Post Processing
Well, today, I was wandering around the City and took several photos as one does. There were a few out of the lot that I took that had potential, and a few where I will plan them a lot more and go back and take them again when the light is better.
The one I am going to talk about today is not so much the photo, but the post processing of it and how it was greatly improved.
The photo I took was a fairly simple "bread and butter" type of photo that everyone should be able to capture with relative ease.
The picture (below) was taken mid-morning in full shade of a building. The light was very even, and I simply framed the photo from around 4Metres away and took it. For those interested, ISO 100, 41mm F5 1/25sec handheld.
I didn't want to go above ISO100 as it probably would have started to introduce noise. I shot at F5 in order to attain the 1/25 sec - a speed I know was OK if I took my time to shoot handheld.
I followed my normal Post processing and loaded it up in Rawshooter Premium. I did all the usual minor corrections and processed the jpg ready for display.
The resultant picture, while Ok, I thought just lacked that certain something that I was looking for. The phot just seemed a little flat and was missing something.
So, back to the toolbox and I Processed the RAW into a TIFF file and opened up the GIMP.
The first thing I adjusted was brightness and Contrast. Some very small adjustments made a huge difference to the image. Then, even though I had done some curves adjustments in RSP, I opened up the Curves tool in the GIMP.
Now in RSP, The curves are applied to the Image, and in the Gimp, I can adjust the Curves independentaly for each colour channel, as well as all of them. So, a little bit of adjustment on each channel was done. A 2nd look at each channel was required as a change to 1 colour sometimes requires a bit of a change to another. In the end I had managed to bring out the Cream of the Sandstone a little more without sacrificing the rest of the colours.
The Final colour tool I used was the Colour Balance tool. The Gimp offers me a whole lot in this area. You get 3 ranges - shadows, midtones and highlights, and for each range you can adjust 3 channelchannels with 3 sliders.
Cyan <-> Red
Magenta <-> Green
Yellow <-> Blue
Once again, a very small change can make a huge difference to the apperance of the image. I made adjustments, and then double checked them all and finally, I had managed to give the picture a bit more life!
There were still a few more things to do to get the most out of the picture and that is the sharpening. Sharpening is one area that is debated over by a lot of people - some say that it should be the final step and only done after resizing an image and others say that do it as the last step at Each size.
Well, I usually only apply sharpeening as the last step, but today, I decided to apply a little before scaling the image. I used the sharpen filter and applied some sharpening to the image, then I resized it to my required web size using bicubic sampling.
Once it was the size I wanted, I then opened up the Unsharp dialogue and made the final adjustments to get the most out of the image. Then, I finally did a "save as" to save out the TIF as a jpg file ready for the web.
The last thing Idid was to use the command line tool jhead to copy the exif info from the RSP processed image to the one I processed in the GIMP as the GIMP destroys all EXIF info.
And after about 15 minutes, I came up with a picture that looks similar, is much better.
The final picture took me about another 15 minutes of processing time and now rather than looking flat and dull, it has quite a bit of extra "pop" and life to it.
Now, I am not going to do this every time, but when I have an image that a quick 30 second job in RSP does not get the best out of a photo that I think has the potential to be a lot better I'll certainly won't hesitate to follow a similar path to what I have done here.
