DigitalPro Shooter

DigitalPro Shooter Volume 1, Issue 5, February 16th, 2002

Welcome to DPS 1-5. This issue is devoted to the grand-daddy of all digital photography software--Photoshop. We've also got the scoop on a great new product from Hoodman to tell D1/X/H owners about.

Photoshop? What happened to getting it right in the camera?

As DPS readers know, Moose and I are big believers in getting the image right in the camera. But there are certainly times when you need to do some final tweaking to an image in Photoshop. Maybe you didn't nail the exposure and you can't retake the photo, or maybe you need to lighten it up a bit so it looks good on the web, or maybe you just like to spend time in front of the computer:-) Whatever the reason, it will save you time and give you better images in the long run if you know which tools to use in Photoshop and how to use them. And more importantly, if you know which to avoid! We'll cover all of those issues briefly here and then give you links to some of our favorite Photoshop books so you can learn more.

What can I do easily in Photoshop?

The first trick to using Photoshop is to have reasonable goals. As a photographer you don't need to create from scratch digital art and you probably aren't looking to make those really psychedelic images that are featured in PEI all the time. You probably just want to make your images look like you meant them in the first place. To that end 99% of your corrections can be done in under 1 minute per image and without ever using the selection or masking tools! Yes, that's right. If your initial image has the right basic composition, you should be able to do the work you need in Photoshop in 1 minute or less once you know what to do and have some practice.

Safety Net: Using Layers

Layers are a great way to experiment with changes to your image while preserving all of the original information. Adjustment layers can be used for Curves, Levels, Saturation, and other adjustments. They can be turned on and off with a click of the mouse and your original image is only a click away. Use them!

Color Management

Entire books have been written on color management, but to keep it simple I'd recommend: Shoot with your camera in Adobe RGB if you can, and use a custom profile for it if you can't. Even with Adobe RGB you may still want to use a custom profile for the camera but it is not as critical. Use Adobe RGB or something similar for your Working Space in Photoshop, and make sure that you have all the options set to "Ask", so that Photoshop doesn't change something you don't want it to. Our software, DigitalPro, makes this part easier by adding the Adobe RGB or sRGB or ICC profile tag to your images as they are loaded from the digital film. That makes it faster and less error prone when you bring them into Photoshop.

Adjusting White Balance

Levels or Curves are excellent and simple ways to snap White Balance to where it belongs. Just choose one of those tools and then use one or more of the Black, Gray and White eyedroppers to select the Black point, a neutral, or the White point of your image. If you do this using a Levels layer or a Curves layer, you can undo your change and experiment with different versions.

Using your Dynamic Range

A common problem with photographic images is 'wasting' a piece of the total available dynamic range. If you look at your image histogram and see that it doesn't extend to the left and right ends, you have more dynamic range available to you. Using it will increase the apparent contrast of your image and may help it 'pop'. However, if you have deliberately captured a moody or other low contrast scene that may not be what you want. If you do want to use your full dynamic range, use the Levels Adjustment (or better yet a Levels layer!) and move the left and right sliders in to where they meet your histogram. This will remap your image range to take advantage of the full available range of light to dark.

Adjusting Exposure / Contrast

It's really tempting to use the attractively named Brightness command to adjust exposure on your images. That's almost never the best solution. It is disappointing how many otherwise useful Photoshop books make the mistake of not warning users about this tool! You're much better off using a Curves layer and then pulling up or pushing down the middle of the curve to get a more natural looking change in your image. This isn't identical to changing the exposure in the camera, but it does allow you to brighten or darken the subject in your image to make it appear better on screen or when printed without blowing out the highlights. You're essentially creating a custom Tone Curve on the fly. Of course you're doing it in 8-bit rather than in the camera or in Raw mode so it isn't ideal, but it's often the only way to convey what you want with your image.

Tonal Range

Through a slightly more clever use of the Curves command you can shift the tonal range of your image to give you the most detail where you want it. A full description about how to do this is best left to the books mentioned below, but in short you create a curve that is "flatter" where you want to have the most detail and "steeper" where you don't mind losing detail.

