Post

Processing
Workflow

Contents
Introducon: Importance of having a workflow
1. Preparing your images
2. Balancing the exposure of your images
(Removing Contrast)
3. Colour Correcon / Adjustment
4. Adding Punch & Contrast
5. The 80/20 Adjustments: Enhancing the Image
6. Resizing, Sharpening and Saving
Conclusion: Wrap Up

Copyright: Aaron Dowling Photography

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The Importance of Having a Workflow

How o7en have you edited a photo and have loved the final product but have no idea what you did to
get there, and struggle to achieve a similar result on another image?

Or you may have even edited two photos separately that were taken at the same me and got com-
pletely different results.

O7en the most successful photographers have developed a style to their photography, and just as im-
portant is the way they process their images. This doesn’t mean that their style does not evolve over
me, but what they will all have in common is a workflow that works for them. That workflow may be
and is likely very much their own, and it’s what gives them their style, but for the most part they are
following some fundamentals which we will be covering in this document.

You may already be producing great images, but working much harder and longer then you like, if so
then developing your own workflow will assist in delivering consistent results quicker.

Consistent results come from having a set methodology / process for eding your images, and once
you have a set methodology in place you can add in / tweak and enhance the way that you achieve
your end result and create a style that stands out from your peers.

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1. Preparing Your Images
Before we delve into eding images, the first thing that is an absolute must if you want to use post pro-
cessing so7ware to get the most out of your images is……

SHOOT IN RAW!

If you are currently shoong in anything other then RAW, change it now. If you sll want a JPEG straight
out of your camera, set your camera up to save both RAW files and JPEG’s.

A JPEG is an image that has already been processed internally within your camera, compressed and
important informaon removed. This is allowing your camera to make the decision for you on what you
want your final image to look like. This doesn’t mean that you can’t edit a JPEG image, it means that
much of the available informaon stored in a RAW image is no longer available and can never be recov-
ered, making some changes difficult if not impossible.

Eding a JPEG is like adding things on top of an image, where eding a RAW file is actually changing
an image itself.

The 5 things that you’ll do in the first stage of your workflow are:

• Lens Distoron Correcon

• Repair Chromac Aberraon

• Correct White Balance

• Noise Reducon

• Remove any Automated Sharpening

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2. Balancing the Exposure of Your Images (Removing Contrast)

The goal of this stage of the process is to achieve a balanced image, and somewhat a fairly flat looking
image. You are not looking for a lot of contrast at this stage, you are trying to give yourself a starng
point to work your magic a liHle later.

So the purpose of part 2 in the workflow is to bring out the detail in your shadows and reduce the
brightness of your highlights while keeping some balance in the image. Therefore you sll want to
have shadows and highlights, but without a lot of contrast.

This is the original image a7er we have completed

part 1 of the workflow, the highlights are sll very bright
and the shadows quite dark, a high contrast image.

This image is much more balanced with the highlights

reduced revealing details, and the shadows brightened
also revealing detail. This give us a much beHer starng
point.

If you are working with bracketed exposures to capture the full dynamic range of an image, you will
either manually blend those images together using tools such as luminosity masks, or use HDR so7ware
to blend them in order to achieve s similar result.
If you are working from a single image you can do this by adjusng the Exposure, Highlights and
Shadows sliders in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), Lightroom or similar.

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3. Colour Correc3on / Adjustment

At this stage in the process you can choose to start geIng creave or maintain a very natural look to
your images.

This isn’t the me where we start looking at the vibrance and saturaon of colours within the image,
instead we are looking to play with our colour balance and correct any issues that we might have such
as unwanted colour casts.

If we do a perfect white balance adjustment on an image, although it may seem like the right thing to
do, depending on the scene it can remove wanted colours such as in images where we have differ-
ent white balances (i.e. warm skies, but cool shadows).

In this stage we are adjusng colours to suit our taste in an image, and for you this can mean:

• GeIng a perfect white balance in your image

• Warming skies while cooling your shadows

• Enhancing colour casts in your image (i.e. warm light hiIng your foreground subjects).

