How do you Post Process?

[mx344]

So everyones style of post processing is different, I'm curious to what all you guys do when your editing your photos

For me it all depends on the photo, since I am doing alot of portraits now, I use a general theme.

1. Choose a preset as a base, I bought film presets that add a nice feel to it.
2. Increase exposure as well as fill light to brighten up the image, as well as fill in any shadows that take away from the image.
3. Adjust wb as well as contrast.
4. ajdust the tone curve, as I said, I do alot of portrait work, so shadows are not what I'm looking for, so I adjust it where ever necessary, to achieve no "over cooked" highlights, as well as shadows.
5. adjust the hue of the skin and saturation of various colors.
6. add a post vignette if needed.
7. sharpen/nr.
8. adjust split toning.
9 do last minute review corrections of everything, get rid of distracting things in the image, spot correct etc.
This whole process takes about 8-10 minutes.

Whats yours look like?

 

[voyagerfan99]

Since I shoot in RAW, I just open the picture in CS6 and use the Canon RAW editor to edit what needs to be changed. If it needs to be cropped, I'll crop it. I don't spend more than 5 minutes on a picture normally.

 

[Punk]

Yeah same here I shoot in RAW and use UFRaw to edit my pictures. The editting includes (if needed):

• Adjusting exposure
• Adjusting Colors
• Cropping

I hate over-edited (is that even a word??) photos.

 

[Justin]

- Fix exposure, add contrast and clarity in ACR
- Colour Efex Pro 4 if I want a certain tone or look to the photo.
- Silver Efex Pro 2 for b&w

 

[Kornowski]

Pretty much the same as these guys. Use ACR to fix exposure, curves and levels, add saturation, fix colour tones, WB etc, then edit in Photoshop removing distracting objects or copping.

 

[4NGU$]

Shooting RAW so,
0. make sure camera is set to the desired color space and monitor is calibrated
1.Import to Lightroom from my camera.

2.Rate and generally adjust levels a white balance

3.Begin work on highest rated image from the shoot

4.tweak highlights, shadows and Exposure in Lightroom as this deals with these things best

5.tweak clarity and maybe vibrancy (I don't find the saturation tool to much use in lightroom)

6. (optional) Noise reduction and colour noise reduction

7. Lens correction using the correct profiles, account for Chromatic Aberration on hight contrast subjects

8. Export from lightroom as full size PSD files, Auto open in photshop

9. once open in Photshop further tweak levels using adjustment layers

10. Duplicate the red channel and apply as a 20% softlight layer (increasing contrast very subtly

11. make any major cloning or cleaning changes (always on new layers that can be applied later to preserve the original image layer)

12. make any colour adjustments using adjustment layers and opacity and masks to change the intensity and the area of effeect

13 Dodge and burn using an unadjusted curves layer set to multiply for dodge and screen for burn using masks to apply to selected areas.

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14. depending on output type and size ether printing sharpen/upscale/profile or watermark/downsize

 

[Punk]

Wow!!! 4NGU$ is back!

 

[Geoff]

2. Increase exposure as well as fill light to brighten up the image, as well as fill in any shadows that take away from the image.

Just as a friendly tip, increasing exposure and using fill light isn't the best option for changing the lighting in an image, you should really be using levels and/or curves to more precisely increase/decrease the highlights, lights, darks, and shadows.

 

[spirit]

I post process RAWs in Lightroom.

 

[Rit]

I shoot in RAW and just have a basic action in lightroom to do some cleaning up, but other than that, I always edit to the picture. If you want the best post-processing for a picture, you have to take the time to do it. No easy way outs!

 

[EvanK]

Pretty similar process (no pun intended) for me. Import to Lightroom, do any crops if necessary, tweak WB as needed, tweak exposure, shadows, highlights, saturation, contrast, levels and curves. Sometimes I'll do some NR or sharpening, or convert it to B&W and do some colour adjustment. Sometimes I'll do some lens profile corrections to reduce distortion, or more often vignetting. For exporting I'll do a batch of full res shots to save on my HDD, and some owner res versions with watermarks for the web.

For HDRs, I do almost everything through Photomatix, which is a superb piece of software. After processing them sometimes I'll do some final tweaks in PS, or do a crop.