As a taker of mainly landscape and macro pics, I wondered if anyone would care to share their PP techniques for birds - getting more feather detail particularly etc. ?
I seem to recall someone once giving me advise on sharpening involving the use of a high pass filter somehow but I have long since forgotten it !
I use ACR and CS3 and my PP at the moment involves a quick NR (Imagenomic Noiseware Pro) on default setting, some sharpening at full size usually Smart Sharpen with value of 100 or 150 and then a bit of Unsharp mask - 50, rad. 1.
I use "recover" in ACR a fair bit on landscape and macro but found it distorted the edges between feather colours. Probably my heavy handedness though to be fair.
Any good websites / tutorials ?
I appreciate that some people don't like to share their secrets which is fair enough (just PM me ! )
cadman342001 wrote:
As a taker of mainly landscape and macro pics, I wondered if anyone would care to share their PP techniques for birds - getting more feather detail particularly etc. ?
I seem to recall someone once giving me advise on sharpening involving the use of a high pass filter somehow but I have long since forgotten it !
I use ACR and CS3 and my PP at the moment involves a quick NR (Imagenomic Noiseware Pro) on default setting, some sharpening at full size usually Smart Sharpen with value of 100 or 150 and then a bit of Unsharp mask - 50, rad. 1.
I use "recover" in ACR a fair bit on landscape and macro but found it distorted the edges between feather colours. Probably my heavy handedness though to be fair.
Any good websites / tutorials ?
I appreciate that some people don't like to share their secrets which is fair enough (just PM me ! )
I only do the sharpening as my last adjustment (no sharpening in RAW) and I use the Smart Sharpening tool. Amount 100 - Radius 0.2 - Remove: lens blur - More accurate: Unchecked. I usually do one, to three passes with that setting as needed. After every pass I use the fade command (go to edit/fade sharpening/luminosity mode) and I use the Luminosity mode to apply the sharpening only to luminosity. This has the same effect as converting to Lab mode and sharpening the Luminosity channel only, but it is faster and less destructive . If needed I reduce the opacity a bit also. I hardly use the advanced mode of the Smart sharpening.
Those are my settings for the web sharpening. For the normal sharpening I use higher values for the radius, but I hardly exceed 1.0. Uncheck/check the "Preview" check box to have a better view of how much sharpening you've applied. When you think your sharpening looks good reduce the opacity of about 20% because we all have the tendency to oversharpen a bit.
It is also important to get the image's overall tonality right to begin with. This will bring more detail to be sharpened.
Have fun!
Socrate
Quick Tips:
1. Prime lens
2. Expose to the right.
3 Repeat on almost all images and your images will improve.
Post Processing:
I just picked up a book that is revolutionizing my post processing:
Camera Raw with Adobe Photoshop CS3--by Bruce Fraser and Jeff Schewe.
Wish I'd read this when it came out!! It's an outstanding book which covers how to get the most out of camera raw so when you get to pshop you often find yourself saying, 'hmmm, I don't think I can improve on that'.
Oh, and try to avoid pshops recover except in the smallest increments. It's waaaay overused and it's very obvious when a heavy hand is applied.
As far as feather detail, that starts with a prime lens. Without that capture having the detail, you can only fake it an that is VERY hard to do convincingly. (Look at the lens ratings on this site. ALL the higest ratings go to primes. There's a reason for that.)
And expose to the right.
Oh, and pick up Arthur Morris' post processing cookbook on image processing (actually by John Shaw) Good stuff and priced right. It's available on his website.
I am waiting on my 300 f4 AFS to arrive so that's a step in the right direction.
Thanks for the tip on the fade command. Other than that pretty much waht I'm doing already.
I always try to expose as bright as poss so that any white on the subject is just flashing on the back screen. I guess that's exposing to the right ?
(rarely use the histogram which I know is bad as I know it's a valuable source of info)
1. Stop your lens down. It doesn't make your image any sharper, it simply renders more of your image in focus, which give it the three-dimensional look.
2. Learn to use flash. It gets you to to 1/250 sec for shutter speed, which can be surprisingly difficult to achieve at f11, even on a sunny day. IME, birds are not bothered by flash. Others' mileage has varied on this.
I realize these aren't PP suggestions, but the idea is to get more fine detail into the image in the field. Then you have something to work on in post -
May 22, 2008 at 12:44 AM
anthony whitmo Offline • • • • • • Upload & Sell: Off
I would say read Johnny's advise again that way I don't have to repeat it! One thing I would add to that if you are one that likes to read then Photoshop CS3, Studio Techniques by Ben Willmore may be for you. It is thick and boring but it does cover almost everything. It does not tell you step by step how to do things rather it tells you what does what. As an example it explains how to sharpen the same way Socrate explained but it doesn't provide the step by step that Socrate provided. In other words the book explains the tools and how to use them, you need to figure out when and where to use them.
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