One of the most important things when photographing and retouching, is preparing your work for printing and to have consistantcorrected colour throughout your photographs. Even if you decide to push your colours to the extreme for creative effect, starting off with a proper correction is very beneficial.
It is important to ensure that all your settings are in-sync with each other; from camera to monitor to photoshop to printer, to produce the same photograph (or exceptionally close to) throughout different mediums. If you are converting your files to different colour spaces through each pre-production process, the more you can potentially degrade the quality of your original image.
Continuing on from my first blog post about adjusting your camera settings for shooting RAW to give yourself a higher dynamic range, I will now go through my process of bringing photographs into Photoshop for post-production.
Firstly, I would recommend calibrating your computer monitor. Many computer’s are set to a default colour hue of blue/cyan, this is so that when they are on display at a store, they appear bright and crisp and look more appealing to the consumer.
This is not useful for consistant colour correction. You need to be able to distinguish the black and white points of your monitor. You do not want to have deep shadows or blown out highlights or an over saturated color hue.
There are various products on the market that will easily calibrate your monitor for you. I would not recommend trying to judge it by eye. I use a Spyder 3 Elite, it’s brilliant and quick and I always receive consistant results every time.
Once your monitor has been calibrated, then you can begin setting up Photoshop for post-production.
I work in Adobe RGB (1998) - This will be consistant with my camera, as previously I said that I shoot with the Adobe RGB color profile.
You will need a RAW conversion software, Adobe Camera Raw is a great program to start with - otherwise Lightroom is what I use.
I convert my RAW photographs to Adobe RGB - 16 BIT at 300 DPI and saved as a PSD (or you can use TIFF) file for working on.
Here is a screen shot from ACR once you have clicked to open and edit a RAW file:
This is in Lightroom when you go to Export your RAW files:
In Photoshop, my colour workflow settings are as follows:
To get to this go to Edit > Colour Settings.
My proof settings are as follows:
To get to this, go to View > Proof Set-up > Custom.
It would be a good idea to save these settings as your preferences.
I choose to work in RGB for the sole reason that it is a very common and standard colour profile with a broad color gamut. sRGB has a lower color gamut range and therefore will not yield the maximum numbers of colours for print.
CMYK does come into play in terms of printing for magazine publication, as generally this is the most common profile used.
This is why it is set to U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2 which is the standard for offset printing. This will be beneficial if you are requested to convert your colour profile to CMYK and then you won’t have highly noticeable colour shifts after doing so.
Once I have completed my retouching, I save a high resolution TIFF for printing.
I then covert the image to 8 BIT and the colour profile is kept at Adobe RGB (1998) with 300 DPI.
For viewing on the web, I save as a JPEG - 8 BIT - 72 DPI and converted to the colour profile sRGBIEC61966-2.1.
I use Convert to profile under the Edit tab. If you use the Assign profile it can make noticable colour shifts and should only be used if your original file does not have an embedded colour profile already.
That’s it! You are now ready to start achieving quality results from your photography!
Keep an eye out for my next post which will explain how to set-up your printer or lab for proofing your images based on your monitor calibration and how to get beautiful, near identical prints to what your photo would look like on your monitor originally.
Shooting in RAW is far superior than shooting in JPEG. I am going to be discussing with you the differences between using RAW and JPEG file formats when it comes to retouching photographs.
The RAW file format is digital photography’s equivalent of a negative in film photography. There is no industry standard RAW mode. Each camera manufacturer has it’s own proprietary format. For example Canon have CRW or more recently CR2, Nikon have NEF.
You may also notice that when you download your camera RAW files to your hard drive that additional files called ‘XMP’ are also included. These files store the metadata for the RAW image (keywords, caption, date, etc.) as well the edits you’ve made in Adobe Camera RAW (or equivalent program) on an image. If you discard it, you’ll lose that information.
RAW data is the output from each of the original red, green and blue sensitive pixels of the image sensor. RAW data from most high-end digital cameras contains 12 bit data, which means that there can be 4096 different intensity levels for each pixel.
If the data is stored as a JPEG file, it is modified by in camera set parameters such as white balance, saturation, sharpness, contrast etc, it is subject to JPEG compression and then stored on the memory card like this. In an 8-bit file (such as a JPEG), each pixel can have one of 256 different intensity levels.
Actually, 256 levels is enough, and all printing is done at the 8 bit level, so you might ask what the point is of having 12 bit data. The answer is that it allows you to perform a greater range of manipulation to the image without degrading the quality. You can adjust curves and levels to a greater extent, then convert back to 8-bit data for printing. If you want to access all 12 bits of the original RAW file, you can convert to a 16-bit PSD or TIFF file.
Dynamic range refers to the range of light to dark that can be captured by a camera before becoming completely white or black, respectively.
TIFF files are larger than JPEG files, but they retain the full quality of the image. They can be compressed or uncompressed, but the compression scheme is lossless, meaning that although the file gets a little smaller, no information is lost. Every time you modify and re-save a JPEG image, it loses more data.
The only advantage of saving JPEG data is that the file size is smaller and the file can be directly read by many programs or even sent directly to a printer. The disadvantage is that there is a quality loss; the amount of loss depending on how much compression is used. The more compression, the smaller the file but the lower the image quality.
When I am shooting, I have a custom picture style set on my DSLR.
Ideally you want to reduce the sharpness and contrast that is within the camera settings, you want to be able to work on an image with the highest dynamic range possible, so that when it comes to post-production and you are pushing your creative effects to a more extreme level, you are going to greatly reduce the amount of artifacts on your final image.
Shooing with a Flat picture style is what I use. This is also recommended for when you are shooting video on a DSLR. You do not want to go Super Flat or push it too far, otherwise you will find that the range of your mid-tones when post-processing will become very messy.
Your settings should be as follows:
There are various other picture styles within the camera, with the general aim of reducing your sharpness and contrast for different lighting situations. As long as you have your correct exposure and white balance set (definitely do a custom white balance, not the presets) you will be set. You should have your colour profile set to Adobe RGB and your exposure and white balance should be manually measured with a light meter and a white/grey card.
Example of “Flat” picture style on a still photograph:
Note the broad range of shadow and highlight detail across the image.
After adding contrast and sharpening in Lightroom:
Merely brightening or darkening a JPEG file; both in dynamic range and in the smoothness of tones, could not achieve similar results.
The RAW file format uses a lossless compression, and so it does not suffer from the compression artifact visible with “lossy” JPEG compression. RAW files contain more information and achieve better compression than TIFF, but without the compression artifact of JPEG.
I will be writing another post as a continuation of this on how to prepare your images for post-production and printing.
