Whilst the exposure controls control the mid-tones, the Highlights and Shadows controls work on these ends of the tone range. In addition the Whites and Blacks controls adjust the upper and lower limits of the brightness range – this is particularly relevant where you are using Raw files, where the file contains the full tonal range the sensor can capture, which is generally much greater than the screen or printer can display. Using these controls you can bring out detail in what initially looks like black shadow areas, and recover detail in overblown highlights.
Consider the following image. Here we have a scene with huge dynamic range. To try to get detail in the whites of the water fall, the image looks underexposed
Boosting the exposure slider 1.5 stops gives better exposure of the forest, but the water is now overexposed and lacks detail
Dragging the highlights slider down restores detail in the water.
Boosting shadows gives more detail in the shadows under the cliff, and adding some clarity and dehaze filter and some vibrance gives the resulting image more punch.
These controls can also be useful more creatively, if you want to make an image more dramatically contrasty, by decreasing the shadows to make a darker, more moody effect, or boosting the highlights for a high-key look.
In some software you may find a dehaze control which also adjusts tonality, in particular reducing blue luminosity (haze tends to be bluish) and increasing contrast. These controls can be fantastic for cutting through haze, but might also be of value in other situations too. Twiddle the control and see what the effects are on your images.
Often, as in Photoshop, there are advanced options on these controls that fine tune how the effects apply. The best way to learn about these controls is to experiment with your own software on a variety of your own images. Have fun.
Lightroom has a non-destructive workflow, using a history of your actions to reconstruct the final edited image. You can save snapshots of your edits at any time,or make virtual copies with different editing paths starting from the same original image. By clicking back in the history you can return to any previous stage in your edits even if you close and reopen Lightroom.
Photo editing often involves many processing steps and a lot of trial and error. If, at the end of an hour of processing you decide you really should have done something different right at the beginning, you would like to be able to modify the original edit, rather than discarding everything and starting again. Welcome to the world of non-destructive editing.
By non-destructive we mean that the original image is not changed; the end result is achieved by applying transformations and changes on top of that image, with each of the things you do on top able to be adjusted. Mostly, that is achievable. For example in the cat image below (in Photoshop), I can select the eyes and apply a colour balance filter to change the eye colour. But this overwrites the original pixels of the eye. I can never get the original eye colour back. With non-destructive edits I would select the eyes, copy the eyes to a new layer, and apply the colour change to the new layer with the eyes. If I want to undo I can turn off visibility of the colour balance layer or the colour balance filter layer, and the original (unchanged) cat image is again visible. I recommend you use non-destructive editing wherever possible.
Lightroom makes this easy. All edits in LR are non-destructive so you can undo edits by backing off down the history; and by using virtual copies or editing snapshots you can generate multiple versions of the same original image using different editing pathways, to try out different possibilities then choose the one you like best. Because LR remembers the editing history, there is no duplication of the original image so a great saving in disk space and reduction in file management. Many of the other alternative software packages also support non-destructive editing (some to different degrees – you may need to explicitly save the processing steps (or recipe) along with the output image if you want to return and modify the original edits for a new version.
In Photoshop or similar programs,
work in layers;
use adjustment layers rather than adjusting the underlying pixels;
use layer masks to make your adjustments local to part of the image;
always keep a version of your work as a layered file format like PSD or TIFF so you have the option to adjust your edits later.
Tidying my room a while agoI came across a very dusty doc I had made yonks ago on the importance of computer backup. It had the “Backup song” that parodies the song “Yesterday” by the Beatles. I rather like it, and it still rings true today. Enjoy.
Yesterday, All those backups seemed a waste of pay. Now my database has gone away. Oh I believe in yesterday. Suddenly, There’s not half the files there used to be, And there’s a deadline hanging over me. The system crashed so suddenly. I pushed something wrong What it was I could not say. Now my data’s gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay. Yesterday, The need for back-ups seemed so far away. Thought all my data was here to stay, Now I believe in yesterday.
A stack of failed disk drives. Lucky I had backups
Now, getting serious! Your disk drive with all your photos WILL fail. Perhaps not today, perhaps not this year, but at some stage it will fail. You just don’t know when. Current expectation is that about 2.5% of disk drives will fail over a period of one year (even if they are brand new).
