SHOW: Before and After Shots

[hazwing]

It's interesting seeing before and after, but this thread would be even better if people show how they achieved the changes.

 

[jyc860923]

a couple of before and afters, images taken over a month ago, differences are subtle

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[ivoire]

A bit of photoshop tweaking

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1774385 by Michael Wolf, on Flickr

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177438a by Michael Wolf, on Flickr

 

[ionian]

I've always been a raw shooter, with processing in Photoshop and Lightroom, but in an effort to a) be sociable with my family(!) and b) speed up my workflow on simple pics, I've been experimenting with mobile apps.
1. SOOC
2. After Facetune
3. After Snapseed
4. After PICSPLAY

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1. SOOC
2. After Snapseed
3. After Facetune
4. After Snapseed (again!)

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[hazwing]

As mentioned earlier, I feel we could learn a lot more from each other if we showed how we achieve the changes in our images and our rationale in our changes. I'll put my money where my mouth is:

Before and After shot in lightroom

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First thing - cropped out unnecessary water and sky. 16:9 more panaromic feel to it.

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Changed WB as a little warm. Pushed exposure, pushed shadows. Added contrast, clarity and vibrance to taste.

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Negative exposure gradient in the sky to darken it up a little

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I wanted to bring out the lights in the water a little more - so did a brush to push highlights

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Highlights a bit too strong in some areas so selective reduced with -ve highlights brush

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I wanted the boat to be more visible, so created a radial filter to brighten it up and add clarity to hopefully draw more attention to it. I actually used a torch to pain some light on the boat, however boat is pretty far away and torch was not quite strong enough. I think the light painting still help to create some details, otherwise the shadows may have been even more noisy.
Unfortunately boat not in the best position compositionally. However due to various fences and stuff this was the closest I could get to it @ 12mm.

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Sharpening. Masking out sky since I don't need sharpening in this region. Retrospectively, should probably have added a little noise reduction.

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Final:

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P6120403 by hazwing, on Flickr

 

[ionian]

Interesting processes @hazwing and a very useful post - and your final image is great.

I wonder if it's worth starting a separate thread for full workflow , as it takes a lot more work than just doing before and after. Also, videos may be a better medium for this - but I'd be happy to contribute.

 

[hazwing]

You might be right, in starting a new thread for this.

In the past I used to visit this mega thread on photographyonthenet forums:
Show Us Your RAW Conversions, BEFORE And AFTER

It helped convince me to use RAW, and I picked up quite a few hints from this thread.

 

[dancebert]

Excellent post. I appreciate the effort it took.

First thing - cropped out unnecessary water and sky. 16:9 more panaromic feel to it.

IMHO the unnecessary water would have dramatically reduced the power of the lines in the bottom half of the image to draw the eye down and out of frame.

 

[hazwing]

Excellent post. I appreciate the effort it took.



IMHO the unnecessary water would have dramatically reduced the power of the lines in the bottom half of the image to draw the eye down and out of frame.

I appreciate the c/c, I gave me some food for though. I tried going back to the uncropped version, but I think I still prefer the 16:9 format for this photo myself.

Here's a uncropped version:

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[hazwing]

Here's another one:

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RAW capture - very flat and not much contrast - allowed me to push up white's and blacks quite a bit without clipping. Some clarity and vibrance added to taste.
Minor cropping/rotation

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Minor adjustment to green hue to make greens more green. Some minor changes to yellow and green luminance. I tend to like playing around with yellow/green luminance in photos with green/yellow foliage, it can create some interesting colour contrast. In this photo the changes are very subtle.

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Medium vignette preset to draw the eye in:

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Some selective dodge, sharpening and clarity brush to bring out some more detail to the duck head. Retrospectively, I think I've pushed the clarity a bit too much with this one.

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P1030925 by hazwing, on Flickr

 

[dancebert]

I'm lovin' the combined abilities of the P20 + EM5 + RAW + LR, especially for my backlit images. Processing was basic (SS of LR sliders below). C&C welcome.

SOOC

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SOOC
by Four Letter Nerd, on Flickr

SOOC, Cropped.

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SOOC, Cropped
by Four Letter Nerd, on Flickr

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LR Adjustments
by Four Letter Nerd, on Flickr

Final:

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Preoccupied
by Four Letter Nerd, on Flickr

Taken in April at The Alhambra, in Granada, Spain.

 

[barry]

View attachment 103006

This is pretty much SooC (got the exposure how I wanted it in-camera with negative EC)...
There's obviously a lot of CA here (of which type I can't ever remember) (legacy lens, very strong light.)... so I re-processed it in mono with split toning:

View attachment 127616

Barry

 

[fader]

Intruder alert! I found this old shot of my first digital camera, the nifty 1.4 aperture 12 MP Panasonic "pro-compact" LX7, and my inspiration for buying into m43 ecosystem. Over the last weekend I spent most of a day trying to rescue this shot of a 17th century chapel, taken about a year ago in the wilds of Brittany. Due to the loss in resolution and image data, I decided to try and stylize the final result, my first attempt to seriously do so, in order to correct for the technical errors. Boring details after the shots.

