Post processing | Carol Fox Henrichs | Photo Art & Nature Photography

Behind the Shot: Asclepias Botanical Print

In this Behind the Shot post, I’ll illustrate some of the steps used to create the final image using a photograph and textures layers in Photoshop. Using layers to add the appearance of texture to an image can help evoke emotions or feelings or set a mood. I use them to communicate my artistic vision. I’ve included images with descriptions from some of the steps I took to create the final image. The process included using 8 layers and two different blending modes.

Many of you may know I like to help the pollinators and try to make sure I have a variety of flowering plants in my yard. This plant is now in several of my flowerbeds and comes back a couple of times each year. Just FYI, the tropical milkweed is frowned upon by some naturalists but it is one that I can get to grow and recent research discounts any negative effects that a non-native plant might have on the annual migration of the Monarch.

The final image tells a story of a once vibrant plant with bright flowers that provided food for migrating Monarch butterflies as well as a place to lay their eggs. This was a plant which gave shelter to the growing caterpillars until they were ready to move on to the next life stage. This sad and withered plant has served its purpose for the Monarch.

The original photo, shot on white background.

February 15, 2022/by Carol Fox Henrichs

Essential Post Processing for Better Photos – Part 3

Post processing

This is the third, and final, article covering what I consider to be essential post processing steps for all digital photographs. I cover steps 8-10 in this post. You can read about steps 1-3 here and 4-7 here. The series should provide a good reference for anyone just beginning their entry into digital photography.

8. Color Amount

Up to this point, you have already adjust color somewhat by setting the tone, temperature, or white balance in step 3. Setting the temperature first, helps you achieve the correct colors throughout the image. In step 8, you are adjusting vibrance, luminance, and saturation. In Lightroom, I use the adjustments in that order. Vibrance is the goto for boosting color as it is not as harsh as saturation. Luminance adjustments change the lightness or darkness of a color.

9. Noise

Steps 9 and 10 go hand in hand. You may see that as you work with one setting it affects the other. I typically adjust noise with the luminance slider in Lightroom. This is found in the Details panel in the Develop mode. Careful not to remove too much noise as this can also remove image details.

10. Sharpness

This should be the very last step. My starting settings for sharpening with Lightroom are Amount: 50, Radius: 1; Detail: 50. Zooming in, you can adjust the sliders until you are happy with the results. Then, I hold the Alt/Option key while dragging the Masking slider to ensure that specific parts of the image are being sharpened.

Final Considerations

After correcting the technical aspects of the photo, I then begin looking at its impact. What feeling does it evoke? For this shot of the fort at San Cristobal, I wanted to convey the sense of its role in providing a lookout point for protecting the island. To do this, I cropped the image in a couple of different ways. I think I prefer the last image best as you can see just a slight bit of the ocean, which provides some context for the main subject.

February 25, 2021/by Carol Fox Henrichs

Essential Post Processing for Better Photos – Part 2

Post processing

Every digital image can benefit from post processing. Yes. You read that right. Due to the technical nature of the way digital images are created, some post processing is needed to bring out the best qualities in the image data. “Oh, but I shoot in jpg and my images look great”, you say? This is because the camera has already processing the image to create the jpg file. Shoot in RAW, to see the difference between an unprocessed file and your jpg.

This is the second article covering essential post processing steps for digital photographs. The process covered here includes 10 photo characteristics to consider during your first edit of a new image. Yes, I said first edit. It is okay to revisit an image and make multiple passes while editing.

This article covers steps 4-7 of my 10 essential steps. Steps 1, 2, & 3 were covered in a prior post, Part 1, where I also included information about the cameras, computer, and software I use in my workflow. I have yet to find an image that could not be improve with some measure of tweaking. If you are a purist, who is dead set against post processing and feels adamantly that everything must be done in camera, then this article is not for you. I will mention that modern digital cameras all do some amount of post processing and more and more capabilities are added with each new technological generation.

4. Adjust Highlights

Around 90% of the time, I drastically reduce the highlights in my images in post processing. Like many photographers, I practice exposing to the right (ETTR) when shooting. Meaning, I try to capture as much image data as possible by almost overexposing the scene. Strictly speaking, a digital image is just a bunch of bit and bytes–data. Underexposing a scene records less data than a proper exposure. Having too little data, restricts your ability to make edits to the photo. Exposing to the right allows the camera to record the maximum amount of light (as data) and thus get the optimum performance out of the digital image sensor. You will then have more information or data and can get better results from post processing.