Check your disks
Your operating system may have some tools to check your drives’ current health (eg Win10 disk health check) though how reliable these are at predicting disk failure is contentious. Your best bet is to assume your drive(s) may fail at any time, and have good disaster recovery plans (ie backups)
Checking disks On Windows: open a command prompt (in the start menu type CMD and press enter.) in the command console window, type “wmic diskdrive get model,status” and press enter. This should generate a list like this:
Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.19042.1237]
(c) Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Windows\System32>wmic diskdrive get model,status
Model Status
ÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ ÿÿÿÿ USB Device OK
ATA ST6000VN0033-2EE SCSI Disk Device OK
Seagate Backup+ Desk SCSI Disk Device OK
ATA ST10000DM0004 SCSI Disk Device OK
Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB OK
Seagate Expansion Desk SCSI Disk Device OK
ATA Samsung SSD 850 SCSI Disk Device OK
C:\Windows\System32>
On Mac: you can monitor the status of your external hard drive by opening Disk Utility by going to Applications and then Utilities. Next, you will click on the drive you would like to test to see how it’s performing. Once you click the drive you would like to check on in the top right corner, click on First Aid. If your drive is performing well, you’ll be able to scroll until you find where it says the volume appears to be OK. If it is not performing well, this process will automatically notify you of any problems like file corruption, an external device not working properly, or that your computer won’t start up. Disk Utility will not detect or repair all problems that a disk may have, but it can give you a general picture.
Backup Photos and Catalog files
I will focus on backing up your photos and catalog files (don’t forget the catalog files made by Lightroom and many other software packages. They contain all the information on the edits you made. You don’t want to lose those edits!). Thus we will consider file based backups not whole disk copies for this purpose.
Make more than one backup – a common recommendation is to keep at least 3 backups, two locally, on different sorts of media (eg internal hard drive, and external hard drive), and at least one copy off-site (perhaps an external hard drive you keep at your workplace, or leave with a relative or friend; perhaps a cloud based solution).
Keep at least one backup off site. Yes, I know I just said that, but it is important and often ignored. If you have a fire, or a burglar takes your computer and disks, you may have lost all your backups.
Update your backups regularly. Set calendar reminders to update those off-site backup disks – you will need to retrieve them, update them, and return them to their safe off-site location.
Periodically check that the backups are still readable/error free.
Since we are talking about backing up photos, we are probably talking Terrabytes (TB) not megabytes, so large capacity is essential. Below I outline some options.
Disk Drives
A USB-SATA disk caddy allows you to use internal drives externally.
These days disk drives are cheap. An internal 8 TB drive can be bought for just over $300; an external 8 TB drive looks to be about the same price – a pittance compared to what you have paid for your camera gear. I have an internal drive that I duplicate my image files onto, and an external USB3 drive likewise. I have some old internal drives from my previous PC that I backup onto (using a USB-SATA disk caddy that lets me use internal SATA drives via USB – I have seen these as cheap as $12), then take these to my work office (off site backup).
Network Accessible Storage (NAS)
NAS systems provide external disk space accessible via network (or USB). These may use multiple disk drives configured to internally replicate the contents to provide fault tolerance, so if one drive on the array of drives fails, the data is still secure on the remaining drives. Since they can combine the storage of multiple disk drives they can provide a logical disk volume that is much larger than a single disk, if you have HUGE storage needs. However, a NAS is effectively another computer, and comes with maintenance overheads and a learning curve if you want to make the most of the investment. Unless you need to access the storage across a network, or access the same storage from multiple computers regularly, a simple external drive is cheaper and probably a more suitable option.
Cloud Storage
Cloud storage (ie storage on a remote disk array, accessible via the internet) may be worth considering. Storage is usually charged monthly or annually based on amount and features. If you have very high storage needs, look for one that offers “unlimited storage” (but check the fine print – a lot of “unlimited” offers come with caveats). There are many companies offering these services. Offerings change over time so it’s best if you search the web to find a suitable cloud storage system that suits your needs and budget if you want to go that way. Some offer free trials so you can check them out. Check reviews on the web to see what other people are saying (tip: tell your search engine to find pages from, say, the last year, so you get up-to-date information.) Here is an article that discusses cloud storage in more detail https://photographylife.com/cloud-storage-for-photographers.
Software
It’s best for you to check the web for reviews of what is available, as software is changing all the time. Check for recent reviews and overviews in reputable unbiased sources (rather than ads by the software makers).
Windows
I use (on Win10) an old package called Yadis Backup which works in the background. I have it synch my main image folder (which also contains my LR catalog) to an external drive. Whenever a file is added to the main folder, it gets duplicated immediately on the external drive without me having to think about it. Alas, Yadis is no longer actively maintained. However, there are several similar packages around.
There are many third party apps in the Mac App Store. In addition you can use an rsync based strategy (see below – under the hood OSX has a linux like core).