Before:
View attachment 133120

After:
View attachment 133121

Unfortunately the sun backlit the scene through cloud cover, and the angle I chose to compose the shot blew out about 30% of the sky to pure 255. Exposure is 1/30 @ F4, and Lightzone (I'm an old film shooter, and learned w/ the zone system) shows a range of 4.2 to 16 in the RAW. I shot this on the run at the time and wasn't paying attention to the histogram, or I would have retaken it. Despite 20 years of using photo editing software for work in dot-coms, I've never spent much time to use more advanced techniques more critically until just recently. I worked this image lightly in Lightzone before exporting to TIFF, then in Gimp. I ended up with around 20~25'ish layers decomposed to color chanels and HSV to use as masks in order to find, lose, then strategically blur detail in the clouds, perform a re-light on the tower to work with the blown out areas, lots more blending, and plenty of blur mask on the foreground to make up for camera shake. No "retro" plugin was used, just very tedious contrast blending and a final radial tint overlay. C&C welcome!

 

[Julia]

I was pointed to this thread from another discussion I started in this forum and I want to show a bit of my processing, too. I have learned the techniques from an online course by Serge Ramelli (Lightroom CC Complete Training).

This is my final image:

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Hidden Beauty by Julia Altermann, on Flickr

On that day, I had forced myself out of bed early because from my kitchen window, I can see some of the hills along the river and if there are low hanging clouds or banks of fog, it usually makes for dramatic images. Only that morning, there was no sun. Fog and clouds, but no sun. I was about to trash the image when I stopped myself, dug out the online course, and started to apply the methods I had learned.

Here's a side by side: original shot and final image:

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As you can easily see, it's quite a difference. I started out with some basic adjustments that I apply to almost all of my images (I actually have a preset for this so I don't have to do this manually for each image). The preset covers everything in the upper palette (Basic). If you are wondering why I chose those settings: Serge Ramelli explains is quite well in his free YouTube videos and the online course; I adjust his recommended settings to my taste since like my images a tad more subdued than he does his. The tweaking of HSL is of course done on an individual basis.

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Next, I did some sharpening, noise reduction, and unsharp mask. Just in case you didn't know: hold down the ALT/OPTION key on the Mac when applying the Unsharpen Mask. Everything that's black will not be sharpened and it's a great way to only apply the sharpening to edges and not to a sky or other areas that don't need it.

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So far, I had changed the overall tonality (hope that's the correct term) and sharpness of the image, but I hadn't done anything for the colors yet. Which finally brings me to one of my favorite tools in LR: the Brush. So happy I don't have to worry about not having PS, or trying this in Pixelmator. The LR brush, paired with adjustment to the color temperature and tint, can work wonders!

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As you can see, I added quite a few brush strokes, making very slight changes to temp and tint each time, and was literally able to paint the sky. All done in LR, no other tools required. Cheers!

 

[PeeBee]

Before....

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and after.....

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Mainly exposure adjustments, cropping, and cloning.

 

[Julia]

After a discussion with a friend last week, who was disappointed with the images he'd taken and which looked dull, I thought I could share some tips on how to get color back into images. I took one last year in the fall, in the evening light, and the scene in real life was bursting with warm colors. It was the height of autumn and you'd think a painter had dropped his paints on the landscape – I sometimes felt like I needed a saturation control in my glasses because everything was so vibrant.

Alas, when I took the image (I didn't have a polarizer then which could have helped with the haze from the river and the reflections in the leaves) it was dull and nothing like the real world.

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You can see that the sky looks almost flat, and while the trees have some color, there is nothing of the vibrancy, nothing of the light of the setting sun that was illuminating the scene.

Since I wanted to keep it somewhat natural and not overdo the edit, I decided to forgo anything with brushes, digital graduated filters etc. and only focused on the Basics panel in Lightroom:

- I had slightly overexposed the image, so I corrected it by lowering the exposure just a tad.
- I brought down the highlights to eliminate glare, and opened up the shadows (I do this with almost every image, it's a preset that I created).
- By holding down the ALT/OPTION key, I lifted the whites and lowered the blacks, making sure I didn't blow out the highlights or drown the shadow areas
I think so far all the changes I made here would have almost been unnecessary if I'd have had a polarizer and if I had been more careful with my exposure, but hey, I'm still learning

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The changes I made to "Presence" were the most significant ones, though. Clarity helped to cut out the glare even more (again, a polarizer would have helped a lot here). By raising the vibrance and saturation just a bit I could make up for the loss I had suffered because of the haze (a bit of mist in the air over the river).

