The making of a photograph – Lightroom Edits

Photo of the Grand Canyon at Desert View By Tony Eckersley

Recently, I have received a lot of messages on Flickr asking to see my work flow for post processing images and how I use Photoshop or Lightroom. When I first started taking photography more seriously, I already had a 4 year graphic design degree behind me and 4 years working in an Branding Agency meaning that my experiences with Photoshop and post processing had been quite high (theoretically anyway). But the main reason behind my knowledge of Photoshop comes not from my work experience or my degree, but through something the majority of us have access to; the internet.

The internet is one of the greatest tool out there for Photographers – as is taking full advantage of online communitiesy. Between my father, Neil Coffey, Matthew Langley and the internet, I have learned more aboutthe technical side of photography and the photo than any school could have ever taught me. When it comes to the internet, there are so many great tutorials out there, and just as photographers like Chase Jarvis have developed, the idea of Photographers sharing their experiences, knowledge and know-how is the essence of how the photography online community works. The internet has allowed me to develop my photography skills because of photographers/professionals like Chase Jarvis, David Hobby, David Nightingale, Joe McNally and Scott Kelby and their willingness to share is a tool any photographer, professional, amateur and people just starting out, should be taking notice of.

On that note, I wanted to share with you my work flow for a popular image I have on Flickr and my portfolio of photographs. As I mentioned at the beginning, I do get a few emails asking how I edited an image to give vibrant colors, or sky definition, particularly on this image. I use Lightroom 2, which is quite frankly the best piece of software I have ever used. This little walk through is setting up a photo to be printed, but also looks pretty decent on screen, which are two very different things – I know it sounds obvious, but correcting color for each is quite a challenge.

Not surprisingly (I hope), it all starts with the original photograph.

Please click this to read about how I edit photos

Step 1 – The original photograph

Immediately you can see there is quite a jump from the shot above to the final photo featured as the header for this post. The photo was originally taken with a Canon 5D mkII with a Canon EF 24-70mm F/2.8L lens with a 0.9 Graduated ND Filter from Cokin. The scene was actually quite dark, so an exposure time of 30 seconds at F/11 was used at ISO 100 with a focal length of 35mm. A Tripod was also used. I always shoot in RAW, and I do tend to find the RAW images that come out of the Canon EOS Camera, are never quite as “vibrant” as when shooting with a Nikon, but that’s ok, as we shoot in RAW to have full control over the final image.

Step 2 – The composition

I get quite weird with composition. Personally, I see very wide with my images, and when I compose, I initially look from left to right before thinking the whole scene. I believe this is because I grew up seeing compositions in wide screen movies, but regardless, I am a fan of the wide composition. I do traditionally try and keep to the classic “think in thirds” rule that you can ultimately see in the cropped image more so than the original. I also try to get it right in camera first. I don’t like to crop too much, and although I have 21 mega pixels to play with, I like the majority of them to stay in the image.

Step 3 – The White Balance

I remember shooting in Zion National Park with my full gear, tripod, Canon 5D mkII, Big 70-200mm F/2.8L IS, filters etc, and this guy with his Canon 10D asked me what white balance setting I was using. He literally laughed at me when I said I leave it on AWB (Auto White Balance). I believe some believe and think this is a major sin! But this is why I shoot in RAW. I don’t trust the camera settings on all the other auto settings as I can just as easily process the white balance in the image in Lightroom as I remember it in person. I have much better control this way. But White Balance is how I start editing my photos. In this image, I added some Warmth to the Temperature and increased the Tint to stay consistent with the image’s color. I increased the warmth in the image as my Cokin Filters tend to make the images a little cooler, plus the time of day, just after the sun set, has this beautiful red hue to it. I don’t want to over do the warmth however, as it will have adverse effects for the next step.

Step 4 – Contrast

As I said earlier, in my experience, Canon’s RAW image lacks a bit of kick. I like to bring this back to what I saw in person by increasing the contrast slightly. This will give some vibrance to the colors, making those red’s more defined, the light’s more bright and the shadow’s more dark. We again don’t want to go too overboard with contrast, as while at first it may look cool on screen, but you have to be careful when printing. You can see in the image above that the shadows do look darker and the reds have more of a punch on the canyon wall, but this will change depending on how you have calibrated your monitor and your settings in Lightroom. I recommend some reading on setting both of these up before editing.

Step 5 – Bring back my Graduated Filter!

I used a 0.9 Grad ND filter on this image, but I found the actual location and time to be the wrong conditions to properly expose the image using the Grad ND filter. As it was getting close to being very dark, there was no real chance of having a fully overexposed sky while keeping the canyon exposed correctly. And while you can see in the original image, the sky is a little darker where the ND filter was doing it’s job, it’s not as defined as I wanted it to be. I really wanted to underexpose the sky a little more to bring out the definition and color in the clouds and the fallen sun. So I selected the graduated filter from the tools in Lightroom and set it at -1.5 and dragged it down from the top of the image to were I knew my filter ended on the camera. I then added a second filter in lightroom diagonally from the top left hand corner to really define the orange.

Step 6 – Clarity and Vibrance

I have a bad habit of using the Clarity tool too often to rescue poor photographs as it does help bring out the details. I have since learned to use it subtly to drive home some detail. The problem I had with the original image is that due to the climate that day and the controlled fires on the north and south rim, some of the detail was lost on the Canyon walls. While adding contrast works, I find adding a touch of ‘clarity’ does wonders to a shot like this. Those tiny cracks and rough edges in on the wall have much more definition and becomes much more like the image we see in person. I also increased the vibrance a little to boost those colors a little more

Step 7 – Final Edits

At this stage, I start all over again. I revisit each of the above stages to re work the image to it’s final outputted state. So, for the final image, once the initial edits are done, I rework the cropping, adding a little more foreground, I added a bit more warmth to the image to compensate for the vibrance we added, I reduced the effect of the Graduated Filter to give a more true feel to the photo. Once that is done, I take a look at some of the finer details. I will take a look at the Hue, Saturation and Luminance for each color and tweak any as necessary. For example, I boosted the magenta slightly in this image to give it more presence when printing. I then do some tweaking to the Sharpening as the RAW image tends to be a little soft. If needed I will reduce noise, but that was not necessary in this photo. After that I will look at my histogram to make sure it looks correct and we have no blow highlights or lost shadow detail. Then I take a look to see if I need to adjust the Highlights, Lights, Darks and Shadows at all.

So there we have it – that’s my work flow of editing a RAW image in Lightroom 2. I hope it was helpful you all those who asked, and to those comparing.

Please feel free to ask a question in my comments, or leave any feedback.