The Discerning Photographer » Software

Photoshop Basics: Dodge & Burn, Part II

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 08:30:46 +0000

In Part I of our tutorial for Photoshop dodging and burning, we looked at the traditional way of accomplishing this basic digital darkroom technique, as well as a tweak that involved the Lab Lightness color space. Today we’ll examine a newer method that involves layers to produce the effect, without actually manipulating the pixels of the original image (and thus, ‘non-destructive’ in its approach).

A DIFFERENT ‘NONDESTRUCTIVE’ APPROACH

This second, newer method is a way to burn and dodge that’s become available in the newer versions of Photoshop now on the market. It involves creating a new layer on top of your original image and doing the work on that layer, thus not actually altering the pixels of the original version. I’ll explain how to do it now:

STEP BY STEP INSTRUCTIONS

Starting with the same image, I would first still run my basic Levels adjustment:

Then, go to Layer>New Layer. When the New Layer dialogue box comes up, change the Mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Soft Light’. Check ofF the box for ‘Fill with Soft-Light-neutral color (50% gray)’. Click the OK button.

Now select the Brush tool. Check the Brush size and opacity—start with an opacity of 30% or so—and click the foreground/background selector at the bottom of the Tools tab to make white the foreground color.

Now you can click and drag the brush around the part of the image you want to lighten. If you have areas that need burning as well, click the Foreground/Background color swatch again to put the black swatch on top. Now, with the same 30% opacity selected as your starting point, click and drag over the parts of the image that are too light. I promise that you’ll be amazed at the results! If you need a bit more burn or dodge, change the opacity—making it 45% or 50%–and click and drag again over the same area.

If you find that the burn or dodge is still insufficient, you can just create another new layer with the same parameters and add another level of burn/dodge to what you’ve already done. The original image is still untouched, down below the layers that you’ve created.

My suggestion for saving this type of file: save out the layered version as a Photoshop file. I usually include the word ‘layers’ in the file name, so I won’t confuse it with a flattened version.

Now create a duplicate of the file by going to ‘Image>Duplicate’. Name the new version something slightly different, flatten this version (‘Layer>Flatten Image’) and let this be your working file to print, email, etc.

Hi, I’m Andrew Boyd, a.k.a. The Discerning Photographer, and I hope this post has been interesting and informative. Please leave me a comment about it, let me know what you’d like to see more of on the site! You can also sign up for email delivery of all future articles or my RSS feed. Thanks!–DiscerningPhotog

Related articles on the web:

Non-destructive dodge and burn at photoshopessentials.com

Dodge or burn areas at help.adobe.com

Photoshop Dodge and Burn at Youtube.com

Photoshop Basics: Two Ways to Dodge and Burn

DiscerningPhotog — Tue, 29 Mar 2011 08:00:38 +0000

THE TRADITIONAL APPROACH

Becoming proficient at dodging and burning ranks high on the list of basic Photoshop skills that all beginning PS users need to master. This tutorial gets complicated, because we’re going to look at two ways to handle this basic chore. So today I’ll show you the time-honored ‘traditional’ method to dodge and burn in Photoshop. Then tomorrow we’ll run a second article looking at a newer, ‘nondestructive’ way to accomplish the same thing.

DODGING AND BURNING: TERMINOLOGY

First though: ‘Dodging’ a photograph refers to an old darkroom technique in which something was held in the path of the enlarger’s light source – a coin soldered on a length of clothes hanger wire was a common dodge tool—to lessen the amount of light hitting a particular area of the light-sensitive paper. This resulted in a lightening of that area in the final print. Under a person’s cap, where a face might be in shadow, would be a good example of something that might require dodging.

‘Burning’ was the opposite: darkening part of a photo print, by adding extra light from the enlarger on specific parts of the photo paper. A sky might need some ‘burning down’ to look good, or possibly a white shirt; many photographers always burned the edges of their photos 10-15% to ensure that there would be a bit of tone there. Burning was usually done just with your hands, making holes for light to pass through, or simply holding up a fist when you wanted to burn around the edge of the print.