Saturation

This is probably the most over-used adjustment in Photoshop. There is no question that saturated colors sell. Just look at all the Velvia images! But certain photographers have continued to increase their saturation to unnatural levels as a substitute for using light and drawing the viewer in through composition. You need to be your own judge here. You also need to decide where to draw the line. It is very easy and fast to make overall saturation adjustments with a layer. But if you find yourself tweaking the saturation of individual color ranges you may want to reconsider whether you really captured the subject you wanted in the first place.

When have you gone too far?

Everyone has their own definition of what is a good use of time in front of the computer and of Photoshop's tools. Personally, I find a clean dividing line between operations on the entire image, like adding adjustment layers, and operations which start to require selection, painting, and brushes. For almost all of the tweaking you need to do you should be able to get it done quickly and effectively wlith layers and filters that affect the entire image. If you find yourself needing to select areas and paint effects then you've slowed your workflow down tremendously. Obviously there is a time and a place for laboring over the details of an image, but it should be the exception rather than the rule.

Resizing

A lot of suffering goes on over DPI in images. The important thing to remember about resizing is that it comes in two flavors: First: true rescaling which affects the actual information in your image and second: changing the DPI, which only affects the "hints" that are given to other programs as to how to display your image. The "Resample" checkbox controls which of the two types of resizing will be performed. If you mix them up you can accidentally squish your image into a low resolution version of itself and will then wonder why it doesn't print nicely. In general I never use Resample for images that I am filing or printing. I only use it when I need to actually reduce the size of an image for posting on the web or because an Editor requires an image of a different size than my original.

The other use of resizing is to scale the image up for printing on a large format printer. Frankly, many high-end printers such as Lightjets now have excellent hardware interpolation so you almost don't need to do this yourself. If you do need to do it, make sure and either use the highest quality setting--bi-cubic, or if you are doing it to very large sizes and do it often you might want to invest in Genuine Fractals or some other 'intelligent' re-scaling add-in.

Sharpening

If you have Sharpening turned on in your camera and your images are sharp when they're captured, you may not need to fuss with Photoshop's Unsharp Masking (Sharpening) filter. But if you like to do your own sharpening or you need to hone the edges in your image prior to sending them to an LCD projector or a printer that reduces the apparent sharpness of the image you may need to sharpen further. The in camera sharpening is used to recover from the blurring caused by the low pass filter over the CCD. It is equivalent to about 150%-250%, Radius .6, Threshold 0. Over-sharpening can cause artifacts and except for the in camera sharpening you want it to be the last thing you do before submitting or printing.

You can do sharpening non-destructively by creating a copy of your base layer, sharpening the copy layer, and then applying that layer using the "Luminosity" mode. It sounds complex, but it only takes a few seconds once you figure it out. This way you can trash that layer and use a different sharpening layer if you need to change the parameters. There are 'intelligent' sharpening plug-ins that get very good reviews, but I haven't used any of them myself.

Printing

The single biggest improvement you can make in your Photoshop printing is to have a color-savvy workflow. You can do this one of two ways. If you are doing pre-press for CMYK and know the numbers, then Dan Margulis's book below is a great guide to how to color correct 'by the numbers'. If you're outputting to RGB devices, or like me don't know CMYK well enough to correct by the numbers, you're probably best off with an ICC workflow. Your printer will benefit from a custom profile and your sanity will benefit from having a calibrated monitor. If you use external print service bureaus, try to find ones which support ICC profiles for their devices.

When you actually go to print using a profile, it shouldn't matter whether you let Photoshop convert your image to the printer profile or let the printer driver do it itself, but bugs in some versions of printer drivers can cause profiles to be applied twice, so experiment with doing it each way to make sure you're getting the right color in your prints. If you're using a service bureau you'll probably need to convert your image, save it (don't save over your original!!) with the new profile, and then send that version to be printed.

With Photoshop 6 there is a great new feature where you can use the Soft proofing capability to preview what your image will look like printed on a particular output device. You might ask why it can't look just like it does on screen. That's a loaded question with a long answer! We'll attempt to tackle it in issue of DPS sometime in the future.