5. Contrast

Increase the contrast. How much is up to you and your vision for the photo. There are many types of contrast, however, for this first pass at post processing, we are just going to consider a global adjustment to the luminosity contrast by adjusting the contrast slider in any post processing software like Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop.

Take a look at the following two images. The first one is the image after following steps 1-3. The histogram in the second image is more spread out because I made the darks darker and the brights brighter. In other words, when I added contrast the whites and highlights moved toward the right, and the darks and shadows moved towards the left.

To some degree, luminosity contrast in the original photo depends upon your lens choice and the dynamic range of your camera but contrast can also be improved in post-production. Please keep in mind though that subtle, controlled contrast is often better than pulling the contrast slider all the way up to +100. Adding more contrast pushes highlights to the right and shadows to the left – which means you have the risk of both blowing out your highlights and sacrificing the details in your darks, ending up in making your entire picture look artificial. The goal is not just to add contrast, but to optimize it.

6. Adjust Whites and Blacks

Now that you have just finished pushing the darks darker and the brights brighter with an increase to contrast, it makes sense to take a look at the histogram to make sure you have not gone too far. What is a histogram? How do you know if you have gone too far?

A histogram is a graphical representation of the pixels in the image. It looks a lot like a bar chart. The left side of the graph represents the blacks or shadows, the right side represents the highlights or bright areas, and the middle section represents the midtones (middle or 18% gray). The heights of the peaks represent the number of pixels of a particular tone. Each tone from 0-255 (0 being black and 255 being white) is one pixel wide on the graph.

Likely you know you can tell an image is well-exposed if it reaches fully from one edge of the histogram to the other edge and it isn’t heavily going up one side or the other. In an ideal world, the graph should just touch the left and right edges of the histogram, and not spill up the sides.

Crowding of peaks up the left or right edge of the histogram indicate “clipping” of that tone and a loss of detail in that area. Clipped areas are often unrecoverable, especially in the highlights. Generally you should try to expose so that the peaks just touch the right edge (which indicates that you’ve kept your highlight details). It is usually easier to recover some shadow detail and retain a decent image than to try and create highlight detail from data that isn’t in the file.

7. Clarity

The Clarity slider is one of the most useful in Lightroom when it comes to giving your images extra punch and impact. While similar to contrast, the Contrast slider has a more far reaching effect. It makes both the shadows darker and the highlights brighter, stretching the histogram in the process.

The Clarity slider works differently. It increases contrast, but in the mid-tones only. The highlights aren’t affected, and if applied to an extreme, the photo becomes darker as the Clarity slider is pushed to the right having a greater effect on dark tones than the Contrast slider. Increasing mid-tone contrast brings out texture and detail, increasing the tactility and apparent sharpness of the image. That’s what the Clarity slider is designed to do.

In short, Clarity affects the contrast between midtone luminance values appearing to help the image become clearer. However, all that is really happening is the adjustment of more or less contrast to the light and dark areas which fall into the midtone area between highlights and shadow.

You may also notice the photo is perceptively brighter and that the color saturation diminishes slightly when increasing Clarity. On the other end of the spectrum, decreasing clarity adds in a soft-focus effect. The Texture slider lands somewhere between Clarity and Sharpening in Lightroom. A good way to think about Texture is that it is much less harsh than Clarity and offers more subtle results without affecting absolute brightness or color saturation. Texture focuses it’s smoothing or clearing effects on areas of a photo which possess “mid-frequency” features. You can think of these as medium detail areas.

Post Processing Checklist

Crop & Straighten
1
Find a true vertical or horizontal reference point. Crop for a good composition.
Lens Corrections
2
Correct any aberrations or distortion created by the lens.
Color Tone
3
Set color tone, temperature and white balance
Highlights
4
Adjust highlights (consider reducing them)
Contrast
5
Increase contrast (digital images are usually too flat looking without this)
Clipping
6
Use the histogram while adjust whites and blacks to eliminate any clipping.
Clarity
7
Adjust clarity and/or texture settings to help define edges or reduce them.
Color Amount
8
Adjust vibrance for adding or reducing color. Then use saturation if needed.
Noise
9
Check for any digital or color noise.
Sharpness
10
Sharpening should always be the last step.

EVERY digital photograph requires some measure of post processing.

Carol Fox Henrichs

December 27, 2020/by Carol Fox Henrichs

Essential Post Processing for Better Photos- Part 1

Post processing

I firmly believe every digital image benefits from some measure of editing. In other words, every image created using a digital camera, including a smartphone camera, can be improved through post processing. Why? Because digital sensors record light differently than film. I won’t bore you with the technicalities here, but I include them in the articles where appropriate. I’m certain you can research more on your own if you are very curious.

