David Bigwood takes us through his own simple procedure for improving his landscapes beyond the capture phase.
In the days of film the production of a negative was never the finish for photographers. There was still much work to be done in the darkroom to come up with a print which satisfied the memory of what the scene looked and felt like at the moment the photographer pressed the shutter button. It was Ansel Adams who equated the negative with the score of music and the print as the orchestral performance. Now, in these digital days, our job isn’t finished when we’ve got the image safely tucked up in our computer. We, too, need to spend time finishing the job which started when we selected a scene to capture as a RAW file.
Why do I prefer RAW? Simply because I end up with as much material available to me as the sensor can handle, without the camera making decisions about what should be kept and what should be thrown away. In my view that job should be mine and mine alone. Just so you know where I’m coming from, I have Photoshop CS4 currently on my computer, but CS5 is identical for this exercise. I shoot in RAW, convert to DNG (the Adobe attempt to make RAW files universal, and available as a free download from www.adobe.com) and begin processing my images in Adobe Camera Raw. Other RAW processors should follow a similar process to the one I describe. I also calibrate my monitor regularly.
The Adjustment Process
The image I’ve chosen for this exercise was shot late one spring afternoon when the light was warm - the sort of lighting that gets a landscape photographer inspired! When I came to process this shot I opened my DNG image which, by default, opens in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) (figure 1). The exposure was reasonable as there were only a few burnt-out highlights which appeared as red areas and could be dealt with easily. Whenever I open a RAW file in ACR my first step is to switch the White Balance from ‘As shot’ to ‘Auto’ and then to click the second ‘Auto’ below the ‘Tint’ slider.
This gives me an idea of how the image could look....
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: How to keep your images stored safely * How to use external flash units * How to improve your photography by taking control