Post Production Tips and Techniques

[EVPohovich]

* DO NOT just post links to other sites in this thread. This is for presenting your version of how you do your post production, so do the work and make up a decent tutorial.
Giving credit for an idea is fine if you need to, just make sure that you don't go overboard. Remember, this is Flash Kit.....a RESOURCE on the web, let make this thread a destination.

[EVPohovich]

So this will be my first tutorial.....here goes.

I have completely stopped using the Unsharpen Mask filter in favor of the Smart Sharpen tool and I am going to tell you why. With the Smart Sharpen filter you can save your settings and you can selectively sharpen highlights and shadows independently, enabling you to apply more sharpening without producing massive amounts of haloing.

What is haloing? Well, it is not playing some Xbox game until the tips of your fingers are bleeding. No, Haloing is the light ring that is caused by sharpening images digitally. You can mostly see it in high contrast areas, like where the horizon line meets.

Once you have your image edited the way you want it duplicate the main image into another layer. I'll show you why in just a few...

Below are the most typical setting I use now when sharpening photos. Set the Remove method to Lens Blur, it produces the least amount of haloing in my experience. Now select the More Accurate checkbox because you want the most accurate rendering of your image you can possible get. The most powerful feature of the Smart Sharpen filter is the ability to control highlight and shadow sharpening individually, so check the Advanced button and get ready to unleash some real sharpening power.



Now you may want to experiment with the settings some, but the settings above seem to work in most cases for me. The Tonal Width and Fade Amount tend to reduce the amount of sharpening when increased so play around with them. Right now you are looking to get things as sharp as you want, so don't be afraid to over do it a tad, we'll take care of that next.

Photo prior to sharpening:


Photo after sharpening:


Getting rid of the Halos
Remember when I told you to sharpen you image on a new layer? Well, here's why. Create a Layer mask on the sharpened layer. Now, grab the Paint Brush tool and select a small size soft brush and simply mask out the halos letting the untouched layer show through. Bye bye halos. The below image show, in red, what I masked out.



And now the image with the halos removed:


Just remember that sharpening should be one of the last steps in your workflow. Why? When you reduce the size of an image to fit on a webpage you lose most sharpening, resizing is a rather destructive process.

Tabbed Browsers make it very easy to see image changes. Simply open the above images in new tabs and then change from tab to tab to see the difference in each image.

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Below is the final image with the Soft Light Layer Setting Dodged and Burned layers turned back on.....but that is for another tutorial.


EXIF Data on the Blog.

[yasunobu13]

Quick image rotation via cropping.

OK, I'll add a short little tutorial. I learned this one when I worked at a graphic design firm. Not being a designer myself, I was stuck with a lot of little annoying jobs that the designers didn't feel like doing. If you're new to photography / Photoshop, hopefully this will help you out in the future. I still use this years later because of how quickly it can get the job done.

One of the jobs was taking new photos of greeting cards and straightening them so they were square with the sides of the images. This technique is perfect for straightening images with 90 degree angles, or with horizontal or vertical lines.

Since the 90 degree angle happens a lot with human made objects (buildings in particular) this can be applied to the majority of non-nature images out there.

Here's the original image that I want to straighten.



It may not be clear at first that an image needs straightening, but break out the crop tool and put it next to a vertical line (in this case, the edge of the pillar), and you'll see that the image is rotated by a degree or two.

There is an image rotation tool in Photoshop where you can tell it to rotate the image by exactly 3 degrees clockwise, but it is both slow and inefficient. This technique will save time and is very exact.

But why the crop tool? It's fast and nearby. Plus it's in nearly every photo editing program out there, and this technique can be applied almost universally.



As you can see above, I choose the pillar as my reference line. This will be the most important step of the process. Due to the funkiness of human vision, we can look at lines and see them as straight or parallel even when they are obviously not, and vice-versa.

My first attempt at this was to use the hand railing in the background, or the lines where the shop widows touch the wall. I assumed that these lines would be nice and horizontal, but I was quite wrong because of perspective.

The longer the reference line the better, but be wary of any lens distortion that could make the lines curved.



The next step is shown above. We need to rotate the crop tool to line it up with the vertical line of the pillar. To do this, I put the top left corner of the crop tool on top of the reference line. Then I moved the center mark of the crop tool to the upper left corner. This will allow me to rotate about that corner. I then rotated until the crop tool lined up with the reference line.

Remember, if you are using a reference line near the edge of the image, the crop tool may snap to the edge. When this happens, hold the Control key down to temporarily disable snapping.



Here I have zoomed in on my crop to make sure it is lined up with the pillar. I also moved the other edge of the crop tool to the stair in the lower right corner. This is to double check that the crop is correct. The vertical line of the step it lined up correctly. The horizontal line is not correct, but that is because of perspective again.

The last step is to move and resize the crop tool to you liking. You can either crop to your final image, or you can drag the crop tool past the outside of the image. This way you can have a straightened image without removing any of the original.



This is the final crop. Compare it to the first image and you can tell that it is straighter. The first image probably wouldn't have been that bad, but straightening it out still makes it look better.