This series of articles describes my basic editing process, which I use for every image I plan to post, publish, or print. My process developed over the many thousands of hours spent at my computer working with my images. I am not saying mine is the best process for every photographer. What I am saying is this the best process for me at this point in time. This point in time meaning, given the current state of technology and my skills. I hope sharing my process with you, and explaining why I make certain adjustments to my photos, helps you develop your own series of basic editing steps. I fully expect my process to continue to evolve, as will yours as you invest more time and effort into post processing. Enough of my philosophy. Let’s begin by looking at my gear and computer setup.

Gear & Hardware

I provide this information, not because I am advocating you must have any certain brand or type of camera and computer, but rather as a way for you to compare your gear with mine and begin to understand how or why your results may differ.

Cameras

These are the DSLR and mirrorless cameras I have owned and used extensively over the years. Most of my photos were made using one of these cameras. There are others I could add to the list. However, I opted to include only the cameras with more than 5000 images in my photo library.

Computer Hardware/Software

This is my current computer setup and the software I use for post-processing, in the order of most to least used.

Macbook Pro 15-inch, 2018
- 2.2 GHz 6-core Intel Core i7
- 16 GB RAM
- Radeon Pro 560x graphics card
- macOS Catalina
Dell UP2516D 25 inch display
Adobe Lightroom Classic
Adobe Photoshop
Topaz DeNoise
On1 Effects

Post Processing Checklist

Crop and straighten
Correct for any lens aberration or distortion
Set color tone/temperature or white balance
Adjust highlights (most of the time I drastically reduce these)
Increase contrast
Adjust whites and blacks using histogram as a reference
Increase clarity and/or texture
Boost vibrance.
Reduce noise
Add sharpening/adjust sharpening mask

For the most part, my post processing checklist is the same regardless of the camera or software I use. I use the checklist as a reference to ensure I consider how or even whether I will apply all of the steps changes with every photo. Let’s walk through the first few steps using a photo from the Castillo San Cristóbal located in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

This is the unedited version of the photo. I shot in RAW so that I would have the maximum amount of photo data to use in post-processing. You can see it needs some work. Given the sunny conditions, and limited timeframe, I felt lucky I got a shot at all.

before edits — *Original, unedited image.*

Watch as I walk through steps 1, 2, & 3 using the photo of a garita at Castillo San Cristóbal in the next video.

Setting a custom white balance is simple using the eyedropper. Watch how I find a gray area in the photo to use as the basis for changing this photos’s white balance.

So far we have completed steps 1, 2, & 3 and the image is looking much better as you can see in the following comparison. I’ll walk through and discuss steps 4, 5, 6, 7 & 8 in the next article in this series.

*After straightening, applying auto tone and setting a custom white balance.*

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October 3, 2020/by Carol Fox Henrichs

Restoring Damaged Family Photos

Post processing

Color scan of original

I’ve updated this post (September 27, 2018) in honor of Ancestor Appreciation Day! Today is a day to give thanks to the ones who came before us; none of us would be here today without their sacrifice. A nod to my ancestors in their native language. Takk skal du ha. August and Julia were born in Norway. They each immigrated to the US where they met and married, which led to a whole passel of descendents.

An instant message from a good friend renewed my interest in restoring photos. According to the definition from Wikipedia, “digital photograph restoration uses a variety of image editing techniques to remove visible damage and aging effects from digital copies of physical photographs.” Yep. That about sums it up but it is a very simple statement about what can be a lengthy and arduous process.

After restoration: August Hansen & Julia Paulsen

For example, I spent the better part of a day working on the slightly damaged wedding photo of my great-grandparents and I plan to spend more time removing the small dust spots and scratches. As you can see, I also extended the size of the image using Photoshop and content-aware fill.

B&W original

I converted the image to black and white, which helps me “see” the details better. After making adjustments to contrast, clarity, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks and using the graduated filter tool to darken edges in Lightroom, I opened the image in Photoshop. The next steps included using the patch too and spot healing brush to remove spots and repair larger areas. I also copied August’s left lapel to use for replacing parts of the right one.

The original composition felt too cramped. I wanted the couple more in the center with more space above their heads. I changed the canvas size and used the content-aware fill for the top and right side. Next, I copied the vase and side table beside August and pasted it beside Julia. A little more masking and blending helped with making the added areas look more like part of the original. Not perfect by any means, but I am not certain perfect is a realistic expectation when restoring old photos.

