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Night Shot Post Processing
Night Shot Post Processing
Hey guys.... my good friend and fellow photographer Florindo Gallicchio was out night shooting recently.
Hey now, nothing wrong with this, but .... well Florindo wanted some more "pop" and he wanted it not to be so brownish-green.
Let's take a look at what I did with the image. Florindo sent me the raw file. So, first thing that must be done is raw conversion. this is what the camera recorded:
The big benefit of raw is you never have to worry about white balance in-camera, you can easily set it in the raw conversion. Notice on the above pic the color temp is 3800 degs kelvin... a bit warm, and that's where the yellow green comes from. Watch what happens if you cool the temp down to 3000 degs kelvin, and slide the tint bar over to the right, to +22:
Here, that looks like a good place to start from.... ok, now we click on "ok" and the file comes into normal photoshop. Very very important step here! Save your file as a .psd! Repeat after me: save your file as a .psd! This is a non-compressed photoshop file that you can keep, and all your layers will remain intact. You'll create your final .jpgs from the .psd file.
OK... now on to the fun part. hey this image didn't need much, and the whole post processing took me less than 10 minutes. First, let's look at levels. Give photoshop's autolevels a try, it sometimes gives quite a good result. Use the following sequence: layer>new adjustment layer>levels>auto and take a look. You can then do a comparison manual levels adjustment and see if you can do it better yourself if you like. I will often do this, and then click the eyeballs off/on to see which version of levels I like better. the reason to work in adjustment layers is that we can also learn to use *layer masks* within our adjustment layers. The layer mask is that square on the right of your pic icon in the layers palette. the layer mask is simple. It's an "undo" for what's going on in that layer. How do you use it? Simple: grab a soft edged brush, make sure black is the foreground color, and simply brush over the areas you don't want the layer's effect to apply to. This is a hard concept to grasp, but if you practice it you'll get the hang of it in no time. Keep in mind that you can go full strength on the brush (undoing 100% of the effect) or you can lower the opacity of the brush by x% and you'll be undoing by that %age....again, just practice it.
If you mess up on your layer mask, you can discard it (right click on it) and start an new mask (circle in square at bottom of layers palette) and just start over!
In this case I really liked the autolevels so I left it. and nothing to mask..but now I wanted more pop, so I went for a curve layer>new adustment layer>curves ... here you play with a graph, looking usually you want a slight s-curve, but here I bulged it upwards some, which lightened the whole image... I'll mask most of that brightness away.... again, this is an effect that's easy to play with and practice, and in this case, I also heavily used the layer mask...notice that some of the mask was full 100% and some was only at 50%. you can see which is 50% by looking at the layer mask icon (to the right and the 50% part is grey, not black).
Hey we're getting there! But the colors are a bit flat still, let's try some hue saturation.. layer>new adjustment layer>hue saturation ... I usually will try the rgb first, and just slide the saturation slider to the right... be very careful! Oversaturation can kill most images. normally I will only do this about +10 and sometimes as high as +20 but watch out for fake looking colors and noise and other hinky stuff in your image. Here, I was able to get away with +40 and no harm to the image. Always look at 100% magnification to ensure you aren't harming the image quality with these adjustments. again, I used the layer mask to remove the saturation from the brooklyn side bridge tower, it was a bit facacta so i just brushed away by 50% and voila, it was un-facacta-d.
Okay at this point I think I did all I could do. So I first saved the .psd file, then I flattened it. then, ctrl-j (copy the background) and I'm ready to apply some sharpening. for this web display, I first resized to 800x533, then I applied unsharp mask settings of 150% amount, .4 radius and 0 thresholds. do your usm this way, and you can easily see the effect by clicking on/off the eybeall in the layer... and in this case, if you did that, you'd see the window lights in the buildings just pop with a bit more brightness and clarity! Here's the final version (photo by florindo gallicchio):
Before/After:
Hey guys.... my good friend and fellow photographer Florindo Gallicchio was out night shooting recently.
Hey now, nothing wrong with this, but .... well Florindo wanted some more "pop" and he wanted it not to be so brownish-green.
Let's take a look at what I did with the image. Florindo sent me the raw file. So, first thing that must be done is raw conversion. this is what the camera recorded:
The big benefit of raw is you never have to worry about white balance in-camera, you can easily set it in the raw conversion. Notice on the above pic the color temp is 3800 degs kelvin... a bit warm, and that's where the yellow green comes from. Watch what happens if you cool the temp down to 3000 degs kelvin, and slide the tint bar over to the right, to +22:
Here, that looks like a good place to start from.... ok, now we click on "ok" and the file comes into normal photoshop. Very very important step here! Save your file as a .psd! Repeat after me: save your file as a .psd! This is a non-compressed photoshop file that you can keep, and all your layers will remain intact. You'll create your final .jpgs from the .psd file.
OK... now on to the fun part. hey this image didn't need much, and the whole post processing took me less than 10 minutes. First, let's look at levels. Give photoshop's autolevels a try, it sometimes gives quite a good result. Use the following sequence: layer>new adjustment layer>levels>auto and take a look. You can then do a comparison manual levels adjustment and see if you can do it better yourself if you like. I will often do this, and then click the eyeballs off/on to see which version of levels I like better. the reason to work in adjustment layers is that we can also learn to use *layer masks* within our adjustment layers. The layer mask is that square on the right of your pic icon in the layers palette. the layer mask is simple. It's an "undo" for what's going on in that layer. How do you use it? Simple: grab a soft edged brush, make sure black is the foreground color, and simply brush over the areas you don't want the layer's effect to apply to. This is a hard concept to grasp, but if you practice it you'll get the hang of it in no time. Keep in mind that you can go full strength on the brush (undoing 100% of the effect) or you can lower the opacity of the brush by x% and you'll be undoing by that %age....again, just practice it.
If you mess up on your layer mask, you can discard it (right click on it) and start an new mask (circle in square at bottom of layers palette) and just start over!
In this case I really liked the autolevels so I left it. and nothing to mask..but now I wanted more pop, so I went for a curve layer>new adustment layer>curves ... here you play with a graph, looking usually you want a slight s-curve, but here I bulged it upwards some, which lightened the whole image... I'll mask most of that brightness away.... again, this is an effect that's easy to play with and practice, and in this case, I also heavily used the layer mask...notice that some of the mask was full 100% and some was only at 50%. you can see which is 50% by looking at the layer mask icon (to the right and the 50% part is grey, not black).
Hey we're getting there! But the colors are a bit flat still, let's try some hue saturation.. layer>new adjustment layer>hue saturation ... I usually will try the rgb first, and just slide the saturation slider to the right... be very careful! Oversaturation can kill most images. normally I will only do this about +10 and sometimes as high as +20 but watch out for fake looking colors and noise and other hinky stuff in your image. Here, I was able to get away with +40 and no harm to the image. Always look at 100% magnification to ensure you aren't harming the image quality with these adjustments. again, I used the layer mask to remove the saturation from the brooklyn side bridge tower, it was a bit facacta so i just brushed away by 50% and voila, it was un-facacta-d.
Okay at this point I think I did all I could do. So I first saved the .psd file, then I flattened it. then, ctrl-j (copy the background) and I'm ready to apply some sharpening. for this web display, I first resized to 800x533, then I applied unsharp mask settings of 150% amount, .4 radius and 0 thresholds. do your usm this way, and you can easily see the effect by clicking on/off the eybeall in the layer... and in this case, if you did that, you'd see the window lights in the buildings just pop with a bit more brightness and clarity! Here's the final version (photo by florindo gallicchio):
Before/After:
0