DODGING AND BURNING INSTRUCTIONS

Photoshop has retained these old icons and terms for digital burning and dodging. We’ll start by dodging and burning a backlit photograph that’s also a bit underexposed. When accomplishing this in Photoshop, you’ll be choosing the Dodge tool from the toolbar, selecting a Brush Size that’s appropriate for your image, selecting a ‘Range’ (Shadow, Midtone or Highlight that you want to affect) and selecting an ‘Exposure’ percentage. A good starting place to learn this technique will be with the proper-sized brush (you’ll see the brush size appear as a circle on your image as you change the brush size), and the Range set for Midtone and the Exposure set for 20%.

This will give you discernable results without doing too much damage if it’s wrong for the image. Now click and drag your mouse around the area that you want to dodge. It’s very important to keep the Dodge circle moving! If you sit in one place you won’t get smooth results.

Burning does just the opposite: areas that you click and drag with the ‘Burn’ tool will get darker. Here you’ll want to first make the same choices on the brush settings. A good place to start will once again be 20% on the Exposure, set for the Midtones range of the image. A word of caution: dodging and burning in the Highlights and Shadow ranges can be tricky! It’s easy to take both of these too far, resulting in visible ‘halos’ for dodges or overly dark ‘Hand of God’ darkened skies with burns. So proceed cautiously! In the example photograph, I’m burning just the top, brightest parts of the background, up around the windows behind my subjects.

[Note: I explain a related dodge/burn technique in another post that describes using the Lab Lightness color channel for a more sophisticated burn/dodge approach; try that once you’ve mastered this straightforward way to do it in the standard RGB color space.]

Using HDR Technique in a ‘Traditional’ Photograph

DiscerningPhotog — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 12:39:57 +0000

THE NEW ZONE SYSTEM

Most of what is written about HDR photography, and most of the resulting photographs, center upon the ‘Wow’ factor made possible by the technology: wildly surrealistic color, super-saturated subject matter, out-of-this-world, ‘cartoony’ results. I don’t have a problem with those who love making these fantasy photographs; it’s just not what drives me or my shooting. But I do love what the technology has made possible: truly extending the dynamic range of information that can be captured in an image.

Thinking back to Ansel Adams’ Zone System of exposure for classic black and white photography, I’m convinced that if he were still shooting today, Adams would be using HDR techniques in his work.

This sunrise image is a good example of what I’m thinking about. I saw this composition last week while making pictures on a wet, foggy morning. The light coming through the live oak trees was fantastic, but what I could see with my eyes—the sun’s orb just visible through the mist set against the dark subtle tones of the tree trunk—did not translate at all in a single image, even on RAW setting.

So I did what HDR makes possible: I shot a bracket of exposures. At ISO 50 and f7.1 with my Canon 70-200mm lens, I shot 1/500th, 1/250^th, 1/125^th, 1/60^th, 1/30^th, and 1/15^th second exposures of this scene, all in quick succession. I determined the high end-the 1/500^th sec exposure—based upon what was needed to record the sun. The low end—1/15^th sec exposure—was needed to pick up detail in the darkest parts of the tree. Then it was simply a matter of filling in the exposures in between.

I used the File>Automate>Merge to HDR Pro feature in Photoshop CS5, although you could do this with other software products. The resulting image gives me something very akin to what I could see with my naked eye.

Developing a Photoshop Workflow

DiscerningPhotog — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 09:30:55 +0000

This image shows the results of a standardized workflow with a histogram adjustment and crop in Photoshop. The original untoned image is visible on the right with the toned version on the left. (Copyright 2011 / Andrew Boyd)

STANDARDIZE YOUR APPROACH

Do you have a Photoshop workflow? A set processing approach that you always start out with? If you don’t, you need to develop one. It will form the jumping-off point for further image toning, but with a set approach, you’ll always be starting with properly-toned basic images. What follows is my Photoshop workflow for non-RAW files.

Open the image in Photoshop. Well, this is obvious.

Go to Image>Adjustments>Levels. (Cmd-L Mac, Cntrl-L Windows)

In Levels, bring the Shadow and Highlight sliders just in to the edges of the histogram ‘mountain.’ Hit okay.