Linux
There are many options in Linux. One of the standards here is rsync, which has a host of options and can maintain synchronisation between files and folders over slow connections (eg over internet) using extremely efficient algorithms.
A workspace refers to the collection of user interface elements on your screen and their layout. Photoshop has a vast number of features, so the workspace usually gives a subset of the available tools and functions. You can customise this workspace to suit what you need, and you can save specific configurations of your workspace that you may suit your needs for particular tasks so that you can easily return to that workspace next time you want to repeat that task. Photoshop comes with a default set of workspaces that you can use as-is or customise to suit your needs, or modify and save as a new configuration. Remember too that there generally are many ways to achieve each result, including keyboard shortcuts, so even if a tool you need is not immediately visible, you may be able to call it up with a keypress.
The photoshop workspace may look a little daunting at first, with a lot of icons and panels, but with use it becomes easy.
Photoshop’s workspace
Open an image in Photoshop and the image appears in a tabbed window in the workspace. If you open another image it will appear in a new tab, and you can flip between images by clicking the tab.
The tools panel contains many of the important tools. There are too many tools to fit in one screen so some of the tools are grouped – right click on a tool icon to reveal any variants of the tool hidden beneath. Click on the ●●● icon towards the bottom to bring up a complete list including tools that didn’t fit in the current tool panel. You can add tools to the panel or remove tools you don’t use, to suit your needs. Save your changes as a new workspace using the Workspace Options menu.
Many of the tools have options visible in the options bar (eg with the brush tool you can choose brush size and feather among others.)
The photoshop panels include a wide range of functions. The histogram shows the pixel brightness for the selected layer in the image. The Layers panel shows the different layers, their order in the image, and their masks. As with many panels there are tabs. The Layers panel includes a chanel tab so you can look individually at the red, green and blue chanels. Panels may be docked (ie locked in the main photoshop window, or Floating panels which you can position, say, on a second monitor to give you easy access to the tools on the panel without cluttering your main workspace. You can drag docked panels and drop them elsewhere to float them (including individual tabs that can become untabbed panels this way).
Individual panels can be accessed by selecting them on the Window menu if they are not already present on your workspace. There are a lot of windows available.
Once you have organised your workspace to suit your needs, you can save the layout using the Workspace Options menu. In newer versions of PS the system will remember the workspace layout at the time you exit the program and reload that layout when you next open PS. If you want, you can reset Photoshop’s standard workspaces back to default values (see the Reset item in the workspaces menu).
Keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts can facilitate your use of Photoshop. You can see on the Window menu above, that some of the shortcuts are given for some of the windows. For example F5 brings up the Brush Settings panel. If you find yourself clicking into the menu regularly to access particular functions, make note of any shortcuts that may speed up your work. If there isn’t a defined shortcut for that function, you can customise the keyboard shortcuts to add a new one.
More Resources
For more detail, check out some of these resources:
I strongly encourage non-destructive editing where possible. Check out https://resources.waverleycameraclub.org/non-destructive-editing/ for some of the reasons why. Rather than changing your original image, try to do the edits on separate layers over the top of the original. That way you can always go back and refine your edits if you want to. Once you change the original, it is very hard to undo.
Lightroom – spot healing/healing brush tool
This is a powerful tool. You can set the brush size and feathering. Choose either Clone mode or Heal mode. Then spot or paint over the area you want to repair. LR will (non destructively) find an area and use this as a source to repair the area you clicked/brushed. LR shows the source area as an outline. If LR chooses the wrong area, drag the source area to a more appropriate region. In Clone mode, the repair will duplicate the source area and in Heal mode LR will interpolate textures and blend. If the repair with one mode doesn’t look quite right, try clicking on the other mode to see the effect.
The clone stamp tool is very powerful. In photoshop the tool has many options. It is well worth while exploring each one and finding out what they do and when to use them.
I recommend creating a new layer over the layer you are repairing. Set the clone stamp tool to sample “Current and Below” and make your edits. The cloned areas will appear on the new layer overlying the source layer. If you make a mistake you can erase it from this layer without affecting the original.
Transformations can allow you to correct converging verticals, adjust aspect ratios, correct lens distortions or to distort the image in multitudes of ways. Most editing programs give you rotate and crop. Some allow you to correct perspective (eg converging verticals). Some give you endless control to twist, distort, shape and texturise your images. I will start with some generic comments and then discuss some of the capabilities of Photoshop and Lightroom. If you use other programs, you may well find they have similar tools and once you know what you might want to achieve and what to look for, you should be able to find specific instructions for the software you use. The notes below outline some options for transformation and distortion but they are far from comprehensive.
