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How To: Photography Post Production with Photoshop (And Lightroom)

Follow along as I do some simple tweaking on a couple photos taken by a friend of mine in Pakistan. This will be remedial to experienced Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom users, but might be useful for beginners.

A Brief Note on My Philosophy of Photoshop:

A lot of people go crazy with post production. Visit damn near any photography forum or flickr group and you’ll find boundless acres of artificially tarted up portfolios, and most will use post production the way a hooker uses lipstick.

Hey, I tell it like it is. ‘Cuz I’m real like that.

Photoshop, like plastic surgery, shouldn’t be apparent. People should look at the photo and think it came out of the camera looking like that. In my opinion, anyway. So if you’re new to Photoshop, I urge you to lay off the crazy extreme-sharpen-filter-overlay-HDR-plugin-plastic-skin stuff. There’s plenty of time for that later, after you get the basics down. And remember that just because you can put icing on a turd, doesn’t make it a cake.

My Photoshop Routine:

It’s important to start with a good photo (I.E. the turdcake metaphor, a highly polished shitty photo isn’t going to be a great photo, it’s just going to be a highly polished shitty photo). I’m using two pictures a friend of mine took on vacation in Pakistan. Here’s the first one before and after:

Click for Full Size

And the second one before and after: (This one got a little cartoonish in my opinion… Oh well, I’m a hypocrite. Remember kids, moderation!)

I picked the first one because I’m a sucker for street photographer. I picked the second one because I really liked the blue door and the outfit of the boy in the front (it has a nifty kind of wax paper sheen to it). Ok, here comes the wall of text… I’m going to explain what I did in detail for the second picture (with the blue door). I did pretty much the same thing on the first picture, except some more colour changes.)

I have a little mental checklist I go through when I start working on a picture. Starting in Adobe Lightroom:

Whitebalance? Ok in this case.

Exposure? Ok in this case.

Colours? I look the colours over, see if anything is too distracting (Bright red things are a common culprit, I tend to desaturate things that are too red just enough to bring them in line with the overall feel of the picture. In the second picture, the red ribbon thing on the garbage bag and the girl’s pink pant leg needed to be brought down a bit), or if anything looks like it needs a boost. Sometimes things look “pale” or faded, in an unflattering way – in those cases I’ll boost the saturation or vibrancy, or maybe mess around with the luminance of that colour, or in in Photoshop make a layer with just that item on it so I can do some more hardcore tweaking.

Blacks? Bring the Black level up to my liking. 2 to 5 ish will do for most pictures. I use the black level to establish sort of a “base” level of shadow, but not to control how much shadow there is in the picture. If turn the Blacks up too much, when I fiddle with the tone curve later I’ll loose a lot of detail in the shadow areas.

Clarity? This is one of my favorite things in Lightroom. In this case I turned it up a bunch, to bring out some detail in the road and wall.

Tone Curve? I usually bring up the high highlights a little bit, don’t usually mess with the mid-highlights (I find that the previous adjustments usually put that tonal range where I want it already), bring the mid-lows up or down as needed, bring down the shadows a little bit. I generally look at things in the picture that have interesting shapes, and then try to adjust the tone curve so that it makes the shape stand out.

Crop? The two boys are the focal point for me, so I cropped the picture putting the two boys on either side and leaving some of the doorway and door to frame them.

Anything in need of spot touchups? In this case I used the brush adjustment tool to increase the exposure on the foreground boys’ right eye area, to get rid of some of that shadow. That made him have glowing white zombie eyes though so I had to paint out the eye itself and leave it just increasing the exposure on his face. I also painted a bit more exposure on his right cheek.

About here I’ll start messing around with things just to experiment. Fiddle with the saturation/vibrancy even if I like the picture just fine already, just to see if there’s something I might like better. Try tinting the shadows or highlights to give it a film type look. Just go through every interesting slider and see if something you like happens. I thought the picture was fine the way it was, and so it was on to phase two of my routine: Area correction.

I have the picture in Lightroom, tweaked so that the boys look the way I want them. I save that picture, and then tweak the same picture so that the background (the road and wall, which look washed out to me) are the way I want them. Brought the contrast up, exposure down, blacks up. I’ll use the recovery slider a bit sometimes, but not always as I don’t like the weirdness it does to the tone curve. When I have the background where I want it, I save that one and open both pictures in Photoshop.

