Time for another in my Before and After series: I’m taking some of my best images and processing them through my workflow step by step so everyone can see what came out of the camera and how it is turned into the final image. (Look here to see all of the tutorials in the series)

The purpose is to explain my processes and techniques in the hopes that all of you will be able to borrow some of them for your own work, and because I hope to get feedback from you on techniques I haven’t discovered yet that will improve my own images.

I’d love to hear what you think of these articles and whether you find them possible. If you have questions on any aspect of them, please leave a comment or drop me an email.

Here’s today’s image as I originally published it. We’re not going to reproduce this, we’re going to start over with the raw and process it from scratch, so the final result will be different (and perhaps better). We’ll find out together…

But first, a digression on this image

This is an image that is one of my favorites, but which doesn’t get much love online. It’s a classic example of the kind of image that the big move to online viewing hurts: the colors are subtle and muted, the attraction of the image is in detail, and most of that detail is lost at online viewing sizes and when reduced to the ubiquitous thumbnail size or on the screen of your iPhone, it becomes a meaningless orangish blob.

But print this puppy at 8×10 or 11×14, and sit down and look at it, and the image is glorious. On paper, this is one of my most popular images. On screen, it’s not nearly as well thought of. Without saying anything against the digital revolution in photography, this is the kind of image that is at risk of getting lost in our move to a pure digital reality for images.

Processing Sunrise at Merced National Wildlife Refuge

And here is that image as its unprocessed raw file.

When I show the unprocessed raw image to people, the common reaction is “why did you even bother processing this?” — at first glance, this image would likely end up in the ding pile for most people.

I really liked the underlying structure of the image. There’s a lot of interesting action going on. I knew from being there that there was color in the sunrise that the camera had muted into greys but which could be coaxed out. And there are some interesting layers in color and texture I thought could be emphasized. The worst that would happen would be a waste of some time, but I really felt the image could be turned into something decent.

It’s a great reminder not to be too fast on the delete button or too quick to judge an image a failure. Not every image is WOW out of the camera, some have a shy beauty that needs some encouragement. It’s always worth some time when working through a photo shoot to consider images that are technically fine to see whether there’s a great image to be found with a bit of work.

This image was shot with my Canon T3i and a Canon 24-105 F4L IS lens, with no filters, using a tripod and remote shutter release. Exposure was 1/250 @ F5.6 ISO 400. I probably should have shot it at F/8 or F/11, but if I’d done so or lowered the ISO, I would have gotten blurring in the birds.

Processing workflow

This is my basic processing workflow. Before I process an image it gets imported into Lightroom and I do some basic work on it, like attaching GPS and location info and basic keywords. The full workflow (import to print) I’ll discuss some other time. This is the develop module part of the processing.

• Crop
• Camera Calibration & Lens Correction
• Color Balance
• Black Point/White Point
• Exposure, Shadows & Highlights
• Clarity & Vibrance
• HSL (Hue, Saturation, Luminance)
• Local Adjustments
• Sharpening (Detail) and Cleanup
• Special Effects

The basic goal of the processing workflow is to start with the large changes that are global and affect large parts of the image in big ways, and work your way towards smaller and more details/localized changes. I also try to process an image in the same general way each time, and only do a task once. Sometimes a chance later in the processing makes me go back and tweak a value I’d set earlier, but the goal is to spend as little time as needed on an image while getting the most out of it — efficient and powerful processing.

Make your processing workflow a habit. Poking at an image at random makes it harder to get a great image and impossible to reproduce the results on a different image later. You want to know what your workflow is and follow it, not spend time with each image wondering what to do next. As you teach yourself to follow a specific workflow checklist like the one above, you’ll find that “what do do next” will become obvious, and your processing speed will go up.

Crop

First step is to crop the image. The horizon isn’t level (mine never are, unless I add a bubble level to my camera, which I don’t often enough), and I want to adjust the shape of the frame to focus in on a part of the scene.

One of the things I like about this image is the banding from top to bottom, with the very dark rushes on the lower edge, and different, lighter bands of activity moving to the top. Unfortunately, un-cropped the rushes is overwhelming so I need to trim that back. I have to sacrifice that tree on the right, but cropping this in a panoramic format didn’t look right (and makes printing a challenge). I wanted this to continue to work well in a standard  frame and mat look, so I’m using a standard crop format here.

Here’s how it looks cropped.

Camera Calibration and Lens Correction

First thing you should do on every image is set your camera calibration and lens correction. Camera calibration is a subjective thing and different vendors and bodies will have different choices available. Adobe Standard will be there for every camera. With Canon bodies I find I prefer Camera Faithful almost all of the time. What this value does is give “hints” to the RAW rendering engine on how to interpret the data when rendering the image.

