Here’s a photograph I randomly snapped on a tennis court a few days ago:

It was taken with my Sony DSC-P200, a 7.2 megapixel point-and-shoot camera released back in 2005. Compared to my Canon 40D, the image quality is much less contrasty, and much duller. One of the things I like to do to quickly and easily improve photos from the P200 is to process the JPEGs in Adobe Camera Raw as though they were RAW files (though it’s less flexible compared to if you shot a RAW file).

In Adobe Bridge, you can right click the photograph and click “Open in Camera Raw…”, or press Ctrl+R.

This allows you to use the sliders and tools provided by ACR rather than processing the JPEG in Photoshop.

For this particular photograph, I made the following edits:

White Balance and Exposure : Unchanged. I liked the warm look of the photo, and the exposure looked fine.
Recovery: +50. Certain areas of the photograph were clipped due to the harsh sunlight. By sliding recovery upwards I can get some of the detail back in those areas (like the glow on the side of the tennis ball).
Fill Light: +20. I wanted to boost some of the shadow areas to make the difference between shadow and highlight less pronounced. Moving recovery and fill light up helps to even out this difference. Careful though… too much of either will make your photograph look either murky or strange.
Blacks: +10. Look at the photograph. There doesn’t seem to be any black, and everything’s gray. Increase the black point to where the darkest of those gray pixels become black.
Contrast: +70. We lost a lot of contrast when evening out the shadows and highlights via the recovery and fill light sliders. Get this contrast back with the contrast slider (or the tone curve section for more control).
Clarity: +30. For photographs with a murkiness due to near-direct sunlight, I’ve found that increasing clarity helps to improve the look of certain areas, like the hairs of the tennis ball.
Vibrance and Saturation: Unchanged. I could have dropped one of them to make the colors more natural, but I liked how it looks a little over-saturated.

Here’s the final condition of these main sliders:

I also did sharpening amount +80 and lens vignetting -50.

Here’s the final result of fiddling with 7 sliders total in ACR (hover over it to compare it to the untouched image):

Using Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom/Aperture) to post-process your JPGs is a really quick and easy way to give them an extra boost.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please leave a comment!

See you all next Monday, when we post an interview with Otto Kitchens.

Happy shooting!

A few weeks ago, I was taking photographs of my friend Tommy at his Berkeley graduation using a Canon 40D and the 24mm f/2.8. I had originally purchased the 24mm as part of a package and was planning on selling it off, but decided to keep it after being shocked by its quality and versatility. Anyhow, here’s an unprocessed photograph of my friends Tommy and Jacob I took right after the graduation:

It was a pretty cloudy day, which was definitely a plus in terms of lighting. I shot the photo wide open at f/2.8, which blurred the background enough to bring out the subjects, but not too much in order to keep the campanile recognizable. In terms of framing, I positioned myself so that

1. The subjects obey the rule of thirds.
2. The campanile is framed by the Hass School of Business gate.

Finally, in terms of timing, I waiting until the balloons floated to a visible position above the subjects, since the slight wind was blowing them around.

Now, opening the image in Adobe Camera Raw, I made the following post-processing decisions:

White Balance: Increased temperature from 4950 to 5450 (you can hold shift and press the right arrow key) to bring some warmth back into the scene, since it’s pretty cool. Left the tint unchanged at -2. Hover over the image to compare:

Exposure: Left unchanged, since the photo was exposed pretty well.

Recovery, Fill Light, and Blacks: Now, pressing ‘U’ and ‘O’ to turn on shadow and highlight clipping warning (respectively), we see the following:

Camera Raw (You can do these things in Lightroom and Aperture too, of course) overlays the image in certain places with blue and red pixels to indicate where shadows and highlights are clipped (where information is lost). The three values we use to try and recover as much of this lost information as we can are “recovery”, “fill light”, and “blacks”. Holding Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) while dragging recovery or blacks will temporarily replace the actual image with a black background, allowing you to see the clipped pixels more clearly.

First, we slide recovery over to 16. I notice that after 16, there isn’t much more detail being recovered no matter how much more I increase the value. Setting recovery to too high of a value results in a muddy looking photograph.

To recover shadow details, we add a little fill light by setting it to 10. This removes most of the black clipping pixels. We can then recover most of the rest by dropping the blacks value down a few points to 2.

What results is an image with more detail, but less contrast. Hover over it to compare:

Notice how the dark shadows became a little lighter, the sky became a little more blue, and the overall difference between dark and light areas became less pronounced.

Contrast, Clarity, Vibrance, Sharpness, and Vignetting: To get back the contrast we lost in the process of recovering detail, I move the contrast slider over to the right until it looks right. In this case, I set it at 80. The clarity value can make things like the campanile and edges of the building more defined. I slide it up to 25. Vibrance I increase by 15 to make things a little more colorful. Finally, I sharpen the photo a little and add some lens vignetting to make the subjects stand out more.