Cut and paste the picture edited to make the boys look good over top the background picture, and apply a hide-all layer mask. Then I paint the mask to reveal any areas that look better in the boys picture than in the background picture. A lot of the time this will be more than just one thing – for instance in this picture, the layer mask revealed the boys, and the door/doorway, because in the picture I edited to make the background “pop”, the boys and doorway were much too dark.

This way I can “flatten” the exposure range in the photo, so that instead of one area looking good and the other looking over/under exposed, they’ll both sort of match. If there are other areas that still need tweaking I’ll either copy a layer and fiddle with the levels in photoshop, or tweak the whole picture in lightroom and copy it to Photoshop and mask off just the area I wanted. After I’m satisfied with that, I flatten the image and start selectively sharpening things.

Duplicating the background layer (which is the only layer after the flatten), I apply a very slight bit of sharpening (perhaps a radius of 1.0 and an amount of 40-70, more or less as needed) just to make everything “crisp”. In this case, I made a layer and applied some heavier sharpening to bring the boy in the front to the level of sharpness I wanted, then applied a hide-all mask. Sticking to the key features – eyes, hair, mouth, folds or patterns in clothes – I paint the layer mask to reveal the sharpened layer where needed on the foreground boy. I try to avoid revealing the sharpened layer in low contrast areas. For example, you would sharpen the outline of his eye, but not his cheek. The noise and pixelation would be more evident on his cheek, which has no lines or contours to enhance anyway. You also want to be wary of some patterns and clothing that might be better left unsharpened – if it adds too much pixelation or sharpening artifacts and noise, then just leave it be.

When I’m done with that, I’ll duplicate the background layer again and apply a really heavy amount of sharpening to bring the boy in the background into focus a bit more. (Radius 2 ish, amount 100+) The rest of the picture will look like crap with this amount of sharpening, so I will be even more selective and careful applying it. I add a hide-all layer mask and begin painting the mask to reveal the detail, but in this case I take more time and use smaller brushes. In a lot of cases I’ll just paint over the important edges (the edge of his pants, the outline of his eyes, his mouth, the outlines of his clothes) because I don’t want to expose too much of the nasty noisy side effects of the sharpening.

Now the background. Same deal, duplicate the background layer and sharpen to taste. This time I add a reveal all mask and paint out the boys.

When everything is suitably sharpened, it’s time for phase three of my routine: Defining the highlights.

This is the fastest part most of the time, I just flatten the picture and make a duplicate of the background layer, grab my tablet and go to town with the dodge tool. I like the dodge tool, although for many years I thought it was a crutch on which poor quality airbrushed-playmate-types  leaned. The trick to using the dodge tool well is moderation. I usually have it set between 1% and 5%, and go very slowly, painting changes on in multiple passes. I hit the hair first usually, to bring out the highlights. In addition to the main highlights in hair, there are often less intense highlights in other places that can be brought out with a bit of dodging to give a fuller shape to the hair. I dodge along the wrinkles and natural highlights on the clothes with a smaller brush, and across large areas with a bigger brush. (I.E. I would use a larger brush to brush across one side of someone’s leg, then use a smaller brush to highlight the wrinkles in the same area.)

Like I said before, the key is moderation. You are just slightly enhancing natural highlights, as long as you don’t paint entirely new highlights, it won’t look like cheesy pinup art.

I go along dodging here and there, fabric wrinkles, jewellry, sometimes I’ll enhance the highlights on a persons face but I’m very cautious about dodging on skin because I hate the airbrushy look it can have. Sometimes I’ll go in and burn shadows in fabric and clothing too, to bring out the shape more. The whole dodging and burning thing is all about highlighting shape, and making things “pop”.

And that’s it, that’s my basic process that I apply to every picture as a matter of course. Thanks to my friend who’s pictures I used here.

If you have any questions feel free to drop a comment below. I might write up something more in-depth about real Photoshoppery later, including one picture from my portfolio in which I engaged in some despicable, magazine-level editing and made someone thinner. If I can get away with posting the before picture without getting in trouble, that is…

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