What don't I have to do in Photoshop?

If you have the right workflow software, like DigitalPro for Windows, you can do some of these tasks without ever opening Photoshop. In particular, DigitalPro can help you by Captioning your images, converting them to TIFF or CMYK TIFF, resizing them, sharpening them, tagging them with the appropriate ICC profile and creating HTML/Web galleries for you..

Great Books on Photoshop

I've listed four of my favorite Photoshop books below, along with my perspective on why they're useful and what they'll help you learn. If you plan on buying them, please use the links below and we'll get a few dollars to help defray the cost of publishing DPS. These aren't the only good books on Photoshop, but most of the others either spend most of their time on fancy graphics effects or document dozens of commands you don't really need to know--which makes it hard to learn the ones you do.

Photoshop 6 Artistry, Haynes. This is my all time personal favorite Photoshop book, revamped for Photoshop 6. Like many Photoshop books it has a large section which reviews the important commands. Unlike other authors, though, Barry Haynes doesn't bother to explain all the commands, just a subset that will get the job done. However, for Photoshop that subset is still a staggering number. That is where the second half of the book comes in. Haynes presents sample images in chapter after chapter of practical 'how-to' sections. Rather than forcing you to learn obscure commands in a vacuum, you can easily flip through the colorful table of contents looking for a sample image that has the same issues as your image. Then turn to that chapter and see how he deals with it. Frankly, if your images are half as bad off as some of the ones he repairs you probably need a book on photography--so you'll find that you can pick and choose a subset of the tools he provides. But by showing you how to recover from many serious image short-comings he gives you the confidence to tweak your own images.

Adobe Photoshop 6.0 for Photographers, by Martin Evening. Despite the title, this book is about a great deal more than Photoshop. It covers the gamut from digital input sources through to file formats. That may or may not be of interest to you. But the bulk of the book is a very extensive overview of Photoshop and its tools from the perspective of the photographer. While it has less detail in its coverage of some of the major tools than Haynes or Blatner & Fraser it provides a broad perspective without being too much of a "kitchen sink" introduction.

Real World Photoshop 6, Blatner & Fraser. This book has grown with each release and now is a virtual encyclopedia of Photoshop. That is mostly a good thing as in a single volume you can learn everything you need to know and more about Photoshop. However, the sheer volume of information is a little daunting and the user needs to pick out the sections that are really important to them.

Professional Photoshop 6: The Classic Guide to Color Correction, Margulis. ICC is right up there with Raw mode as an important technology that has gotten used and then over-used as a solution for nearly everything. Dan Margulis has been color correcting images since before most folks knew what a digital darkroom was. He has a healthy scepticism for ICC/ICM systems as a replacement for a fundamental technical understanding of color and of ink. His work is of more value for those producing CMYK prints or doing pre-press than for those who have the luxury of staying in RGB for their entire workflow, but in either case you'll learn something about color and learn to view ICC solutions as more of a tool and less of a panacea when it comes to color. This book is listed last because unless you do a lot of pre-press I don't think it is at all essential, but it is unique and informative on the difficult topic of color. Many pre-press pros still do color management 'by the numbers' and this book explains why and how.

See it all! An LCD Magnifier from Hoodman

One of the most common complaints about digital cameras is that it is too hard to see the image on the LCD. Hoodman has worked hard to fix this problem with transparent LCD covers and an LCD Hood for the D1/X/H. Now they've extended their product line with a unique magnifying lens that works with their D1 Hood to give you not only a shaded view of your LCD, but a magnified one. This is potentially very exciting to hard-core D1/X/H users. We haven't gotten one to try for ourselves so it is too early for a real review, but we'll be anxious to hear how it performs in the field for our readers and will have a review of it at a future date. In the meantime we're posting some photos of it on nikondigital.org.

DigitalPro Tips:

Want to see your image data without opening the Properties Window? Just use the View->Image Info Window (Control-I) command.

Bugged by the Delete confirmation dialog? In new versions of DigitalPro you can turn that off under Tools->Settings.

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