Posted by Barry Southon on December 2, 2007 at 6:49 PM
First posted in June 07 I have just found my way around CS2 but still struggling so please feel free to critique I'm not convinced my adjustments are working as I think they are.
Canon 350D sigma 50-500mm f7.6 1/2000sec
Thanks
Barry
Posted by Laurie Braman on December 2, 2007 at 7:54 PM
I bet you must have been excited to get this shot. This is one bird the I would love to see even if I didn't have my camera. I'm new, but it looks a little "fuzzy" to me. I'll have to leave the photo critique to the pros.
To me this image looks to be very noisy, was it a heavy crop?
Also the white hightlights appear to have been blown.
Chas
Posted by Barry Southon on December 3, 2007 at 9:46 AM
Chas
Yes it was a heavy crop removing bright blue sky harsh light. My reason for posting was to seek an explanation as to whats going wrong. My understanding of photoshop is very limited what I've tried to emulate is the actions described in previous posts. I may well have overcooked it. Am I correct in thinking I can make other raw copies to work on from lightroom? At my level my raw originals seem to be far better than the tweaked copies.
I'm probably trying to run before I can walk.
Barry
Posted by Ben Micklem on December 3, 2007 at 12:44 PM
Barry,
Are you using 'levels' make adjustments? Looks like the black and white points (the triangles at either end of the scale in the levels dialog box) have been brought far into the image's tonal range. You shouldn't see large areas of pure black or white. The red is also completely saturated (i.e. the same thing has happened in the red channel as has caused the white to be completely white with no detail in it). If you post an unmodified RAW conversion as a JPEG, or the RAW file, I could talk you through some optimizations.
Ben
Posted by John Varley on December 3, 2007 at 3:27 PM
Hi Barry - just had a look your post in June - it looks a lot better than this one! It was useful to see the original post as it shows there is quite a lot more detail in the shadows than in this one.
It strikes me with this pic - you can do just about everything that needs doing to it in Lightroom. Perhaps the only thing I would do to it in Photoshop CS2 is to selectively take some of the noise out of the blue sky.
If your raws look reasonable in LR, then make several virtual copies (Photo menu, eighth down on the list.). Now you have the original raw with the default settings LR gives it, and some identical virtual copies which you can now experiment with trying different development settings. The key ones to start off with are exposure,black point setting and then the fill (which brings up the shadow detail and recovery which is pretty good at recovering burnt out higlights.
What colour space do you export the pic into Photoshop with (the default for LR is prophotorgb. Is CS2 setup to use this? If the pic looks ok in LR it should look just the same in Photoshop b4 you start adjusting things in CS2. If its appearance changes once it comes into CS2 then Photoshop is not setup properly.
I would concentrate on getting the best possible pic out LR first. I hope this is of some help. I would love to have some pics of these woodpeckers.
I recomend the book by Martin Evening on Lightroom - gives a very clear explanation of all the tools in LR.
Discussion
5 repliesCanon 350D sigma 50-500mm f7.6 1/2000sec
Thanks
Barry
Laurie
To me this image looks to be very noisy, was it a heavy crop?
Also the white hightlights appear to have been blown.
Chas
Yes it was a heavy crop removing bright blue sky harsh light. My reason for posting was to seek an explanation as to whats going wrong. My understanding of photoshop is very limited what I've tried to emulate is the actions described in previous posts. I may well have overcooked it. Am I correct in thinking I can make other raw copies to work on from lightroom? At my level my raw originals seem to be far better than the tweaked copies.
Barry
Are you using 'levels' make adjustments? Looks like the black and white points (the triangles at either end of the scale in the levels dialog box) have been brought far into the image's tonal range. You shouldn't see large areas of pure black or white. The red is also completely saturated (i.e. the same thing has happened in the red channel as has caused the white to be completely white with no detail in it). If you post an unmodified RAW conversion as a JPEG, or the RAW file, I could talk you through some optimizations.
Ben
It strikes me with this pic - you can do just about everything that needs doing to it in Lightroom. Perhaps the only thing I would do to it in Photoshop CS2 is to selectively take some of the noise out of the blue sky.
If your raws look reasonable in LR, then make several virtual copies (Photo menu, eighth down on the list.). Now you have the original raw with the default settings LR gives it, and some identical virtual copies which you can now experiment with trying different development settings. The key ones to start off with are exposure,black point setting and then the fill (which brings up the shadow detail and recovery which is pretty good at recovering burnt out higlights.
What colour space do you export the pic into Photoshop with (the default for LR is prophotorgb. Is CS2 setup to use this? If the pic looks ok in LR it should look just the same in Photoshop b4 you start adjusting things in CS2. If its appearance changes once it comes into CS2 then Photoshop is not setup properly.
I would concentrate on getting the best possible pic out LR first. I hope this is of some help. I would love to have some pics of these woodpeckers.
I recomend the book by Martin Evening on Lightroom - gives a very clear explanation of all the tools in LR.