The Wonder Of Light

I’ve been asked the very same question a million different ways by a million different photographers (perhaps a small exaggeration in the numbers.. but you get the point!). Does a photographers ability in Photoshop supersede his/her ability to actually take a photograph? Is Photoshop a more important step than the actual image capture itself? Indeed, is it possible to produce a “winning image” without the use of Photoshop? Unfortunately the answer is both yes and no! But let me try and explain…

First and foremost, I am a firm believer in trying to get things right in camera. Good camera technique will help ensure your photos are exposed well and are sharp where they need to be. The photographer should really focus on everything from how they hold the camera (or mount it on a tripod) all the way through to paying close attention to shutter speed, aperture and ISO so that the correct highlight and shadow details are maintained. In addition to this, composition needs to be considered, as does the finer details like what should and shouldn’t be included in the shot. There really is no substitute in post processing for any of the above. Sure, Photoshop offers the photographers many features to help adjust or alter many of the aforementioned considerations, but if you get it right in camera, there’s no need for this additional and likely unnecessary step.

But once we have captured the image, what then Is Photoshop required Can Photoshop change an average shot into a special shot Are all special shots the result of Photoshop more so than the result of good photography Well first and foremost, if you shoot RAW, then some degree of post processing is required, so the chances are your image will require some editing in Photoshop or a similar editor. But these steps are really just the same steps your camera performs anyway when producing a JPG image, i.e. assigning it to a colour space profile, sharpening, adjusting contrast and changing saturation. Anything beyond these steps, or indeed only applying these steps to particular parts of an image and you enter the world of retouching and it is retouching I want to talk about here. Hopefully from below you’ll see how little is actually needed to polish or finish an image in Photoshop, if you’ve taken the effort to take the shot correctly in the first place.

The image above is a natural light portrait of the model Sara McCall. I use Adobe Camera Raw as my RAW converter and as you can see, I have changed very few of the image adjustment settings. When I took the shot, I paid close attention to the exposure, so in post processing there is no need to adjust exposure. In this case, I have adjusted the brightness (which is a gamma adjustment as opposed to an exposure adjustment) as well as adding some fill light, lifting the shadows somewhat. Positioning wise, I shot Sara against a plain white wall, so the background was reasonably simple and for even more isolation I shot pretty much wide open (f:2.8) to throw the background out of focus.

Within Photoshop I tend to use a non-destructive editing technique, making heavy use of layers. This really allows me to revisit different different points in my editing process and make changes if required. So once I’ve made a back up of the background layer, I’m ready to start editing. One of the first steps I perform when working on a portrait is to process the subjects skin. Obviously, the better the skin that your model has, the less work you have to do here. Similarly, working with a good make-up artist that understands the photographic process, can be an enormous benefit and can save a lot of post processing time.  I do use the Portaiture plug-in from Imagenomic which is yet another time saver. It’s a pretty terrific tool when used subtly and carefully and so far I’ve been very pleased with the results it produces.

Once the skin has been retouched and things like stray hairs have been removed, the next step in my process is to boost contrast and then sharpen. I tend to use USM (unsharp masking) to boost local contrast – commonly called local contrast enhancement or defogging. If needs be, after this I will also tweak levels and in some very rare cases, use curves. This is typically a global step, applied to the whole image, where as the next step; sharpening is selectively applied. Zooming in to 100%, I sharpen the image (again using USM) and always consider the fact that I am sharpening for print at this point. Then using a mask, I either paint in or paint out the areas where I want this sharpening to be applied to within the image.

And thats pretty much it Some final tweaks to saturation (in this case I boosted the red in Sara’s hair) and a touch of levels to increase brightness. But all in all it’s about 10 minutes work, most of which are steps that would be carried out by the camera anyway, had I been shooting JPG. Now all this is a moot point if the final image couldn’t be considered a “winning” image, but assuming it is, then there is very little done in Photoshop. The framing/cropping was done in camera. The exposure was handled in camera as was the white balance. Careful framing and my choice of aperture helped ensure a clean uncluttered background. Photoshop in this case really just served to polish the image. So to answer the question.. “Does someone need Photoshop in order to produce a winning image?” my answer would have to be “No”.. but it does help

If all the above is just a touch too heavy to read, I’ve explained it on video below

Related posts:

1. Retouching?
2. My Photoshop Actions
3. Unsharp masking & Iran (2007) revisited.
4. My Photoshop Actions
5. My Attempt At Beauty

Tags: colour, photoshop, portrait, retouching, sarah, video

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 3:50 pm and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.