Editing: Step five - a final choice

I checked through the second sort and decided to use image DSC_3083 (last one on the list of the previous post. I felt this had the most potential but still needed some work on it due to the low light level and poor angle of the door frame.

As you can see the whole image is rather dark and the door frame is not upright. The lighting needs attention using Image/adjustments/shadows and highlights in Photoshop. The door frame needs to be skewed using the Edit/Transform/Skew in Photoshop.

Here's the final image with corrections for lighting and skewed door frame.

I used Levels to lighten the whole image, Edit/Transform/Skew to straighten the door post and Shadows/Highlights to lighten his face. Each function only needed a bit of tweeking to produce a much better image.

Editing: Step four - group and review

I've gone over all the pictures that I took during the session with John the winemaker and feel those selected for first and second sort do bear keeping.

Those I rejected were, in the main, copies of the selected images with one or two small variations.

Editing: Step three - the first selects

I worked my way through the images that I had selected with my first sort and labelled my choices using the second level yellow labels:

Image 3067 is rather dark but has potential.  It can easily be corrected using both Levels and Shadows/Highlights.

Editing: Step Two - the selects

I have never really used Adobe Bridge before preferring to work through Windows Explorer (or My Computer) to delete or select and organise the good slides from just plain bad to technically poor. But I decided to give it a go and here are the results based on my photo shoot with John the Winemaker.

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Initial sort of Winemaker folder in Adobe Bridge using labels system

I worked my way through the images that I had selected with my first sort and labelled them 'Select'.  This gave me a selection of 9 images.



Editing: Step one - the technical edit

I have never really used Adobe Bridge before preferring to work through Windows Explorer (or My Computer) to delete or select and organise the good slides from just plain bad to technically poor. But I decided to give it a go and here are the results based on my photo shoot with John the Winemaker.

I worked my way through the images that I had selected with my first sort and labelled the second sort using the second level labels.

Exercise: Editing

I had to take some pictures of a local man from Lyme Regis called John.  He not only made wine, collected saucy Victorian postcards but also wrote poetry.  The local newspaper wanted to feature him as he had published a book of his poems which were to go on sale at a local bookshop.  I arranged a date to go and see him to take the pictures. He works in his garden shed so I featured him in the shed (which was very small and lit by fluorescent lights).

He did not have time for me to do a pre picture visit to look at his facilities so I had to take the shed as I found it.  I chatted to John and as we spoke I took pictures of him against various backgrounds with him arranging the items behind him as we spoke.

Here's all the pictures I took in the time available:

They needed sorting into usable, technically poor and compositionally poor.

Exercise: Histograms

As part of this exercise I was asked to find three types of pictures, that of low contrast, average contrast and high contrast. As I took each image I had to bracket the shots to give images that were one stop under exposure, the correct exposure and one stop over exposed. I had to remember that my camera, the Nikon D5000, when asked to bracket some pictures, gives the correct exposure first then the under exposed then the over exposed images.

Once I had taken the pictures I had to put them into Photoshop and display the histograms, through the Levels pallette to show how different the profiles of each type of image was. Here's my images below:

Low contrast:

Average contrast:

High contrast:



I've always been a bit confused about what histograms show but having to read up about them, in the Martin Evening 'Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers, it has made what they show a lot clearer. I put each of the three images into a new image and did a screenshot of each histogram showing the detail so that I could compare them.