I received an email from a reader named Paul. He wanted to know if used photoshop on the image I snapped at Chelsea and Jay’s Wedding. I told him I did and he persuaded me to publish my steps and post a before and after. Well I don’t think this is the forum for a full out tutorial. However, I will post the before and after images, and let you know what filters I used to come up with my final result.
First off I want to say that photoshop is not an excuse to not try to take the best picture possible. I think having a good understanding of your camera, and some knowledge and rules of photography can go a long way. With that being said photoshop can help save a bad image if need be. Take the before image below. I did not have my flash with me, the exposure was off, and it was dusk.
As you can see there is not allot of good things you can say about this image right now. Now comes photoshop. My fist step was to use the shadow and highlights feature. Next I used a awesome program called noise ninja to reduce some of the noise from the overall image. Next I used an adjustment layer and added a curves adjustment. Knowing how to use curves can dramatically change an image. Next I applied an adjustment layer for levels and brightness and contrast. This made a difference, but the color was just not popping, so I added a color balance, and a hue saturation adjustment layer to make the color pop. I still wasn’t getting enough from the greens and yellows, so I added a selective color adjustment layer to make those colors really stand out. Last and probably the most important I added a vignette layer and changed the layer to soft light. That was it. I thought it turned out ok, I probably could tweak with it some more but knowing when to quit is a virtue.
Thanks for the questions Paul and thanks for following through our RSS feed!