Grey, Flat Light

[David Anderson]

Funny, when I think of curves I think of Elle as well

www.dsaphoto.com

A picture is thousand words that takes less than a second while a thousand words is a picture that takes a month.

[John Bennett]

Tim I try to do very little in PS myself, atleast with images I hope to use, or learn from.

To me theres two approaches to PS.
1) The stereotypical photojournalism. A minimislist approach

2) Art. Creating something thats sellable as print.

Ramping up Sat or Contrast or sharpening in box is no different than in post. The only real difference is that in post you increase or decrease. If you do it in box your stuck and changes to jpegs are lossy.

Take Cardinals or anything vibrant red. More often than not you want to decrease saturation. If you’ve ramped up the saturation settings in box for jpegs………………………. Your only recourse is to try and turn it down in post and youd likely need to be heavy handed.

If I need to spend much more than 5 minnutes on a photo, its heading to the recycle bin. I rarely touch my WB and if I do I slide it 50 to 150 pts on the Kelvin. I check my exposure both visually with the histogram and by checking how many pixels are blown/clipped. If I need to adjust exposure +/- 30 pts its headed to the recycle. Finally I tweak the “recovery or fill light” sliders.Thats all in ACR and takes about 30 seconds. The only real exception is macro shots or landscapes where you’ve stopped down into the teens. F14 or more at which point you learn just how filthy your sensor is. Mines disgusting 🙂 and I really need to the cahonnes to try a wet clean, blowers and artic butterfly do well but, bottom line macros which I shoot at f18 take me about 20 minutes each cleaning up crap.

Either way once adjustments to the raw are done
I open it in PS, check shadow/highlights, maybe add a upto 5 points saturation and if I want a bit more contrast I goto curves and tweak that.

Sharpening is applied as per the images destination. Be it web or an editors hands, or my HDD.
In all about 2 minutes per image. While one day Id like to consider myself skilled in PS and do more with select images, all in good time and I figure Im about 2 years from that :).

Replacing skies depending on the foreground elements is one of the easier composites, especially when the skies a uniform grey. You “select” the grey sky (the magic wand will work ok) and then move the Blue sky from another file image into your main image.

Done.

[Author]

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