My Post Processing for Landscape Photography
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Processed Photo: Branch Brook Park Fall Colors, Newark, NJ ⇑
I often get requests from new photographers on post-processing techniques I use to edit my images. Truthfully, few of the images I display look exactly like the original shot straight from the camera. Some edits are almost always required to make the final images look their best, especially if you are shooting RAW instead of jpeg. The advantage of RAW is that it gives a photographer more control over the final look of the image. However, it also demands a higher level of expertise from a photographer to create the best looking image from a raw file.
Here is a brief synopsis of the steps I took to create the finished photo seen above from the raw image shown below in Lightroom 3, a popular image editing software:
Photography Tips: DSLR Post Processing Tutorial Image⇑
I used Lightroom 3 for editing the original RAW Nikon .nef file. You can see the beautiful light captured in this photo. However, a few tweaks are needed to really make this image glow! I tweaked up the saturation and luminance controls individually for the yellow, red, and green colors to give them some “pop and glow.” That restored the beautiful light glow in the leaves I remembered when visiting this scene. Next, I added about 20% Contrast, darkening the tree limbs in the photo. Finally, I added about 38% Vibrance which gives everything a lively look.
I then brought it into Photoshop for resizing and final sharpening. I used the Curves tool to create a very mild S shaped Curve that opened up shadow detail while preserving highlights. I sharpened the image for the web in Photoshop at 300%, 0.2 pixels, 0 Threshold. Using 0.2 Pixels is the secret to getting nice sharpness with no halos around edges when you have lots of fine details in a pic like this that is meant to be displayed on the Web.
The end result is the finished photo seen above! Of course, not all photos require the same degree of post-processing. However, this is the basic workflow i use for most images. i hope you find it helpful. -Don Peterson, Newark1 Web Design Portfolio.