Here is the final photograph. Hover over it to compare it to the original, unprocessed version:

If you have questions, suggestions, or other remarks, please leave a comment! I’d love to hear from you.

This entry will describe my thought process when editing a portrait, though it could apply to general photos too.

Here’s the original photo I will be working with straight out of camera (i.e. RAW but processed to JPEG without any edits using Adobe Standard for color settings).

My initial reaction is that it’s underexposed on the skin. Then I notice that it’s crooked, but that doesn’t bother me too much in this picture. I also notice that it’s a bit on the cold side. (Read: Check exposure, composition, and white balance. Not necessarily in that order).

So I make some really basic edits. Since I’m not going to crop or rotate (I usually worry about composition first), I increase the exposure until I like where the skin tones are (while making the WB a bit warmer). Sometimes I’ll use fill light or recovery depending on the situation but in this case increasing the exposure was sufficient. In the end, it’s about making the skin look as I want (and harsh change in dynamic range on the skin usually looks bad but it’s not a problem in this picture). The next thing I usually do is to play with the black clipping and contrast until I’m happy. However the contrast in this picture is already to my taste so I didn’t touch anything. Then I sharpen using preset sharpening in LR. I usually don’t change the preset sharpening unless I think it looks bad. So here’s the picture after those edits (hover over to compare):

Now take a look at the following picture. Can you figure out the two things I did to finish it off? (Hover your mouse over it to compare)

The first edit is a bit more obvious than the second. I added a lens correction vignette to the outside. I do this to most of my images and it’s more of a personal taste thing (and to bring the subject out more) than anything else. The second edit is a bit harder to catch, but it’s all in the eyes…

Did you catch it? Look at his eyes. Often for single person portraits, I will do spot editing on the whites of the eyes to make them a bit whiter because they tend to be shaded in soft lighting due to eyebrows/eyelashes/eyelids.

That is all! Of course, this isn’t comprehensive in any way but is just an example of how I typically think and how I thought about this picture.

This article was originally published here.

Here’s a photograph I took today while hiking with friends on the Bailey Cove Trailhead in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest:

Since I wanted to capture the small flowers flying off of the dandelion as my friend blew it, I needed to separate them from the busy background by using the smallest depth of field possible (in this case, it was f/2.8). This blurred the dry grass in the background enough to make the flying dandelion flowers stand out more.

While this photograph captured what I intended to, it still needs a good amount of post-processing work. First, notice that white balance is off, my friend’s face is blown out, and that certain areas of the photograph are too dark. We can correct these things (and add a little vibrance) with the following settings (shown in Adobe Camera RAW):

These changes result in the following image (hover your mouse over it to compare it with the original):

Now we can finish off this basic post-processing improvement by increasing sharpness a little, tweaking the hue of the yellow grass in the background, and adding some vignetting. This is what results (hover to compare):

You’ve probably heard many of the common arguments people give for whether to shoot in JPEG or RAW. When people discover the power of RAW, they usually never go back to shooting purely in JPEG. Sure, RAW files are enormous compared to JPEGs, the whole process will take you longer, and you’ll definitely need much more storage in terms of external hard drives and memory cards, but I definitely feel like the benefits of shooting in RAW outweigh the costs.

One such benefit is the fact that you can easily post-process the images non-destructively, meaning you can always go back to the original RAW image whenever you want to later down the road. You can do the same thing for JPEGs, but it’s much easier to accidentally overwrite the original file, and much harder to process the image again in exactly the same way you did before.

Why this non-destructive processing is useful, is that when you improve your processing skills and techniques, you can return to your older images as if they were just taken off your camera.

Take this photograph for example:

My friend David took this photograph during a trip to Pacifica Beach in California. A few weeks later, he decided to return to the photograph and bring out the textures in the sand. Here’s what resulted:

How about another example? Back in July 2008, I took some portraits of my cousin Perry. Here’s what the original image looked like (the untouched RAW):

To edit the image back then, I chose to do most of the editing on the converted JPEG using Photoshop. Here’s what I did at the time:

Since then, I’ve switched to doing most of my post-processing on the RAW file in Adobe Camera RAW, rather than doing them on the processed JPEG in Photoshop. Revisiting the photo, here’s what I would do now:

As you can see, my newer version of the image is sharper, more vibrant, and more detailed in areas such as his hair. Shooting in RAW allows your older images to improve easily as your post-processing skills improve, which is definitely one of the biggest advantages I’ve experienced from shooting RAW. Even if you don’t work directly with RAW files yet, shooting in that format will leave the door open for you to revisit the original image sometime in the future if you decide to start working with RAWs.