• Warming or cooling down the enre scene.

• Selecvely eding certain parts of your image, such as cooling down the flowing water in
an river or introducing a different hue to an area such as a more aqua colour in a water in-
stead of blue.

• Also at this stage if you are want a Black & White image, this is where it would typically take
place.

Again note at this stage you are not adjusng the vibrancy or saturaon of your colours, only changing
them to suit your taste. The vibrancy and richness in the image are coming in the next stage of the
workflow.

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4. Adding Punch & Contrast

Our images are ready to go, we have:

• Prepared our images by fixing lens distoron, chromac aberraon, adjusted white balance, re-
moved noise and sharpening.

• The image has been balanced between the highlights and shadows, giving us a low contrast
starng point.

• We have adjusted the colours in the image to give us a natural or creave feeling to our images.

Now it’s 3me to make our images start to jump out of the page.

This stage of the process is the most excing and where you will achieve most of the WOW results.

While working through this stage of the process, I want you to keep a few things in mind:

1. Always make smaller adjustments and many of them instead of large adjustments.

2. If you are unsure of the results you are geIng, walk away and return. O7en we get lost in our
edits and a break can give us a fresh perspecve.

3. Zoom out, I mean really zoom out so you are seeing the enre image on less than half of your
screen, this will give you a more holisc feel to the edit rather than your eyes focussing on certain
areas.

You can use many different tools / methods to add contrast to your image, there is no one set method.
The two most powerful tools for adding contrast to an image are your Levels and Curves adjustment
tools. My preference is to use the curves adjustment tool as I have finer control within the image, but
the levels adjustment tool can be simpler to use and give very good results.

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With either method you will want to do small adjustments and following this methodology.

• Create an adjustment layer for your image

• Contrast is added by brightening lights and darkening darks. This doesn’t mean that you have
to brighten the bright highlights and darken the dark shadows, contrast can be added in tones
that are very close to each other by using the same methodology.

• If you are using a Levels adjustment layer you will create contrast by moving two of the sliders
closer to each other. With a curves adjustment you will be typically lightening (raising) the
point on the right of the curve and darkening (lowering) the point on the le7 of the curve.

• It’s also important that we’re not looking for the magic bullet in one hit, to achieve the de-
sired result we may need to do this several mes, so take small bit sized chunks with each ad-
justment.

• Turn on and off the adjustment layer several to many mes, viewing the changes that you
have made throughout the image.

• It’s also important that you use your histogram to see what you are doing to the highlights
and shadows, o7en our eyes will deceive us.

• Using a black brush on a medium to low opacity and low hardness, brush out the areas where
it’s geIng to bright or dark.

• Repeat these steps several mes, unl you are happy with the result.

Note: Usually as you add more contrast adjustment layers you are going to get more focussed on the
areas that you are adjusng. The first couple may be globally applied, but the more you add, the less of
the image you will likely want to affect.

There are also some good plugins that have some reasonably powerful contrast adjustment tools, this is
the me that you want to apply them.

Below is an example of before and a7er contrast adjustments.

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5. The 80/20 Adjustments: Enhancing the Image

Have you ever heard of the 80/20 rule, it seems to apply to just about everything, 20% of the
populaon holds 80% of the wealth. I think it’s more like 5% of the populaon, but you get my point.

We have completed the major eding within the image by the me we reach this stage 80% stage, but
that last 20% of what we do to the image will make all the difference in the way your viewers view and
interpret your work. Therefore, this is one of the most important stages in anyone’s workflow.

The eding that we do here, if looked at individually, would appear to have liHle to no impact on the
image, but when you are done eding and take a step back and look at the enre image the changes
will be profound.

One thing that doesn’t change at this stage, is in order to create an image with drama and impact, we
must remember contrast, contrast, contrast. So the adjustments that we make here will typically
involve contrast. I believe that contrast comes in many forms, such as:

• Light and dark, like we applied in step 4.