Lens correction profiles allow you to tell Lightroom what lens was used. If it’s a lens from a major vendor chances are a profile exists for it. This helps Lightroom auto-correct for certain lens flaws like chromatic aberration and distortions, especially around the edges of the frame. It’s possible to manually make changes as well, but for most images I don’t; the big exception being buildings where I need to straighten up walls and edges.

If your lens has a profile you should use it. If it doesn’t, leave this disabled.

Color Balance

Setting color balance is the next step, up in the Basic section. I’ve found that you can get decent color by using Auto White Balance but that I can rarely get the best possible color by leaving the choice to the camera. It gets close, but it rarely gets it perfect. Shooting in RAW mode allows me the option of deferring the white balance decision to when I process the image, though, so since I shoot almost 100% of the time in RAW, I almost always shoot 100% of the time with AWB set in camera. When I bring the image in to process, I’ll choose a specific white balance that I think best represents the lighting at the time.

Given that this was shot in early dawn under significant fog, there isn’t an obvious right choice here. Any of “sunny”, “shade”, or “cloudy” would be appropriate. There are times when experimenting with color balance can give you some interesting results. Here is this image showing how changing color balances affects the image, including setting it to “tungsten” which creates a very cool image. Under some circumstances, that might make for a very interesting image but not what I want for this one.

There is no “right” answer here but choosing a specific color balance helps you get the colors set to the ranges that work best for the image and reduce the amount of tweaking you’ll need to do later — most of the time. Notice also how much color has re-appeared in the image just by setting the color balance to either cloudy or shade. This image is a classic example of the kind of conditions that will confuse the camera and why you shouldn’t trust auto-white balance most of the time. AWB is nice starting point under easy conditions, but it’ll trip you up when the lighting gets tricky.

This is also a great example of why you need to be wary of dismissing an image because at first glance it doesn’t seem special. Simply setting an explicit white balance instead of deferring to the camera’s decision makes a huge difference in the overall quality of the image, and brings back the color that was in the dawn in person but missing from the image because of the camera’s decisions. This is why it’s a good idea to learn how to control your camera’s features and not over-rely on the automation. I think it also could start a great argument with the “did you photoshop it?” crowd, but we won’t go there…

You can change or tweak this later, but choosing “shade” brings the image a lot closer to what I want it to look like without a lot of work, so we’ll start there.

 Black and White Point

The next change is to set the black and white points. This will let you adjust the overall contrast of the image and help create the strong blacks and whites that can create impact in an image. But this is a dawn image with a strong dose of fog, and an aspect of shooting in fog is that the images will tend towards high-key light values and be relatively low contrast. If you mess around with the black and white points too much, you can effectively delete the fog out of the image — which is sometimes what you want, but not here. We want that foggy, soft look.

This image already has strong blacks in it so I can set a traditional black point with the blacks kissing the left frame of the histogram. If you try to set a very white white point like you might under mid-morning sunlight, much of the sky washes out and the sun effectively blows out — not good. So I’ll take the strong blacks, but be very wary of adjusting the white point because the color is subtle and I don’t want to lose it. I end up with blacks = -75, and white being adjusted just to +16. You can see just a touch of solid black in the rushes. This is how I like to set my blacks in most images, and it allows for a very strong black to show up on paper when you later print the image.

Exposure, Shadows & Highlights

Next up we adjust with the exposure, shadows and highlights sliders. Exposure sets the overall light levels for the image, while shadows and highlights adjust the light and darker areas independently. The shadows slider in Lightroom 5 has become a close friend of mine because it allows me to bring out the detail in the shadows amazingly well, and because of that I rarely turn to the tone curves any more (sssh: don’t tell photographers who live and die by adjusting curves, with Lightroom 5 I find it’s rarely necessary). 

For this image, I’m going to leave well enough alone for the most part. Adjusting the shadows doesn’t improve the image, it just makes the dark areas darker. I don’t think the exposure needs to be changed. I end up shifting highlights to -40; because the fog adds a lot of white to the colors, this deepens and intensifies them a bit.

Clarity and Vibrance

Clarity can be thought of as a “smart sharpener”, while Vibrance is an intelligent saturation adjustment. A bit of clarity helps most images; I typically set it around +20 and it does some localized contrast adjustments much like sharpening does; on good images, it can sometimes replace doing any sharpening in the detail module although I typically do both clarity and sharpening.

