The magic of post-processing
By Matt Baker July 26, 2010
So I haven’t blogged in a while. I know, I know – you all missed my inarticulate ramblings and I have been feeling correspondingly guilty. But what should I talk about? My life is pretty tedious (although in two weeks I am going to LA, so hopefully that provides some freaky blog fodder) and I want to make sure that my readers get only top-quality ramblings, so I have to be pretty picky about my blogs. But then Roz said “fuck it, just write about whatever” and I thought to myself “sounds good”. So here I am and I’m going to write about the wonders of Photoshop and how it disguises your lack of skill and makes you seem like a more interesting photographer.
Photoshop (and various other photo editing software) can really do wonders nowadays. What might of taken hours of labour and skill in the black room in the past can now be done by any jerk with a computer in just a few minutes. However, as in scrapbooking, one must always remember to use restraint: not all techniques are appropriate for all pictures and some are cool but virtually useless most of the time.
I’ll start off with the most useful technique: conversion to black and white. Do you have a drab, lifeless picture? I know I have many. But with just a little work – poof! It actually looks like you had something in mind right from the beginning. The key is to use something like Channel Mixer to do the conversion instead of just desaturating or converting to grayscale. This allows you to imitate the coloured filters use in film b&w photography. For instance, here I reduced the amount of blue from the original picture, darkening the sky and any other blue areas.
Another handy tool to add pizzazz to a crappy picture is to create a duotone – essentially taking a b&w picture and making shadows one colour (e.g. blue) and light areas another colour (e.g. red). Doing this with brown and black results in sepia.
Moving on to the less-frequently-useful category we have Selective Colour. Here we make everything b&w except for one or two parts that are left in colour.
This next technique is the one I think is the coolest as it allows you a lot of flexibility in your shooting conditions, but it has the potential to look pretty awful and cartoony. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is used when the variation in light intensity is too high for all areas to be properly exposed (for instance, the sky is too bright so everything else appears really dark, or the land is properly exposed by the sky is overexposed). HDR involves taking 3 different exposures of a picture (over-, under-, and properly exposed) and then combining them using software (I use Photomatix) so that all parts of the picture are properly exposed.
Another fun, but not frequently useful, technique is called the Orton effect (named for a photographer who did this in the darkroom). Essentially you combine a sharp photo with a blurry version of the same shot, resulting in kind of a saturated, dreamy feel.
This can be combined with something like selective colour for an even cooler effect.
You can also use Cross-Processing, which is a digital replication of a popular effect in fashion magazines and advertisements where the film is developed in chemicals that are meant for a different type of film. This results in some wonky colours that actually look kind of cool.
The last thing I’m going to talk about is probably the most useless of all, but it is really cool. Essentially you are emulating something that can be done with a tilt-shift lens, where a very small section of the photo is in focus, resulting in a weird scale-model feel to the picture.
Anyway, I guess I’m done talking about funky effects. Hopefully this was at least a little enlightening and I swear the purpose wasn’t just to make people look at some of my photography. Incidently, if you want to see more, check out my flickr account.