Levels is so critical because of what it represents. The histogram ‘mountain’ takes your photograph and turns it into a two-dimensional graph with shadows on the left, midtones in the middle and highlights on the right. A properly toned image almost always* needs a real black tone (96-100% black with the eyedropper, grayscale K value), and a true white (0-5% white). By adjusting the shadow and highlight sliders right to the edge of the tonal ‘mountain,’ you create an image that will print properly and look good with the proper tonal and contrast range.

[* ‘almost always’: with some high key images, you may find you have a histogram with an abundance of highlight information. But even then, I think you’ll usually find that the toned image looks better if somewhere in that image you still have a solid black, however small it might be.]

Select the Crop tool. I like to make my default image resolution 300 dpi, so I’ll insert that in the box at the top of my window at this time. The largest I ordinarily print anything is 18 inches on the long axis, (on an R1900 Epson), so I’ll frequently go ahead and insert that information too. Make your crop now.

Now go to ‘Save As’ under the File menu.

I like to have a destination folder for images that I like, that I think I might want to print. Or conversely, maybe you have a different holding bin set up for these photos. I’ll usually include a date in the file name as well to help me keep things straight.

So maybe this image becomes ‘BoatDock1_021611’; that would be the first boat dock image saved out on February 16, 2011.

That’s it for the basic workflow.

THE IMPORTANCE OF ‘IMAGE>DUPLICATE’

Beyond this, lots of things might happen. If I had an image that I liked but wanted to tone a few different ways, the safe approach is always to go back to your saved, basic toned image, and first go to Image>Duplicate before you start. That way you haven’t lost your starting point since you may not like what you come up with. If the new toned image contained extra image layers (and most of mine will), then I’ll save out that file always as a .psd Photoshop file.

I frequently make conversions to an RGB black and white version using the Black/White tool in Adjustment Layers. This is something that would also get added as an experiment to a duplicate version of an image that had the basic toning done.

I also make web versions of images for articles like this one. Those get recropped 600 pixels wide @ 72dpi. 600 pixels is the width of the content well here at The Discerning Photographer, so that’s my standard size for these photos. So I’ll usually end up with large and small versions of the images.

What about you? Do you have a standardized Photoshop workflow? Or do you do your basic toning in Lightroom? Some other software package?

Related articles on the web:

Photoshop Workflow at The Luminous Landscape A much, much more involved workflow. This is the advanced, graduate-school version!

A Photoshop Workflow from Adobe. This is a downloadable pdf file.

Photographic Workflow from Lightroom to Photoshop from Layers Magazine.

How to Use the Info Palette with Eyedropper to Tone Your Photos in Photoshop

DiscerningPhotog — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 08:30:11 +0000

Have you ever noticed how sometimes you’ll shoot something and it will come out with a funny color cast? Maybe it was a mixed light situation (daylight and florescent, for instance) and your camera had to choose between two at-odds color temperatures. Or maybe you were shooting in blueish open shade and it looked okay to your eye but now the images look really, really blue. What to do? The answer is to tone the photograph in Photoshop; to know where to start, you need to set up your Info palette and use the Eyedropper tool.

First you need to properly configure your Info palette. This will give you clues about the overall density in different areas of your image (densitometer settings) and tell you something about the current color breakdown of your image, very helpful if you’re trying to correct a color cast.

Panel Options2" src="http://thediscerningphotographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/InfoPanel-Options2.png" alt="Go to Window>Info, then click the small triangle in the upper right corner and choose 'Panel Options.'" width="600" height="445" />

Go to Window>Info, then click the small triangle in the upper right corner and choose 'Panel Options.'

First go to Window>Info to open up your Info palette. Click the small triangle in the upper right hand corner of the palette box. Choose ‘Panel Options’ from the list of choices. This will open up your Info Panel Options dialogue box.

Set Panel Options" src="http://thediscerningphotographer.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/InfoSet-Panel-Options.png" alt="Change the first readout choice to 'Greyscale' from RGB. This will give you an accurate densitometer for viewing and judging your image's overall tonal range and values. (Copyright 2010 / Andrew Boyd)" width="600" height="395" />

For the First Color Readout , change this pulldown to ‘Grayscale.’ This will give you an accurate and useful densitometer reading as your first readout when looking over an image. Click OK to close this box.