• Colour, through saturaon / de-saturaon, selecve vibrance

• Sharp and so7 areas of the image (i.e. sharp rocks and so7 water)

• Light and shade, not like contrast, but light parts of an image enhanced by darker sur-
rounds, etc… (similar to vigneHes).

What we are aHempng to do here is make certain parts of our image stand out, find the most
important things in the image, the things you want the viewer to noce and make them pop. Things
like:

• Rocks
• Trees
• Mountains
• People
• Building, etc...

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The example below is of Dodging and Burning the image in order to lead the viewer to the area of the
scene that you want them to look at.
By brightening up the lower right foreground and following the line of rocks into the water and eventu-
ally to the temple, while at the same me burning / darkening the surrounding areas we are beHer able
to keep the viewers aHenon where we want it, while increasing the dramac impact.

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Another popular method of direcng the viewers eye in a scene is through the use of a VigneHe. A
vigneHe can be a very effecve method of keeping a viewers eye in the scene, it can also be over done.

Quite o7en you will see vigneHes applied as an ellipse and then darkened far too much. There are two
methods that I prefer and they are:

1. Creang a burn layer, then using a large low opacity brush with liHle to no hardness, start
painng in from the corner of your scene, pushing the viewers eyes towards the area of in-
terest. Note, keep toggling this layer on and off to make sure the effect is not overly noce-
able.

2. The second method I would use is the lasso tool to draw around the area you want to stand
out, then invert your selecon and create a curves adjustment layer (use vigneHe on
ADPpanel+Pro). Use this to darken the outside of the image (change the blending mode to
Luminosity if it’s effecng the colour too much). Now if you click on the mask you will find a
“Feather” slider in the properes panel. Slide the feather slider unl you have a smooth
unnoceable transion between the light and dark areas.

The last step in the 5 step of the workflow is to clean up you image, this could mean:

• Removing dust spots

• Removing other unwanted objects (power lines, people, etc…)

• Move minor objects around

• Minor repairs of blown out areas

• Etc…

You may be very tempted to remove these items at the beginning of your edit…..DON’T, there is a good
reason we want to save this unl the end. If we don’t do a really good job of removing items early in
the edit, it may look ok at the me, but a7er you have completed all of your other adjustments any
poor job you did early will stand out much more. So ignore those items and remove them at the end,
and you’ll be much happier with the results.

There are many methods for this, each work slightly differently, but you will typically use your cloning
and healing brushes, content aware delete/fill, or patch tools.

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6. Resizing, Sharpening and Saving
We have completed our edits, and are almost there.
There are many tools and plugins available to us to sharpen our images, but probably one of the most
effecve that I have used to date is the “Smart Sharpen Filter or Unsharp Mask” in Photoshop.
There are a couple of things to consider when sharpening an image:
1. Resize your images before you sharpen them.
2. Only sharpen those parts of an image that need to be sharpened.
If you follow these steps below, you will have acceptably sharp images without the tell tale signs of
over sharpening, such as crunchy looking images, halo’s around high contrast areas, and detail where it
should be so7.
• Decide on what the finished size of your image is going to be.
• Resize your image to it’s finished size.
• Sharpen the image using the method you prefer.
• Mask out the parts of the image you don’t want sharpened.
Now before you save your image, there a few things you need to consider:
• If you’re going to be sharing your image on the internet then you need to ensure that your
image is in the sRGB colour space. You have two opons here:
1. Use File > Save For web, this will automacally convert your image to sRGB, just make
sure the check box for this is checked when you open the dialogue box, but not my
preferred method as I find it effects colour.
2. Your other opon is to convert using Edit > Convert to Profile, to convert the file to
sRGB if it isn’t already, then simply save using File > Save as
• If you are going to be prinng the image, check with your print lab or check which colour
space your home printer works in and convert the image accordingly.

Wrap Up
You now have all of the fundamentals of a strong workflow.
Take the steps I have given you and start to build on these steps to develop your own style of eding.
Using these 6 fundamental steps, and applying your own methodologies for adding contrast and punch
to your images and how you direct your viewers will give you your own style, and have you creang
consistent, quality and repeatable edits over and over again.
Happy Eding!

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