Post Production, Printing and Critique Page

Many thanks to Mike Herrmann for providing this interesting guide into how to create an Infra Red Effect with your images

CREATING INFRA RED IMAGES

A good candidate image will have a lot of green, yellow, blue sky

and white clouds

BEFORE EXPORTING TO PHOTOSHOP

BASIC PANEL LIGHTROOM

Boost Shadows to suit possibly and probably by 100%

Reduce highlights to suit possibly and again probably by 100%

Up whites till whites are white but not blown out, whites must not be grey

Up clarity to increase contrast, the image needs to be very contrasty.

COLOUR MODULE

Adjust hues

Up Greens

Up Yellows

Up Blues

These should be adjusted to taste but could easily be by 100%

Adjust luminance

Up Yellows

Up greens

Reduce blues

Again, adjusted to taste but quite likely by 100%

DETAIL MODULE

Adjust sharpening

Introduce a mask to mask all but sky, the mask will sharpen everything that remains white,

most important is the edge of clouds and the edge of prominent detail.

Sharpen up to say 100 by moving the detail slider

EXPORT TO PHOTOSHOP

Create a black and white adjustment layer

Up the greens to suit but probably to maximum

Up the yellows to suit but probably to maximum

Reduce Cyan to suit but probably about 70%

You are both exactly right about the image meaning something to you and reminding you of a fab time and tbh, I like the original because of just that 😃

Hi Steve and Sarah,

Thanks for your comments which are really helpful in terms of deciding where I want to take this image.

My first instinct was to recreate the feel of the moment in that time and place as it was a missing record from our trip to NZ. I think with that achieved I can now experiment as Sarah suggested to create other “arty” versions.

This will also expand my understanding of different functions in my editing toolset.

Best of all my mind is taken back a year to January 2024 in a NZ summer as a distraction from this winter gloom in the UK.

Hi Paul. My opinion is very simple.

Firstly what you have achieved is really good and from what you have written is exactly what you wanted to achieve.

My view is that it is your image and as such it is up to you how much or little you would want to do with it.

With that in mind, what you have done is entirely appropriate for you. Others may disagree with this viewpoint but it will always be a personal a choice what you choose to do to an image that you capture.

I love the different take on the scene and your editing Paul but maybe take it a bit further?

Please excuse the quick phone edit but i personally think if you’re going to go off piste with an image then you should go the whole hog! Really love the idea of mirroring and not something I’ve ever done before. Be interesting to see how others see it.

As a relative newcomer to post production I would be interested in any comments or advice on one of the more challenging images I've tried to improve recently.

The original was a shot that was very much compromised by a busy city road junction at night, so in the interests of safety I couldn't get the desired composition.

This photo was taken at the entrance to Prince's Wharf in Auckland Harbour looking towards the Sky Tower. The entrance has a pair of the bright red Chinese style lamp standards and I ideally wanted the Sky Tower centrally between them. To do this I would have risked my life and much of the Sky Tower would have been hidden behind the multi-storey car park to the left of the photo. (You can see a light trail left by a car that whizzed past me, which is where I would have had my tripod!!)

So looking at the most appealing aspects of the original image I embarked on a post production exercise which involved a lot of mirroring, selective masking, removing one of the mirrored pedestrians (without AI tools) and ensuring signage lettering wasn't backwards on the mirrored building. Lastly by mirroring the original shot I initially had two Sky Towers in the scene, so I retained one and moved it onto the centre-line of the image (as below).

Aside from comments or advice, I guess my final question is... does such a wild departure from the real life scene sit comfortably with other viewers, or, do you concur with my own view that the spirit of the Prince's Wharf entrance has been creatively represented, allbeit in a very fictional sense?

COLOUR MANAGEMENT INPUT

I have put together some material around colour management which I am prepared to share with you in the new year. The objective is to help you understand the nature of digital images and how to manage them so that when you share with others they see what you intend, be that via prints, DPIs or online.

I am proposing the evening of 7th January in 2 consecutive Zoom meetings. One starting at 7.00pm and the following one starting at 7.50pm. The maximum free time we have in Zoom is 40 minutes so we are looking at 30-40 minutes, a 10-20 minute break and another 30-40 minutes. I will record the session for replay after the event.

All you have to do is accept or decline the Zoom meeting invitations which will follow this email. If you can’t make it, but would really like to attend, please propose alternative dates. Only if a significant number of people can’t make the 7th will I rearrange, but it would be useful to know about suitable alternative dates in that case.

This will start at a very basic level, from “what is RGB” through to a colour managed workflow for DPIs or for printing. This is relevant whether you print yourself or outsource to a print shop. It’s equally relevant to avoid unexpected colours when you see your DPIs on our projector or you put images on line.

I’m sure other members can add to this from their knowledge and experience too, so I would like to make the session interactive. I have prepared some theory in slides but will also be showing things live in Lightroom. I knowsome of you use other software but the principles will still stand even if the tools look different.

Have a restful break and a happy new year!

Regards

Mark Taylor

How to achieve a painterly image