Before and After - Why Photoshop Rocks, Part One | Hartwell, GA Photographer

Photoshop is probably the coolest tool a digital photographer has, aside from the camera.  It takes a massive amount of time and energy to learn the program, which can do wonders for photographs.  What I find more daunting, though, is how much I don't yet know and how much I haven't even realized is possible.  I am not a pro.  I refer to my books and favorite blogs regularly for tips and tricks and sometimes step by step instructions.  Since many people don't get the chance to really get into Photoshop, I'm going to write a series of posts that highlight the awesome things that it can do, from working in partnership with the camera, enhancing selective parts of images, to fixing those "Oh, darn, (something) is ruining this picture!" situations.


Part One:  The Camera/Photoshop Partnership

This is a true use of Photoshop as a tool.  The rainbow photo that we popped up on Facebook yesterday is actually a series of 9 photographs, carefully edited and aligned and cropped together to form one image.  This is why it covers such a wide angle of view (see: Panoramic Photography).  You can see the photos are gray, they lack contrast and are individually uninteresting - but Dave shot them with the intention of putting them together.  For sanity's sake, I'm only putting up two of them: 

These photos are Straight Out Of Camera, or SOOC. 

But wait, before we jump into it: I know you're thinking "Wow, yuck! Why such blah color?" Here's why:

The image is shot in RAW. This is the original image, as shot in camera. When a camera shoots a JPEG, the chip in the camera uses complex algorithms to adjust for color, saturation, light, contrast and many other tiny factors to give you a pretty image when you download your camera. It also discards the "extra" data that is leftover when the image is prettied up. JPEGs are smaller files and for most people, a great way to work. Many of them make good prints straight out of camera. A small to medium sized JPEG image will likely run you about 1-2MB, so you can click away and store a ton of photos without worrying about space on your hard drive.


RAW images, however, include every little bit of information present at the time of shutter click. This means the file is a) much more in-depth to edit and b) huge. It's not uncommon for RAW files run up to 13MB/image (to illustrate: remember those 3 1/4" floppy disks we all used a decade ago?  It would take 13 disks to hold one image). When you're shooting 200, 400, 800 images at a time that adds up pretty quickly.  However, RAW files are very forgiving and give you many more options when it comes to editing if you don't mind starting from square one and correcting everything. Since the files are larger, they can be cropped down dramatically and will still be high-quality images if they're properly exposed and tack sharp to begin with.

Still with me?

OK.  So we have 9 images, and we put them together, crop them down to a uniform size and voila, we have a panorama:

Now it's time for general workflow - the steps I take with each image to adjust contrast and color and burning and dodging and tweaking to make all of the parts of the image look the way I feel they should.  Every photographer has a workflow, what makes sense to them as an order of operations to process images.  This is where my workflow landed this image:

The phrase I mentioned in the beginning is applicable here:  Oh darn, those power lines, they're ruining the picture...

Removing them required a lot of patience - remember, RAW=huge file x 9 photos means this original file is 69" wide and over 100MB before resizing for the web!  Anyway, this is the final product:

(clicking the image will enable you to view it as large as your browser window)

Instead of capturing a corner of the rainbow, Photoshop let us capture and display the whole thing.  It's not a shot we could have made, unless we used a very specialized, very expensive wide angle lens - but even then there would be a huge degree of distortion.  Pretty cool, right?  Check back in a couple of days to see another Before and After!

Questions?  Comments?  Leave a note below and I'll get back to you.  See more pictures on Facebook!