After restoration- final image

February 9, 2018/by Carol Henrichs

Lightroom Workflow: Filenames on Import

Post processing

To be honest, I haven’t given filenames much thought since, I organize my photo files in separate folders or subdirectories and duplicate names (if any) didn’t really pose a problem. However, I have found myself struggling with adding titles to my nature photos when uploading them to my website and online portfolios. Spending inordinate amounts of time trying to craft creative, catchy, and artsy sounding titles for each image was not an efficient use of my time; and really, how many ways can you title a shot of a Northern Cardinal? Yet, I knew I would not be satisfied with several hundred photos all titled Northern Cardinal. See title examples for the following images.

Northern Cardinal – facing left

Northern Cardinal on Feeder

Then, I viewed an informative webinar conducted by Kathy Adams Clark, which provided useful insight into naming schemes, titles, and online portfolios. I will share how I have adapted Kathy’s process but first I’d like to thank The North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) for providing such useful resources for their members. If you are a nature photographer, I urge you to explore nanpa.org and consider joining.

The filenames assigned to the photos by my camera are meaningless to me, yet I used to feel they could serve as some sort of unique identifier should I need to search for a photo. The rationale presented in Kathy’s webinar caused me to question my half-baked logic. First, how would I know what to enter as search criteria if I wanted to locate a photo strictly based on filename? Searching by filename using my current system might be useful if I had the image file (with it’s original filename) on my website and needed to locate it on my local computer. Second, how would I know my search returned the correct file? It is very likely I could locate the desired image as well as all other images with the same filename. My Canon camera has a four digit sequence number and it rolls over after 9999. With a Lightroom® catalog containing over 136,000 files, the potential for multiples of the same filename is very real! I began to see the value of renaming my photo files. In some ways, I felt I had come full circle because the next question was, you guessed it, what to name them.

Kathy presented her naming scheme and her rationale, which has worked well for her for several years. Her scheme seemed logical to me and I so love logic! However, she uses Adobe Bridge to organize her photos while I use Lightroom. Therefore, I could not simply adopt her process. I am not arguing for one method over the other here–just pointing out that they differ.

The naming scheme I landed on initially was Subject CFH_Sequence#. I set about to incorporate renaming into my Lightroom workflow when I ran into an issue (feature design) causing me to change my naming scheme. If you utilize sequential numbering in Adobe Bridge, it retains the sequence number assigned to the last photo of the previous import and will use this as the starting number for the next import. Not so for Lightroom, which retains the number you entered for beginning the sequence of the previous import; making every import sequence effectively starting with the same number. Not a problem if the rest of the filename is unique but it was not going to work for me. Remember Northern Cardinal?

After more testing, I finally landed on this scheme: Subject CFHYY####; where Subject is the name I type in for the primary subject of the photo, CFH are my initials, YY is the two digit year the photo was captured, i.e. 17 for 2017, and #### are the last four digits of the original filename assigned by the camera to the photo. This results in filenames which look like Northern Cardinal CFH170039. Now that I had the scheme I had to incorporate it into my workflow.

Using the Filename Template Editor, I created a preset that I can use when importing photo files into the Lightroom catalog to rename my photo files to match the chosen scheme. The following image displays my preset information. You can find the Filename Template Editor in the File Renaming panel on the right side of the import window. Check Rename Files to make the Template selection menu available. Choose Edit to open the Template Editor (see the following image). Lightroom Template Editor

You can also access the Filename Template Editor by selecting Library > Rename Photo, and then choosing Edit in the File Naming area of the dialog box.

I feel pretty good about this scheme and the near impossibility of duplicate filenames as I doubt I will ever shoot 10,000 images of the same subject in the same year. Additionally, I no longer have to struggle with artsy titles for my online portfolios as the filename is used in place of a title. This eliminates the need for me to edit each photo and add a title; which saves a significant amount of time.

Strip of 4 cardinal photos names Northern Cardinal CFH128083-87

August 30, 2017/by Carol Henrichs

8. Color Amount

9. Noise

10. Sharpness

Final Considerations

4. Adjust Highlights

5. Contrast

6. Adjust Whites and Blacks

7. Clarity

Post Processing Checklist

Crop & Straighten

Lens Corrections

Color Tone

Highlights

Contrast

Clipping

Clarity

Color Amount

Noise

Sharpness

Gear & Hardware

Post Processing Checklist