Now select the Eyedropper from the Photoshop Tools group (if it’s not already selected). Take the eyedropper and use it to find something in your image that should be a neutral color. Grey is best although you can also use white or black. With the Info Panel open on your screen, you can now see the CMYK balance percentages for your current photograph. In this example image, my Cyan(blue) is much too high, relative to my Magenta and Yellow numbers. This tells me right away that I need to adjust the overall Cyan down.

Using Color Balance and watching my 'Before/After' CMYK percentages while sampling a neutral area with the Eyedropper, you can quickly see how your toning adjustments are working out. (Copyright 2010 / Andrew Boyd)

Open Color Balance (Control/Apple B, or Image>Adjustments>Color Balance). Make sure you have the Preview box checked. Push the Yellow/Blue slider towards Yellow and the Cyan/Red slider towards Red. (I always start with the default Midtones, but sometimes it’s useful to also adjust Shadows and Highlights here.) You can see your results in the Info Palette, giving you an effective ‘Before/After’ readout in percentages as you make the changes. You want the CMY percentages to be closer together for a good neutral tone, although it’s not necessary to get too literal here. Make the changes and watch your results as you go. You’ll find the right balance by using these tools and judging your results.

That’s it! It’s really quite simple, but very few Photoshop users understand how to use this basic, fundamental tool. Give it a try, I promise you’ll see better control and toning in your results.

Photoshop Image Toning: A Journey, Not Just a Destination

DiscerningPhotog — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:21:57 +0000

I shot some images of a dying banana plant last week, posting one of them here on The Discerning Photographer the other day. I went back to that shoot yesterday, thinking there might be some other things worth toning and saving. I found something that I thought had possibilities and decided to work on it. The results, shown here, look nothing like the first image. Why such different results from the same basic shoot? I thought it might be instructive to walk through my thought process and the toning journey I took with this photograph.

The first image was pretty straightforward. I loved the subtle richness in the banana leaf and the way the tonality broke across the frame, going from parchment off-white to the yellows. Toning it was a simple process: adjusting levels, tweaking curves, doing a little sharpening and adding the black border. ( ‘A Basic Photoshop Toning Recipe’ here on the site explains this process.)

This second image, above right, was more complicated. Right away, I liked the composition but didn’t like the color. The greens and yellows in the image didn’t seem to work. I had passed over this frame before when doing the first edit. But what about some black and white version? I thought it was worth trying.

First I went into Window>Adjustments to bring up the Adjustment Layers palette. This non-destructive work environment is something I’ve written about extensively in the past, and if you haven’t worked with Adjustment Layers, I urge you to give it a try. The Black and White Adjustment Layer was my interest here: the image, while still an RGB, is organized as a black and white, with color sliders for all areas of the file. By experimenting here, you can create some dramatically different versions of your image, giving you amazing control over the final version. I also played with the Levels and Brightness/Contrast Adjustment Layers, upping the final contrast of the file.

But I still wasn’t satisfied. This photograph needed something else. I saw it in sepia tones for some reason, and decided to try putting an antique patina on it.

Since the file was still an RGB, this is an easy adjustment. Opening the Color Balance dialogue box (Image>Adjustments>Color Balance, or Cmd>B), I added Yellow and Red in all three areas: Shadows, Midtones and Highlights.

Finally, I thought the area seen through the opening in the banana leaf would be more interesting if sharpened and brightened a bit. I did this by duplicating the overall layer, sharpening the underneath layer with Smart Sharpen (Filter>Sharpen>Smart Sharpen), then bringing that area up by going back to the top layer and using the Mask feature to ‘paint’ the opening into the top layer.

Now for a black border and presto! I had an image that I liked.

But is this the only creative solution? Of course not! Photoshop is such a fabulous, intuitive toning program. I’m sure that if I toned the image again next week, I’d come up with something else entirely. It’s one of the wonderful things about this whole toning process isn’t it? As much a journey as a destination.

What about you? Do you have any images that you’ve revisited later and toned differently? Maybe your Photoshop skill level improved and you wanted to try a new technique. Or maybe you just came to see the image differently. I’d be curious to hear how you go about your Photoshop toning….

