Help a newbie out!

JoeWhitley

JoeWhitley

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Name
Joe
Edit My Images
Yes
Hi everyone,

Hope all is well.

I'm very new to post production and have already received criticism on the critique section for making some rookie errors, including over-saturation.

I was wondering if anyone had some basic tips, like the 5 golden rules of making a photo look professional and not cheap. What five things are most important to change (ie: levels, sharpening, contrast, shadows/highlights, vibrance)? And what's the best way to do it?

Thanks so much in advance,
Joe
 
The best advice I can give is not to go gung-ho with all the sliders for the various tools that are at your disposal.

As a general rule I only use Levels, curves and sharpening in PP and thats only when I really have too.

Go easy on the vibrance and saturation as it's to easy for it to go off the scale.

As a side note, check your histogram in camera when shooting. It's to easy to think that PP will cancel out any errors at the time of shooting. It can recover some but not all.
 
I edit almost all my images in either camera raw or lightroom (even the jpegs)
Colour balance (usually more or less right)
Exposure
fill light
Blacks
Clarity
Sharpening/noise reduction.

I don't often bump up saturation/viberance unless I need to for a reason, and I tend to do curves in photoshop proper as I find the curves in ACR?LR limited.

Scot Kelby suggests a 7 point system.
Camera raw
Curves
Shadow highlight
Burning/dodging
Channels ajustments
Layer blend modes and masks
Sharpening
Although you won't usually use all on every image.
 
First of all what software are you using? It may help tailor responses.

The first things I do are sort out compositional aspects of the image, make sure the horizon is straight, if there is one and crop out anything creeping into the frame.

Then white balance and exposure, use the highlight/lowlight clipping warnings.

The above are mostly things that can be corrected in camera and is probably easiest to do there, use the back of your camera to check.

Then I usually boost the vibrance (less harsh than saturation) and clarity, but only slightly.

The next step is to clone out dust bunnies etc.

The after output a light sharpen.

Another key thing is to make sure your monitor is calibrated, then you can see what your images look like properly, then it is just a case of asking yourself, does this look ok?
 
1. a hardware-calibrated monitor.
2. to raw-processed images try to use your camera's native software (i.e. DPP to Canon) as much as it possible to you.
 
stupar said:
The best advice I can give is not to go gung-ho with all the sliders for the various tools that are at your disposal.

As a general rule I only use Levels, curves and sharpening in PP and thats only when I really have too.

Go easy on the vibrance and saturation as it's to easy for it to go off the scale.

As a side note, check your histogram in camera when shooting. It's to easy to think that PP will cancel out any errors at the time of shooting. It can recover some but not all.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the advice, Stuart.
 
swanseamale47 said:
I edit almost all my images in either camera raw or lightroom (even the jpegs)
Colour balance (usually more or less right)
Exposure
fill light
Blacks
Clarity
Sharpening/noise reduction.

I don't often bump up saturation/viberance unless I need to for a reason, and I tend to do curves in photoshop proper as I find the curves in ACR?LR limited.

Scot Kelby suggests a 7 point system.
Camera raw
Curves
Shadow highlight
Burning/dodging
Channels ajustments
Layer blend modes and masks
Sharpening
Although you won't usually use all on every image.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the help, Wayne. Appreciate you all taking the time to help me.
 
Craikeybaby said:
First of all what software are you using? It may help tailor responses.

The first things I do are sort out compositional aspects of the image, make sure the horizon is straight, if there is one and crop out anything creeping into the frame.

Then white balance and exposure, use the highlight/lowlight clipping warnings.

The above are mostly things that can be corrected in camera and is probably easiest to do there, use the back of your camera to check.

Then I usually boost the vibrance (less harsh than saturation) and clarity, but only slightly.

The next step is to clone out dust bunnies etc.

The after output a light sharpen.

Another key thing is to make sure your monitor is calibrated, then you can see what your images look like properly, then it is just a case of asking yourself, does this look ok?
Click to expand...

I have Photoshop CS5 (I need it for cropping images for my company's website) and that's about it. How do I calibrate my screen? I use a PC laptop and when looking at my Flickr on a Mac it looked really different. Thanks for your help.
 
JoeWhitley said:
I have Photoshop CS5 (I need it for cropping images for my company's website) and that's about it. How do I calibrate my screen? I use a PC laptop and when looking at my Flickr on a Mac it looked really different. Thanks for your help.
Click to expand...
Laptop monitors are never the best to start with, but using a hardware calibrator (such as a Spyder) will make it better. If your image is already looking different on other monitors it isn't a good start.

With CS5 you're diving in at the deep end, but if you shoot RAW the ACR process is pretty much the same in Elements, Lightroom and Photoshop CS5.
 
how do you calibrate your monitor?
Click to expand...
I use a PC laptop
Click to expand...

in that case i'd recommend to check laptop's graphics settings with one of these dozens test pictures by the link above. even glossy screen doesn't shows correct contrast, anyway this might be useful for an overall tune up.

on a Mac it looked really different
Click to expand...

it's ok. mac shows a bit brighter image.

BR
 
Last edited:
Craikeybaby said:
Laptop monitors are never the best to start with, but using a hardware calibrator (such as a Spyder) will make it better. If your image is already looking different on other monitors it isn't a good start.

With CS5 you're diving in at the deep end, but if you shoot RAW the ACR process is pretty much the same in Elements, Lightroom and Photoshop CS5.
Click to expand...

Thanks a lot, Lewis. I'll have a look at Spyder. I know what you mean about CS5 - it is quite complicated. Suppose if I can master it I'll be able to master anything, though. Going to be a lot of work!
 
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