Image processing in Photoshop (actions included)

[Travis]

This thread got some good feedback and seemed particularly helpful to some people (along with the included actions) so I'm posting it as an article here.

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I'm often asked "what I do" to the images... well, here it is. After this is all finished I think you'll agree that the final product is
clean, sharp, and an accurate representation of the animal I photographed. In this case, I chose a pic of a copperbanded butterfly I recently photographed at the Houston Aquarium. I chose this photo because it does a good job of demonstrating the overall changes made to both foreground, background, color, sharpness and levels.


I hope you all find this both educational and helpful with your own image editing techniques. I am certainly no Photoshop master myself, but since deciding to take the hobby of Photography to a professional level, I have learned quite a bit.


Now, let's get started.



Here's the original image. If you don't see the "foggy" look, you will. Also notice the specks in the background, that's gunk flying around the water column trying to mess up my photo. You'll notice this image looks particularly unimpressive at the moment- mostly because I keep my in-camera sharpening, contrast, etc.
settings at ZERO. This leaves me more leeway to edit them after the fact, though they're fairly nasty looking straight off the camera.






Now, here's the image after a quick levels adjustment. Much better, huh? I prefer to do it manually but you'll achieve the same or better results 90% of the time using
"image -->adjustments-->auto levels."






OK, next I ran the "10D subtlecolor" action. This really seems to overcome some specific weaknesses with the 10D's color reproduction. This action is new to me, so I use it judiciously
look at each image before and after to make sure I'm getting the desired effect.




Next, sharpening. I used to use unsharp mask but found a technique called "high-pass sharpening" on luminous-landscape.com it works great, and adds much less noise to the image. Notice the fish and rock are sharper in the resulting image, but the background isn't. Ironically, sharpening only works on the parts of the image that are relatively in focus. So don't think it will save you from a poorly-focused subject.




OK, almost done. Now I used the healing brush to get rid of those icky particles in the water column. Much cleaner, no?




Alright. Final touch. Another trick from Luminous-landscape.com- this action uses the unsharp mask to selectively add contrast to the image. It also does a bit of sharpening so watch out for noise. This action sort of "snaps" everything in a bit.



That's it. Now I save my image as a .PSD file so there is no compression loss like there would be with a JPEG.


PART II: LOADING/USING ACTIONS

I have uploaded the actions I created, "High-Pass" and "USM Contrast". Feel free to download and use them to your heart's content, just promise to keep sharing your photos with us here.

The other action mentioned, "10D subtlecolor," is the property of someone else but he has it available as a free download HERE.
The action was specifically designed to enhance the 10D's color sensor, so results may vary if you run this action on photos taken with a different camera (but well worth a try!)

After downloading the actions:

First of all in Photoshop you want to go to your "window" pull-down menu and make sure "actions" is checked.

The actions palette looks like this:



To load actions you have downloaded (like the 10D finisher action at http://www.lindev.org/10D-sharpening/ ) click on the triangle just below the red "X" on the top right of the palette.

A pull-down menu should appear. Click on "Load Actions."

Map to wherever you saved the action and choose it. The action should now appear in your palette. Then, simply highlight the action and click the Triangle on the bottom of the palette to "play" it.

A good suggestion for the 10D finisher actions or any other you may download is to first duplicate your image onto a new layer and then run the action.

To duplicate your layer, make sure "layers" is checked on your "window" palette and right-click on the shaded box marked "background" in the layers palette. Choose "duplicate layer." Now click on the new duplicate layer so that one is shaded and perform your action on that. Now if you don't like the action you can simply delete the layer (right-click on it) or you can reduce the effect of the action using the opacity slider.



The opacity is on the top right. Click on the ">" next to it and a slider will pop up. Watch your image as you move the slider.

Conclusion

Hope you enjoyed this little seminar. Please, comments and questions are welcome. Or try them out and post your results!

Travis
www.reef-life.com

[Travis]

The actions.

[Pro_builder]

Travis, Do these plug ins work with Adobe Photoshop 7.0?
TIA

[Craig Manoukian]

Fabulous photos as always Travis and very informative material, thanks, a great resource!

[sorcerer]

Great material Travis. I've been using Picture Window Pro with my astrophotography images for a couple of years now, but it definitely works better for that than for digital camera photos of the tank. It also helps that with the astrophotography I can use stacking software and take 5 to 15 minute shots of something.

I'm going to pick up a copy of Photoshop and try some of your methods and see what I can do to improve. Need to get a tripod to work from too.

Thanks for the info!

[Travis]

Sorry Troy, should have added that info.

I'm using Adobe Photoshop 7.0, and the actions should also work in Photoshop Elements 2.0 (much cheaper).

Don't mistake "actions" for "plugins" though. Two completely different tools in photoshop. An action in the plugins folder won't do you much good, and vice versa.

Travis

[wooddood]

thanks travis as always great info.

[Witfull]

trav, this should be a sticky

[Dracunculus]

Nice idea for a thread, and helpful information.

One other tip regarding the use of levels...I use them manually as well.

The default setting for the levels (in a pulldown menu on top) adjusts all three color channels the same. You can also adjust individual channels, so if the picture is too blue, you can reduce that selectively...probably along the lines of what gets adjusted in the 10D subtlecolor action (although that is just a guess). The eyedropper levels tools are helpful if you have an object that is pure white or pure black in the photo as well.

Lots of fun stuff to play around with.

Also, I usually use the rubber stamp tool for getting rid of the annoying "floaters"

[Craig Manoukian]

Thanks for the tip Dracunculus!

[Dracunculus]

One other thing that I noticed. You can save files in TIFF format as well if you don't want the compression loss. I think TIFF files will be smaller than PSD files (since they don't have the layer information). JPEG, GIF, and PNG are the types that use compression.

[traip93]

I never touched photshop until I read this thread, let's see if I can get this to work....

[traip93]

I've never worked with photshop before, and so far your instructions have made it real easy.

Questions:

I saved my file as a .PSD, however Reef Sactuary does not allow .PSD files to be posted???

Also, I checked out Luminous-lanscapes and the tutorial on "High-Pass sharpening was pretty clear and easy to follow. You mentioned another technique from the same site on unsharp mask. is this just simply going in photoshop and "FILTER-->SHARPEN-->UNSHARP MASK" ???

Final question, my file after I did the "Travis Touch-ups" was 3.25 MB yup, MB that's huge I think..RS allows 102K I think per picture file. I starting with too large of a file, should I cut/crop before or after I do the "Travis TOuch-ups" or should I change my camera settings from the 1600 X 1200 to 640 x 480.

I'm new to the digital camera world an photoshop so I hope this all makes sence and thanks again for the help.

Chad

[StoneyReef]

you do all the touchups and editing first, then you click

file-save for web


then you can choose what size and quality file, i just use default settings and that will save it as a jpg file, never had one too big to post on RS using that method.

[reefrunner]

should I change my camera settings from the 1600 X 1200 to 640 x 480.

Take your photos in the largest demensions and the highest resolution that your camera allows.