Related Articles on the Web

Discover Seven Ways to Create Sepia Images in Photoshop at Digital Photography School

The Top Five Black and White Photography Tips at Epic Edits

Black and White Toning in Photoshop CS3 at Layers Magazine

How to Automate a Batch of Photos in Photoshop

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:30:54 +0000

If you’re like me, there are some repetitive tasks that you do over and over with Photoshop. Lots of these tasks can be performed with Actions scripts, which I’ve explained in another post here on The Discerning Photographer. But what if you have a whole folder full of images that all need the same thing done to them? Then you want to ‘Automate a Batch.’

I do this a lot when preparing a gallery of images for web use. Maybe they’re all 10 inches wide and 300 dpi to start and I only need 600 pixels at 72dpi for my web site. Putting all that extra resolution online will slow you down, fill up your server and give thieves direct access to your hi res images, so not a good idea. A batch action will solve this problem and take almost no time to run. Here’s how.

Have all of the ‘source’ images that you want to automate in one folder.

Create a second empty ‘destination’ folder that you will send the images to once the Action script runs.

Then go to File>Automate>Batch. This will open up the Automation window.

From the pulldown at the top, choose the Action script that you want performed on all of the images. (You’re limited to the Actions that you’ve created, obviously.)

Now choose a ‘Source’ folder.

Choose a ‘Destination’ folder. Hit the OK button. Your images will rapidly open in Photoshop, have the specified Action performed upon them, and a new copy will be sent to the Destination folder.

Your original images will be untouched, still available to you in the ‘Source’ folder.

Try this with one of your repetitive tasks and I think you’ll find that it can be a huge timesaver. You’ll probably find new Actions that you want to record and save, just to take advantage of this great feature.

Photoshop RGB to Black & White: Which Images Should You Convert?

DiscerningPhotog — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 11:25:37 +0000

Shooting in the Washington, D.C. area, visiting museums, I found myself drawn to images that were generated out of the great architecture that has been created to house our Capitol’s wonderful collection of museums. Lots of these images turned out to be still life in nature, details that emphasized the form, shape and light that I was finding interesting. Then it came to me: I should make this a series of black and white images.

Black and White: we have a choice now, in this digital age, don’t we? Not long ago, we shot either black and white or color film, making a decision on the front end of the creative process that we never questioned down the line. In fact, deciding to shoot black and white impacted the way we ‘saw’ images from the beginning: form and shades of gray and composition took complete precedence over color when you knew you had black and white film loaded in the camera.

Nowadays this isn’t so obvious or so easy. Usually we walk around with the RGB default version of reality dialed in with our digital cameras, and at least for me, in my brain. The decision to make it a ‘black and white day’ is rarely made in advance. Today I stumbled upon this realization—that today’s images should be processed as black and white—late in the day, after I had done most of the shooting.

I was in the Hirshhorn Museum, shooting up at an interesting composition of lights, railings and short half-walls, when I realized I was really looking at a color, black and white photograph. Immediately I realized that most of my photographs from today would work better as black and white. I made the leap, and here are the results.

Incidentally, if you’re going to do color/grayscale conversions in Photoshop, you owe it to yourself to learn to do them using the Adjustment Layers flavor of black and white. I’ve written about how to utilize adjustment layers elsewhere on this blog, so I won’t go into detail about it here. But it’s clearly a superior way to work on black and white versions of your images. I find the Yellow and Red channels provide most of the control over tone, along with Blue and Cyan to a lesser degree.

So what about you? Do you ever shoot straight-up black and white anymore? When/how do you decide to convert an image to black and white? If so, which conversion method in Photoshop is your favorite?

HDR Imaging: Is There a Point, Past Which, It’s Really No Longer a Photograph?

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:00:51 +0000

HDR image from Splashology's '100 Mind Blowing HDR Photography' article: http://www.splashnology.com/blog/photography/470.html No photo credit given for this image.

There’s been a lot of buzz online recently about HDR and ethics: is HDR okay for photojournalists to use? Dennis Hayes wrote a piece on the Black Star photo agency blog (Black Star Rising) about this, referencing a recent piece about HDR in the New York Times by John Tierney.