Vibrance has almost completely replaced the saturation slider in my workflow. the Saturation slider adjusts all instances of the colors the same, while vibrance will adjust lower-saturated colors more and high saturation colors much less, making it a more foolproof way to tweak the colors on the image. For this image I’ll use my normal +20 for clarify, but since it intensifies the blacks, I’ll drop the black slider to -65 to compensate.

For Vibrance, since one of the things I’m trying to do is bring that subtle dawn color out, I’ll push clarity fairly hard at +35. We’ll continue to work on the color in the next section.

HSL — Hue, Saturation, and Luminance

Now we move to the HSL section where we can start adjusting colors with more precision. This section allows us to take specific color channels and change the color itself (hue), how saturated the color is, and how bright the color is (luminance). You can make some very dramatic improvements to an image this way, but if you’re not careful you can make the image look like it was snipped out of a bad sci-fi movie, so I’ve found a delicate touch is necessary.

This image looks to me like it has a bit of a blue cast in the sky, but when I go and examine the sky in detail, it turns out it’s really neutral gray from the fog and not bluish. One easy way to explore this is to use the saturation sliders and set various colors to -100 and see what happens. As it turns out, the sky is mostly oranges with some yellow, and the sun is mostly reds with some oranges and yellows, and there’s a grey wash across the sky from the fog. Since I want to emphasize the oranges, I use the hue slider for red and set it to +25 to shift the sun more into the oranges.

Any other changes you have to be a bit careful, because large changes of a color channel where there’s noise and color patterns in the sky can cause major blotching and be incredibly hard to fix later. You can minimize this by staying in the +-15 range, and +-20 is really pushing it. Some of that you can fix with noise reduction, but you’re better off not putting it in in the first place.

As I work this image I’m coming to realize it’s a tough one to get what I want just using Lightroom, so I’m going to pull out the plug-ins and do some serious work on it shortly. Because of that, I’m not trying to absolutely optimize the image colors now, but to set up the colors so that when I shift to the plug-in I have the image set up so that I can finish it in the plug-in. For a rather average image (my 3stars), I won’t use plug-ins because the image isn’t high enough quality to warrant the investment of time, but for my better images like this one, it’s worth the extra steps.

I am still trying to emphasize the orange tone of the image, so I end up with Hue Red +25 (mentioned above) to shift the sun towards orange, saturation I shift Orange +3 and Yellow -22 to pull some of the yellows out. With luminance I darken the primary colors a bit with Red -8, Orange -15 and Yellow -10.

I’m now going to re-arrange my workflow a bit to bring in the plug-ins. I primarily use the Nik plug-in suite (now owned by Google). Shifting to them implies making a TIF copy of the image, so once I do, I can’t go back and make further adjustments to the RAW image in Lightroom — unless I want to toss out the work in the plug-ins and re-do them. If I want to do any localized adjustments, now is probably the best time to do those, but for this image, I’m happy with what I have. I will be doing sharpening later using another Nik plug-in.

Nik Color Efex Pro

The first plug-in I’ll typically use is Nik Pro. It has a lot of options available to go in and massage color, contrast and other aspects of the image. Color Efex Pro is a tool that has a large number of image manipulation tools. I must admit that I didn’t really see the advantage of it for a long time, but once I started using it, I realized just how powerful it was, so when I do decide to do extended processing on an image, I’ll typically start with it.

To fire up a plug-in, right-click on the image, and choose the plug-in via the Edit In menu. You need to configure your plug-ins in the preferences of Lightroom in the External Editing section. Many plug-ins will set this up for you during install, but you still need to make sure the TIF you create is configured properly; often it’ll set up the color space to sRGB, which can cause banding and other problems. Make sure when you send things off to the plug-ins you give it as much info as possible. I will typically use the ProPhoto color space for this but AdobeRGB works as well. I also set it for 16 bits of bit depth and a fairly high resolution at 240 pixels per inch.

The first thing I want to do is try to bring out the colors a bit more and give them a bit more variation from top to bottom, and I want to make sure the flying birds are more distinct and visible. I’ll do that with the Pro Contrast function. Before is on the left.

After that, I’ll use Detail Extractor. If clarity is lightroom’s smart sharpening, Detail Extractor is clarity on steroids. If my workflow was plug-in centric and I used plug-ins on all images, I’d use this on images and do minimal or no sharpening in Lightroom. Note also there’s more contrast adjustment which is lightening the image and bringing out the colors in the sky. Unfortunately, it’s brightened the rushes at the bottom too much, but I’ll fix that later.