Rotation and Scale
Rotation and scale are probably the most frequently used transformations. Handy for fixing sloping horizons or tilted buildings, but also for more creative use. For example if you are making composites you are almost certain to need to adjust the relative sizes of images as you composite them together get all the elements together in appropriate scales.
Perspective
Perspective comes from the fundamental physics that things further away look smaller (ie occupy a smaller part of your eye’s retina or your camera’s sensor. It provides a sense of depth to images, but in some circumstances it can be a distraction. Consider the images below. The left panel shows converging verticals – the lens was pointed upwards and the roof is further away from the camera than the floor so the perspective lines converge. Using perspective controls one can straighten this out. Note the bits of white at the bottom corners. The top has been stretched horizontally to correct the vertical convergence, making the bottom (relatively) narrower. The white is where the original frame is extended. You can use tools like Content Aware Fill in photoshop to fix this.
Aspect Ratio
Aspect ration refers to the relative dimensions in the vertical and horizontal directions. You may want to adjust this to correct for distortions after perspective adjustments, or just to make something look taller and narrower, or shorter and wider for creative effect (or just because it looks better)
Warp
The perspective controls make linear changes – ie things are adjusted along straight lines. Warp introduces curved adjustments. This may be valuable to correct for curvatures caused by lens distortion (especially with wide angle lenses) such as barrel or pincushion distortion. Note that many recent processing packages such as Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw have the ability to automatically correct these sorts of lens distortions. In the images below I used warp transformations to make a fish-eye lens image more rectilinear.
Puppet warp
Puppet warp (a feature in photoshop and some other software) allows you to move parts of an image about relative to other parts. In the example below I have used Photoshop to reposition an arm. I selected the model’s arm. Puppet-warp places a network of nodes over the selected area. I then clicked on several nodes around the elbow to lock their position (I should also have locked the nodes further up the arm and shoulder to stop them moving). I then dragged some nodes on the forearm to change the angle of the arm. All the pixels in the forearm get dragged and repositioned in concert. Once in position, accept the warp and the arm is now fixed in the new position. The area where the arm used to be needs to be repaired, but usually a content aware fill or a bit of work with a clone stamp will do the trick.
You can use Puppet warp to re-shape things easily. Give your male model bigger muscles and square up his jaw, perhaps? Give it a try and see what you can do.
Liquefy
The liquefy filter in Photoshop (PS) allows you to push parts of an image about as though the image was made of rubber or perhaps as if it were wet paint on a canvas. You can push and pull, enlarge and shrink and otherwise manipulate. The tool in recent photoshop versions has face-sensitive controls that allow you to easily retouch portraits – adjust eyes, noses, mouths, chins etc. In the example below I have used the face controls in PS liquefy to slightly lengthen the face, change the mouth (smile), nose (smaller), eyes (much larger), cheek (higher) etc (the arcs to the right and left of the face are from the liquefy preview, indicating the face being edited). All this is done with previews as you go, with a couple of dozen sliders.
These filters allow you to make overall adjustments to an image. One popular use is in the Little-world images, where a panorama is transformed to polar coordinates.
Filters that add ripples, raindrops on water effects and so on are easy to find, as are filters that apply local distortions to get painterly effects (eg check out Photoshop’s Filter Gallery – make sure your image is set to RGB 8-bit mode or it will be greyed out). There are too many options to list here. Have a look on the internet for further information.
Transform in Lightroom CC
Lightroom does not have the power of Photoshop but has a lot of transformation tools. Lens distortions can be automatically adjusted, or you can take manual control.
Lightroom also has extensive tools for rotation in the develop module. Using the Crop tool allows you to rotate (click and hold your mouse button outside the crop box and drag up or down. Release the button to fix the new rotation).
The Transform Panel gives a range of additional tools including Auto modes, adjustment for horizons (these auto modes often do what you need, so give them a click, and if they fail, undo the edit and try the manual controls. I find the Guided mode gives me a great deal of control, sometimes coupled with the Aspect slider, since sometimes perspective adjustments lead to some horizontal or vertical squashing or stretching. The links below give more detailed information.
Using keyboard shortcuts can speed your work compared to hunting through the menu system. And the keyboard shortcut system is flexible. You can change the default settings to suit your needs. To customise, use the Alt+Shift+Control+K (Mac users use the command key not control key for these shortcuts).