While this is a question that all news organizations need to ponder, it got me thinking about something else: is there a point with an HDR ‘creation’ when the thing pretty much ceases to be a photograph?

HDR image from Splashology's '100 Mind Blowing HDR Photography' article: http://www.splashnology.com/blog/photography/470.html Photo by D.A. Mandale.

Stay with me for a moment on this. So much of the HDR work that’s out there is so overdone, cartoonish in tone. It really bears very little resemblance to the scene that was photographed. Sure, this is a cool thing to look at (sometimes). But is it still photography? Or is it really illustration?

This depends upon your definition, of course. Sure you say, it’s a photograph. It was made with a camera and a series of exposures, combined together to show this incredibly cool ‘effect.’ But back to my question: can you take the post processing too far?

'Wet Rocks, Dusky Tones' by PhotoToasty from a set called 'Subtle HDR' at Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/phototoasty/254325520/in/set-72157594225970774. I like this one!

I guess for me, I want images that speak to me, inspire me and communicate to me about the world around me. When the image becomes a cartoon, a ‘look how cool this is’ image in which the subject matter is almost secondary to the effect, I become quickly bored.

'The Great Beach, South HDR' by Andrionni Ribo on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/reversezer0/2296507048/. This is beautiful.

Take any photo, and spend enough time on your computer with the filters that come in Photoshop, and you can create something that ceases to be about what you photographed. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I think maybe at that point it’s more illustration than photograph.

I find some HDR images very compelling. They tend to be the ones that use the technique to extend the dynamic range in a subtle way, rather than a garish one. These images were good compositions to start with anyway.

But I have little use for the ‘over the top’ variety, images that remind me of airbrushed graphic novel covers more than photographs.

What do you think? Am I completely off base on this? Does this make me a Neolithic dinosaur? How do you like your HDR? Straight-up or with all the bells and whistles?

Related articles on the web:

Is HDR Imaging Ethical for Photojournalists? at Black Star Rising

What’s Wrong With This Picture? at The New York Times/TierneyLab

7 Reasons HDR is Here to Stay and Why That’s a Good Thing at Lightstalking

HDR Tutorial at Stuck in Customs

How to Correct Perspective in Photoshop

DiscerningPhotog — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 08:00:16 +0000

When shooting buildings with a wide angle lens, you may be confronted with lens foreshortening. This is distortion that occurs when you have to shoot from too-close with the lens pointing up: maybe you don’t have room to back up ( a common occurrence). The result is a photo in which the top of the building is distorted, appearing too small, as if it’s falling backwards.

The traditional fix for this problem was to shoot the photograph with a view camera. By keeping the camera level and raising the front lens standard, you were able to shift the photograph vertically, accommodating the height of the object in front of you. Tilt/shift lenses for 35 mm cameras accomplished the same thing on a more limited scale by allowing you to shift the front element. (But pricey! Ouch!)

Fortunately, there’s a really great way to accomplish this right in Photoshop. Here I’ve shot a simple building from down too low, with my 16-35mm lens pointed up at the subject. The result gets the whole building in, but the result is distorted.

Using the Rectangular Marquee Selection tool, draw a box around the distorted object, making sure to leave some room around the edges.
Now go to Edit>Transform>Perspective.

Click and drag from one of the top corners of the image left or right. You’ll see the top of your selected area begin to resize itself. Stop when your vertical lines look vertical. Hit Enter.

The top of your photo may now look likes it’s ‘squished’ down. If so, go immediately (before you lose your ‘crawling ants’ selection) to Edit>Transform>Scale.

Click on the top line of your selected area and pull it straight up. You’ll see your selected area resize again, but this time it’s contents will start to regain their proper perspective. Stop dragging when things look right. Hit Enter.

Now select your Crop Tool. Carefully crop your image from inside your selected, transformed area. Hit Enter.

Ta-dahh! You’ve fixed it, without spending thousands on view camera equipment.

Related articles on the web:

Avoiding and Correcting Linear Distortion in Buildings at Phototuts+

9 Architectural Photography Tips at Digital Photography School

Perspective Adjustment in Photoshop at Luminous Landscape