One more contrast adjustment to get the colors where I want them. This time it’s using Contrast Color Range. Color Efex Pro has over 50 functions you can apply to images, but chances are you’ll end up finding yourself using half a dozen or so a lot and the rest rarely. You can stack these so multiple effect the image in a single edit, and you can even set presets to give you recipes if you build an effect you want to use again.

The image is now close to what I want, but the top third is a bit too bright and the rushes at the bottom aren’t as black as I want. Note the colors in the middle 2/3 of the image and note how the flocks in flight and the tree lower right are standing out. That was a big purpose of the processing in this step.

One option here would be to use a pair of Graduated ND Filters, one to darken the bottom and one to darken the top, but experimenting with that I don’t like what it’s doing to the top part of the image. Instead, I’m going to switch to another plug-in where I can work with a bit more precision on that part of the image.

Here’s the before and after for the changes made in Color Efex Pro

Color Efex Before and After

Nik Viveza

Home stretch now. Nik’s Viveza allows you to make localized changes to an image via what they call control points. These act a lot like Photoshop’s layer masks in creating active areas of an image for adjustment. You set a control point by clicking on a location and setting a radius. The area affected by the control point is set by the color of pixels similar to the ones under the control point. It’s a lot easier than layer masks (most of the time), and once you get the hang of how the control points work, you can do really interesting things to an image with them.

We’ll start by darkening the rushes. here I’ve set four control points, each on the dark part of the rushes. I’ve grouped them into one logical control area, and so when I adjust the control area, it’ll adjust all of them equally.

I then create five more control points along the top with smaller circles and group them. They’re all set on the lightest points of the image. Finally, two more control points in the middle covering a large area of the image, grouped.

The bottom set I set brightness to -21 to darken the reeds.

The top set I’m trying to blend in that bright area with the rest of the sky, so I drop brightness by -21, and I pull back contrast to -20, and I also reduce saturation a bit at -22, and I reduce structure by -11. Structure is Nik’s version of Lightroom’s clarity, so it’s another smart sharpening tool. In this case I’m removing structure, so I’m reducing sharpening and smoothing the area a bit, taking out some of the noise and detail. Reducing structure in skies is one way to smooth them out and get the noise out that I find works well.

The middle control points do two things. One important one is they take control of those pixels so that the control areas above and below don’t. I decided as long as I was tweaking to add structure (+35) to bring out the birds more, and add in saturation (+26) to pull out more color. Now to my eye the entire sky has a nice orange glow to it with some interesting banding, but all of the colors look the same to me, including the sun, but the sun has just a touch of red in it coming through the fog to set it out. The birds  are now visible streaming through the image and help create  a structural pattern that gives the eye things to look at. The rushes at the bottom frame the image and are nice and dark again.

The image is done except for cleanup. Here’s the before and after for the Viveza edits.

Viveza Before and After

The changes here are subtle, a few final tweaks to get it just right. That’s an important aspect of this workflow: start with the large global edits, and work  your way to the smaller, more subtle and more specific regional edits. While I don’t say you should never go back and adjust something from a previous step, you want to avoid working in a way where a change forces you to go back and redo a previous change (unless you realize you made a mistake), and any updates to previous steps should be tweaks, not major changes. If you find yourself redoing your processing along teh way, I’d argue you’re doing it wrong. Top down, global to local helps you avoid waisting time redoing your work along the way.

Final steps

The image is done, but we need to do some cleanup with final sharpening and noise reduction. Since I’m using plug-ins in the processing, I’ll do these final steps in plug-ins as well, using Nik’s dFine for noise reduction and Sharpener Pro for sharpening.

Nik’s Sharpener pro has two modules, one for RAW presharpening and one for output sharpening. I did the RAW sharpening in Lightroom, so I’ll only do output sharpening. I’m going to target this for online use; you should sharpen separate copies of the image for online and print because the needs are much different. This is a place where one size doesn’t fit all.

A lot of the time I’ll trust Nik’s sharpener and just accept the defaults. In this case, I’m going to boost the structure a bit because it emphasizes that white fog band just above the ground a bit, and again, it brings the birds out a bit more. It is bringing out some more noise, but we’ll fix that.

Sharpening is one of those things that can be really hard to show off online, but you can get a sense of the changes in the loupe view:

Then on to dFine to clean up the noise. There’s a lot of noise but dFine does a great job of cleaning it up. This is a case where I need more than the default to get the clean look I want, so I crank up the constrast noise removal. This is effecitvely de-sharpening the image, but for an image like this, that’s okay. It’s not something I’d do where I’m trying to preserve a lot of small detail, like feathering on a bird.

And we’re done.

Here is the before and after from the RAW image to the final.