For a full list of the default keyboard shortcuts go to https://helpx.adobe.com/au/photoshop/using/default-keyboard-shortcuts.html. The first section on this page gives some of the more popular shortcuts. Note that you can switch between tools by pressing the relevant key (shown on the toolbar context menu). For example, B brings up the brush tool (last type of that brush – in the figure to the right, the default brush selected is the ordinary brush tool, but if you , for example, selected the pencil tool, then B would bring up the pencil tool. Some common usages are listed below.
V
MoVe tool
M
Marquee tool
W
Wand tool
C
Crop tool
H
Healing Brush tool (H and B were already taken, but J was free)
B
Brush tool
E
Eraser tool
G
Gradient / Paint bucket tool
H
Hand tool
X
eXchange foreground and background colours
Some of the most common keyboard shortcuts that I use are:
Ctrl-0
Zoom image to fit full windows (note: zero not O). Also double click the hand tool for the same effect.
Ctrl-1
Zoom image to 1:1
Ctrl-+
Zoom in
Ctrl–
Zoom out
Ctrl-T
Free transform selected layer
Shift-click
when selecting – start adding to selection
Alt-click
when selecting – start subtracting from selection
Ctrl-J
new layer by copying current layer (just the selection if a selection is active)
Escape
Close modal dialogs
Ctrl-Z
toggles the last edit off or on (I usually customise this, to
spacebar
Switch to hand tool (when not editing text)
I customise my shortcuts to make Ctrl-Z be Undo not Toggle Last State so Ctrl-Z in PS behaves like all my other Windows Applications.
Alt-Right Click-Drag to adjust brush size and feather.
Another shortcut I use often is changing brush size and feathering. With a brush selected, hold down Alt, and right-click. Drag left and right and left to adjust size, and drag up or down to adjust the feather.
General principles about selections are covered here. A common problem is making a selection that involves hair. Those hundreds of fine whispy strands provide challenges for selection. Here are some tutorials on various strategies. Most are based on Photoshop, but the same general principles apply if you use other software. They also apply to, say, selecting the sky from leaves and branches of a tree. Essentially the same problem – selecting lots of fiddly bits. Remember that the process of selection is easier if the hair is clearly distinguished from the background by colour or luminance, or focus. If there is no clear distinction between the hair and the background, making an automated selection is near impossible for the software. Don’t expect miracles. Here are some suggestions (if you have control of the shooting setup):
Use a green-screen (or blue-screen) background
Use a dark background and backlight the hair to make a distinct luminance contrast. Or with black hair, have a lighter toned background.
Use a suitable depth of field, so the background is very soft and the hair is very sharp (you can then use approaches based on finding edges to select the hairs)
If just part of the outline is difficult, cut it out and use a clone tool to paint some whispy hair bits from elsewhere around the head
The video linked below shows an approach using GIMP, but the approach is equally applicable to making difficult selections in Photoshop. Note in this video the presenter uses differences in brightness to build the mask. you could equally use colour channels if there is a colour contrast between the background and the hair.
This video shows an approach using GIMP, but the method could equally be used in Photoshop.
Your camera has a fixed sensor size and aspect ratio. Very often your image will capture things that you might want to crop out. Maybe you have shot some scenery with a wide angle lens to capture the broad horizon and want to crop out the foreground and background to make a panoramic image. Perhaps you shot a portrait, but now realise that the composition would have been better if you had missed out all the distractions in the background. Cropping is a simple but powerful tool.
Consider the images below. The left panel is uncropped. Verticals are slightly off vertical (note the lamposts tilted relative to the side edges of the image) and there is a lot of space on the left and foreground that adds nothing to the image. Straightening and cropping gives a stronger image.
Sometimes a very severe crop is needed. Today’s cameras have so many pixels you can throw most away and still get a good result. On the example below, the original frame captured was lack-lustre. Cropping tightly down on the feet of the horses and the polo ball makes a far more interesting image.
Cropping can help you improve your compositions by cutting out distractions, balancing compositions by moving elements relative to the frame, focusing on key details, and generally giving you a tool to make more eye-catching images.
Some general principles
Straighten horizons (in general). We are used to horizons being horizontal and tilted horizons can be unsettling to the viewer. Crop tools usually have rotation functions to facilitate this. On the other hand, you might want to creatively tilt an image for dramatic effect. A strong diagonal element in a composition can add a dynamic component.
Crop off parts of the image that do not assist with the “story” of the image or contribute to the compositional balance.
You can use cropping to remove distractions from the edges of your image
Consider converging verticals – sometimes images are improved if you correct the verticals (see Transformations and distortions)
