bland guy. The rock edges didn’t have the greatest contrast, Bert’s blue jeans looked even more faded than they truly were……I think you get the gist.
So, this morning I set about trying my hand at being “artistic” with one of my photos. I wanted the rocks to have more contrast, and I wanted Bert to stand out from the scene. I’m not sure if I achieved it or not. Then again, I spent about 6 minutes on the edits.
As you’ll see immediately, the colors have changed dramatically. That happened almost immediately. I shot this picture in RAW. That left me a lot of room to work with the photo after the fact. The first step I took was resetting the white balance. The original seemed a little too far into the blue range. And it was. I simply sampled an area that should be white to set my custom white balance. The white I sampled from was the piece of paper sticking up from Bert’s pocket.
After resetting the white balance I revealed some more detail from the shadows behind Bert. At first I revealed too much and it looked far too artificial, so I toned it down a bit. All of those changes were in the RAW editor in Photoshop (it always pops up when you bring a RAW image in).
I opened the image and created a new layer with adjustments. At the tone curve I set it to Strong Contrast. That really brought all the edges of the rocks out. It also over did it on Bert, so I created a mask and got Bert out of the strong contrast.
Finally, when resetting the white balance in the beginning I thought Bert’s jeans faded way too much. So I created one more layer, jumped into Hue & Saturation, and pumped up the blues a touch. Bert’s jeans became “new jeans”, and I touched up the blue pattern around his hat. Basically, I got the blues back to where they were in the original shot, while keeping a warmer yellow to everything else.
So, there’s the first real official edit attempt. I understand all the concepts from Kelby’s amazing book. The thing that he can’t do for you in the book is teach you what the correct lighting and colors should be. Sure, in his book he walks you through getting that great image, and he’s made all the decisions. Doing this one I kept asking myself, “Is that closer to the real color?” I guess in time I’ll get better with that as well.
I can say, I love the 7 Point System. It’s been a lot of fun. Now it’s time to really play with applying the techniques and get creative!
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May 8th, 2008 at 9:15 am
One thing that I find generally works well for separating your subject from the surroundings is a slight color difference between the two.
Here I added a little yellow to my friend Luke compared to his surroundings (disregard the blur of an inexperienced photog with his first 3.2MP camera), which helps draw the attention his way.
Not sure what Mr. Kelby has to say on the matter, but it works pretty well for me.
May 8th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
This is the millionth time I’ve clicked over here…because I totally forgot to comment. I am not stalking you.
Mostly.
OK then…I love the second picture (via our phone conversation this AM) and I think it looks great! I am interested to see what you do with it if you further choose to tweak it…I am super excited that you are powering through all the lessons and are bold enough to try out what you’ve learned. I think it’s paying off! Good work
May 9th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
I’m on chapter 4 of Kelby’s 7 Point System. I find that I’m doing the lessons step by step but I really don’t understand what I’m doing or why. The book does not provide much explaination. I have picked up a few tricks that I never knew, like increasing the black level to make the photo less flat.
May 10th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Dagny,
By Chapter 4 I was just going along. I didn’t understand either. By chapter 21 I anticipated every change, and at times didn’t read his suggestions first. I did the changes, then looked at his suggestions.
The one hard part….having an eye for the next change. Do I go brighter? Do I go darker? More orange? More blue? In the end, that’s up to us. Some mild experimentation on our part. Clearly Kelby has been doing it for a while, so he’s got the jump on us. But really, I think in time I’ll “develop” my own sense of how I remember the scene, and get it to an accurate depiction if I need to.
Still, I always feel weird about editing my photos. But I’m learning, and reminding myself it’s an artistic endeavor.
Keep reading, and tell me if you “get it” by 21 like I did.