RAW vs Final

And since you never exactly reproduce the same image when you reprocess it, here’s my original version of this image compared to the new one.

Old Master vs New Master

Actually, not quite done…

Doing my final look at the image, I found a dust spot that the sharpening brought out. A quick spot removal took care of it. It’s something that might not show up at all in online images, but which would make you crazy when printing it.

And with that, this image is done. If I wanted to take it further and print it I’d go back to the TIF created by Viveza and from there do a separate set of sharpening and noise reduction aimed at the higher resolutions of a print image. I would also spend a chunk of time pixelpeeping at 100% looking for artifacts, noise, dust spots and probably clone out some of the birds that are really fuzzy or indistinct (subjective call, when does it stop being a bird spot and start being a noise spot?)

Final Thoughts

Right now, highly saturated colors and really large, distinctive objects are trendy in landscape photography because subtlety suffers when mashed down to online file sizes and those subtle details disappear completely when you turn it into a thumbnail, which is often the first (and only) look a person gives an image on a screen. I’m hoping that fad is temporary and we’ll go back to imagery that’s more realistically saturated, but I may be lecturing into the void on that one.

If there any things I hope this image teaches you, it’s two things:

• Don’t trust your camera to do your work as a photographer. Modern cameras do a great job of getting a decent image, but they still can’t get the image you’re envisioning. You need to learn how to tell your camera how to shoot an image the way you want it, not accept the image the camera offers to take for you. Which of you is in charge, you or the camera? Too often with the automation cameras offer, we defer to the camera.
• When reviewing and editing your images from a shoot, don’t toss an image because it doesn’t reach out and slap you in the face at first viewing. There are a lot of gems sitting on hard disks around the world that only need a little care and attention to bloom. Again, if you defer to the camera to give you great stuff, you’ll miss a lot of potentially great stuff. Look behind that initial rendering at the structure and bones of an image and see if you can identify whether there is potential within it. Don’t be afraid to experiment — the worst that happens if you put in some time, decide it’s not there and archive the image. It’s definitely worth the effort if you find a few like this.

This image definitely looks best printed out and on paper. It’s one that I hang proudly on my wall here in my office. If you’re curious about how it looks printed, it’s available as part of my portfolio on my Smugmug site, and you can have a copy printed up and delivered there. Think about it this way: these before and after pieces take hours to create; if you buy the print you help fund the writing of these articles — and you get the print. We both win, and it encourages me to write more of these….

I’m curious that my original processing of this image emphasized the reds and this time through I emphasized more of an orange palette. There are other minor changes but the images are for the most part very similar. Once I start reprocessing I don’t refer to the original, so I don’t use it as a guide when I create the new version. My best guess is that in the original I keyed the color palette off of the reds in the sun and pulled those out across the rest of the image, while this time, I took the oranges in the sky as the base and built the image colors from there. There’s no right answer, I like both images a lot, but they have different feels with the different color bases.

This image could easily cause days of debate about the whole “get it right in camera” and “have you photoshopped it?” schticks because I started with the same base image and ended up with two very different looking images, and yet both of the final images looked more like I remember the original scene than the “in camera” one did, which was very grey and with colors a lot more muted than the actual scene.

That difference and the differences with the RAW image and the two versions based on it all really come down to one key decision, too: color balance. I haven’t checked the older image files, but I’m guessing the original image was processed with a color balance near daylight, while this reprocessing I shifted the color balance over to cloudy. If you look back at the color balance comparisons earlier in this piece, you’ll see the daylight color balance has a reddish tone to it. That one decision point affected the final result significantly and nudged it in two different but equally interesting directions. Which one you think is better is purely subjective.

It should also be noted that if you did take the camera default and left it “as shot”, you probably wouldn’t have gotten an interesting image out of it all; it would have been tough to pull good color out of the image from the starting point the camera chose. All of which is a good practical example of what I said earlier: take control of the image and your camera rather than defer to what the camera feels like giving you.

That doesn’t imply (as some photographers will tell you) that you have to live in manual focus and manual exposure, although you need to know when it’s best to use both. What it does mean is understanding how to adapt the camera’s thinking to what you want instead of what it thinks you should get. For me that means shooting a lot (>90%) in Aperture mode, but using exposure compensation to help the camera understand my intent and adjust its thinking for conditions, and when to use the various exposure evaluation variations your camera has. Knowing when switch from, say, center-weighted evaluative to spot metering can save you a lot more pain and heartburn than switching to manual exposure and trying to dial it in, especially outside in rapidly changing conditions.

Thanks for reading, and for your feedback. Next time it’s probably time to show the processing of a bird image…