Terrible at processing.

NikonGuy

banned
I am still working on switching to raw, but I haven't yet. Anyways, I am ultimately terrible at editing my photos, and everything recent youve seen is from my tablet editing( where I do it best ) but i'm sure you've noticed grain etc... My question is even though I only have the Jpg's right now, could someone like ... ( Geoff :p ) ... take some time to help me out a little bit show me some techniques and process a couple of my photos so I can see what they could look like. On my trip to Cincinnati last week I got some quite nice cityscape shots, however minus being a little crooked ( easy fix ) I was dumb enough to forget to check ISO and shot at 1250 ISO with a night sky now full of grain, :mad:

Can someone help?
 

C4C

Well-Known Member
Photoshop has a "Reduce Noise" filter that might help with grain.. Just don't get it confused with "Remove Noise".


I too notice grain when editing on a mobile device. May be the reduced image file size.
 
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Geoff

VIP Member
Since you mentioned night photos, I'll give you an example of a recent one of mine. For the photos below, and really whenever I edit RAW photos, I adjust the white balance, exposure/levels, contrast, saturation, noise reduction, sharpening, and Photoshop's automated lens correction.

First, you need to shoot in RAW. You have much more flexibility in post-processing. Some of the most basic editing is cropping and straightening the photo, along with adjusting the exposure and levels. By levels, I mean changing highlights midtones, and shadows independently, such as when you have a high contrast photo of a foreground and sky. Saturation helps make colors pop, or you can make them more subtle if that's the look you are going for.

ISO 1250 is not very high, as I mentioned I routinely take photos at ISO 6400 to ISO 8000, yes there's noise but in Photoshop you can easily apply some noise reduction which makes a huge difference. In-camera sharpening and NR is pretty poor.

This is one of the original RAW photos:



And this is the final product:
Cool fall evening by Geoff Johnson., on Flickr
 

NikonGuy

banned
Photoshop has a "Reduce Noise" filter that might help with grain.. Just don't get it confused with "Remove Noise".


I too notice grain when editing on a mobile device. May be the reduced image file size.
Yes I have both photoshop and Lightroom, Lightroom even with the noise reduction I am just terrible at editing, I always soom to mess something up.
Since you mentioned night photos, I'll give you an example of a recent one of mine. For the photos below, and really whenever I edit RAW photos, I adjust the white balance, exposure/levels, contrast, saturation, noise reduction, sharpening, and Photoshop's automated lens correction.

First, you need to shoot in RAW. You have much more flexibility in post-processing. Some of the most basic editing is cropping and straightening the photo, along with adjusting the exposure and levels. By levels, I mean changing highlights midtones, and shadows independently, such as when you have a high contrast photo of a foreground and sky. Saturation helps make colors pop, or you can make them more subtle if that's the look you are going for.

ISO 1250 is not very high, as I mentioned I routinely take photos at ISO 6400 to ISO 8000, yes there's noise but in Photoshop you can easily apply some noise reduction which makes a huge difference. In-camera sharpening and NR is pretty poor.

This is one of the original RAW photos:



And this is the final product:
Cool fall evening by Geoff Johnson., on Flickr

I'll use Geoff's image as example. I took a night shot like that before, and the only way I could figure out is to bump up clarity, other than that I have no idea how to make things "Pop" like other lightroom user do, so am I missing something? https://500px.com/photo/69046673/stars-turning-by-benjamin-holthaus?from=user
To me, this is the most annoying star shot ever. I have focus set to infinity, it says Ap f/4, but actually I used f22, and this is the only shot i've ever taken where you see the stars so clearly. nonetheless what you see in that picture are noisy over saturated, contrasty, blurred stars with outlines due to clarity. Back to topic :p

So I understand correctly, You work with tones and hues etc for certain areas of the that only affect maybe 1 or 2 spots in the image, you are not using the main sliders that effect the entire image?
 

Geoff

VIP Member
Yes I have both photoshop and Lightroom, Lightroom even with the noise reduction I am just terrible at editing, I always soom to mess something up.


I'll use Geoff's image as example. I took a night shot like that before, and the only way I could figure out is to bump up clarity, other than that I have no idea how to make things "Pop" like other lightroom user do, so am I missing something? https://500px.com/photo/69046673/stars-turning-by-benjamin-holthaus?from=user
To me, this is the most annoying star shot ever. I have focus set to infinity, it says Ap f/4, but actually I used f22, and this is the only shot i've ever taken where you see the stars so clearly. nonetheless what you see in that picture are noisy over saturated, contrasty, blurred stars with outlines due to clarity. Back to topic :p

So I understand correctly, You work with tones and hues etc for certain areas of the that only affect maybe 1 or 2 spots in the image, you are not using the main sliders that effect the entire image?
For star photos, you need to change how you compose your shot. For settings, you should be using a wide aperture such as f/2.8 or f/4, the shutter speed should be ~ 15-20 seconds for a wide angle lens, ~30 seconds for ultra wide angle, and then shorter when using standard or zoom lenses. I typically use f/2.8, ISO 1600, with a 20 second exposure. You want to bring in as much light, hence the wide aperture, without increasing noise too much by having such a high ISO, and a shutter speed longer than what I listed will start to show star trails, which some might want, but not if you want a crisp photo.

The other problem is your focusing, you can't use auto focus, and you don't want it on infinity. You actually want it slightly closer than infinity. Canon has a live view mode where you can see a 10x magnification of what you are focusing on, then you choose a bright star and manually focus until that is crisp. If you can't do that, it's trial and error, but turn to infinity then dial it down slightly until it's in focus.

For composition, if you want a foreground such as those trees, you need to take two photos, one exposed and focusing on the stars and the other on the trees, otherwise one will always be out of focus.

For tones and colors on this image specifically, I changed the white balance, bumped up the saturation on the blues and purples while lowering the oranges and reds to try and minimize the orange light pollution, I darkened the blacks to give the night sky a deep tone, I darkened the trees, and increased sharpening a tad. Some settings were global, while others were only on certain parts of the image, I had to use the exposure brush to darken certain areas to make it more uniform.

Start off with single shots like this, then work your way up to photo stacking. The example above is from a stack of 5 photos combined.
 
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NikonGuy

banned
Oh ok. Well I was messing around with live view and to the conclusion I gotta start shooting raw.. Everyone knows jpegs cannot be processed without loosing a lot of quality. The color and details in live view on my camera I could only replicate if shooting raw. Oh and i‘m still new to my camera, got it about 4months ago but worked full time up until recently so im just getting a hang of it. Thanks Geoff! Hope you don‘t mind me coming back with more questions :p
 

Geoff

VIP Member
Oh ok. Well I was messing around with live view and to the conclusion I gotta start shooting raw.. Everyone knows jpegs cannot be processed without loosing a lot of quality. The color and details in live view on my camera I could only replicate if shooting raw. Oh and i‘m still new to my camera, got it about 4months ago but worked full time up until recently so im just getting a hang of it. Thanks Geoff! Hope you don‘t mind me coming back with more questions :p
You take excellent photos, I saw your 500px account, keep it up! :good:
 

voyagerfan99

Master of Turning Things Off and Back On Again
Staff member
Yeah no, your photo skills have greatly increased. The only place you can go is up.
 
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