Just wanted to share this to show that it's not always a huge process to make an image look more like what we saw. Cheers!

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[David A]

Julia,

If you're using LR CC you have a Dehaze slider in the Effects pane which can help at times. I often find it's a bit "heavy handed" and that I often have to go very easy on it, but it can help at times with haze and mist. It seems to do something like Clarity does, plus something in the Saturation/Vibrance area, and also to do something with contrast. Clarity has some impact on contrast but Dehaze is stronger in that area to my eyes which is part of why I think it's a little on the heavy handed side of things. I don't think it affects Saturation equally for all colours. For scenes like the one you're showing, it's an alternative to using Clarity and Vibrance or you can use it in combination with smaller Clarity and Vibrance adjustments

I notice you didn't adjust the Contrast slider and I probably would have increased that a bit before adjusting Clarity. One thing about the Contrast slider in LR is that it has an effect on saturation, increases in contrast increase saturation slightly and decreases decrease saturation slightly, so to some degree the Contrast slider actually does a bit of what you were doing with the Clarity and Vibrance sliders but perhaps a little more gently than they work. The LR books and videos I've learnt from all seem to recommend using the Contrast slider before using the Presence controls, basically getting as close as you can to your desired result just using the Tone controls before using the Presence, Curves, and other adjustments. I've found that tends to work for me quite well but different people have different approaches and what counts is finding what works best for you and what you've done is working quite well.

The other thing I've found when making strong adjustments to the Blacks and Whites is that those can often be best done in local adjustments. I often shoot high contrast scenes where everything but the sky tends to be underexposed because I'm exposing for highlights in the clouds. What I find there is that if I adjust the Whites, usually bringing them down a bit, in order to get maximum cloud detail, the rest of the scene can go a little flat so for that sort of situation I'll tend to make the Whites adjustment with a brush over the sky and clouds so I don't also lower the Whites setting for the rest of the image. That can allow things like foliage and reflections on water to "pop" a little more against the sky. You increased the Whites and that has benefited the control tower and the building in the trees but I think a different Whites setting would help with the clouds so I think using a brush for the sky and clouds might get you a bit more lift with them. Another thing you can do with the adjustment brush and the graduated and radial filters is to apply a different white balance setting to an area of the image and that can help at times as well.

 

[Julia]

Hi David,

First of all, thanks for your in-depth thoughts, I found them very interesting and informative!

If you're using LR CC you have a Dehaze slider in the Effects pane which can help at times.

Well, looks like this isn't for license holders. I am not a software-as-a-service gal, so I like to buy my licenses and Adobe is of course not giving us these new features. I am thinking about the LR/PS CC package, but so far, I can't justify the monthly expense, even though the Dehaze feature looks very interesting!

I notice you didn't adjust the Contrast slider and I probably would have increased that a bit before adjusting Clarity.

It's interesting you say that. I usually never touch Contrast, or only very, very gently. For my personal taste, I find that it makes the image too dark in areas I don't want it to be dark, and changes the overall feel of the image to my dislike. I do experiment with it sometimes, but in the end, usually put it back to 0 and work with the other sliders. Different tastes...

I'll tend to make the Whites adjustment with a brush over the sky and clouds so I don't also lower the Whites setting for the rest of the image.

That's a good point. If you look further up in the thread, you can see that I did use the brush tool to add some tinting and other effects to the sky in the photo I showed there. I find the brush one of the most useful tools in LR, but for this image, I wanted to show that one doesn't need it necessarily (even though you are right, adding some brush strokes to the sky could have made the sky even more interesting). It took me quite a while to master the brush tool, though, so I wanted to show an editing without it for those who might be intimidated by it, too

Thanks again for your thoughts, David!

 

[hazwing]

From my understanding, if you are adjust whites and blacks you are adjusting the contrast but more selectively. E.g. adding +10 contrast will increase the whites and deepen the blacks by an equal amount.

I also don't have adobe cc. There is a dehaze hack for those not on the creative cloud version:
Lightroom 6 Dehaze

 

[arjubx]

I like this post, one of the things I do when bored is to use Lightroom mobile on my iPhone to grab an image and edit/re-edit it. Even with my recent photos, I tend to sync my 2 star ones (in my system, this means they are decent enough to put in the editing work to maybe show people) to LR mobile.

This passes the time, allows me to edit in different environments to spark ideas, and increases my skills/creativity. Just watch out, it crushes your battery once you start a lot of selective edits! If I like what I'm doing, I'll usually go finish on my computer later with more detailed adjustments.

Here is an example of one of my LR Mobile experiments. I took the original on a vacation but was driving one morning and saw colors like this in the sky with haze/fog which inspired me. It is originally an iPhone 6S Plus picture so I do not have a RAW file which probably would have helped.

Before:

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After:

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I'll have to show a more complete proper example later when I get a chance from a computer.