technology, photography, music

Editing and Postprocessing

So, now I’ve taken an entire shows worth of photos, and I have a memory card with 2 or 300 photos on it. Its a sad reality, but 90% of them are going to suck. How do I sort through them? Chances are, if I am shooting for someone, I have a pretty tight deadline to turn around my best 5-10 photos. Often this happens late at night after the show is over, when all you want to do is hit the sack I use Adobe Lightroom to edit and organize my photos, so most of this is geared towards that, but many of the concepts are the same regardless of the software you use.

The very first thing I do after I have imported all of my photos (or if you are slick you can do it *while* you import) is to tag my photos. I use lightroom’s key wording panel on the right side, And I usually fill out the Title and the Caption spots, as well as adding any relevant metadata keywords to the photo (usually the artists name, and the name of the venue) Doing this saves me all sorts of time later when I export my photos elsewhere, as they are pre-captioned and tagged. I also put a copyright and some other contact info in the EXIF data. I cannot stress enough the importance of doing the tagging, you will kick yourself down the road for not doing it, I promise you. What I have described is the minimum, I know a lot of folks who do a lot more with tagging.

Next thing I do is sort. I take a 2 pass approach to this. First I throw out the junk, and then I pick the best of what is left and work on those, and I tailor how many depending on how many photos I need to produce (usually 10-12) It makes no sense to even spend the time to white balance photos until you have done these 2 passes, because you will be wasting effort on photos you don’t care about. Note that I don’t throw any photos away. Ever. Storage is cheap, and I see no reason to throw away stuff that might be useful some day.

To do this I use the Flag and Color attributes in LightRoom because i can use the attribute bar to quickly show me the subsets of the entire set of images. Here’s how I do it: First I put on the caps lock key which causes lightroom to advance to the next image after I’ve set the attribute of an image. I then select the first image, and set a flag attribute for each image using the following keys: P for pick, U for un-flagged (which basically means skip this image) and X for rejected. Mostly I focus on the PIcks, but if an image is completely unusable, I X it so i ignore it in future passes. Next I use the attribute panel to filter out everything except the Picks, and then i go through those (usually I get down to about 40 or 50 picks from the original 300) and select the best images by setting their color with the 6, 7, or 8 keys. Now I’m down to about 15-20 images I want to work on, and I select for that color attribute so I am only looking at images I care about. This entire process takes me less than 10 minutes usually. Whats good about this approach is if it turns out I need to go back and find additional images for my select few to send out, I don’t have to re scan the entire set of photos, I can simply go back to the “Picked” images.

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Thievery Corporation @ Terminal 5

Now that I have my photos to work on it is time to make adjustments. Many many excellent books and webpages have been written about how to edit photos and I’m certainly not going to try to get into that in any depth here. I’m just going to touch on a few things that I’ve found useful. Generally speaking I do my cropping before I do my adjustments, again to be sure that I have an image worth tweaking, because the rest of the editing is far more time consuming than sorting or cropping.

White Balance

You’re shooting RAW, right? So you need to set white balance, and often that is very hard due to the very bright colored lights that tend to be flashing at rock shows. The automatic mode almost *never* works. Feel free to give it a go, but usually it makes things worse. I use the eyedropper tool and pick a neutral spot. Often the dots on the frets of a guitar are white, and a good place to pick neutral colors. Other options includes the whites of people’s eyes, shirts, logos on amps or other equipment, basically anything you know is going to be a solid, neutral color. It is still likely you are going to have to tweak it with the sliders after you dropper.

Often people are still going to come out looking like blueberries. Thats the UV lighting messing with your color balance. Correct it as much as you can and tweak the rest with HSL / Color sliders (see below) The main goal is to make the skin tone look sane and normal without trashing the rest of the image. I use the eyedropper and then adjust the sliders until I get something that looks good. Play around, you’ll get the hang of it.

Brightness / Contrast / Exposure / Blacks / Fill Lights / Highlights

A lot of times I will get a shot that is underexposed, or overexposed in one part, or some combination. That’s not too surprising considering I am shooting in extremely low light with huge amounts of focused colored spotlights. There is an “auto” setting that sometimes works to pull back shadow detail, but lets face it: “Auto” is for sallies. These are big dog exposure problems, and you are going to want to use all of the tools at your disposal.

Generally speaking these tools manipulate sections of the histogram you see. In the develop module of lightroom you can actually manipulate the histogram directly, but I still prefer the sliders. Most of the sliders are oppositional. That is, when I tweak one I’m going to want to balance that tweak with compensating moves with the others. For example if I crank the exposure and the brightness to bring out an underexposed image, I’m probably also going to have to bring up the blacks or the picture will get this grey washed out look to it, and the areas that are supposed to be black will not. It’s a constant back and forth, a yin and yang of adjustments until you balance them into the best image possible. The history panel in lightroom is good for backtracking and seeing if you are making things better or worse, and the \ key (backslash) will quickly toggle from the original to your most recent edits, so you can see if you have moved in the right direction or should start over.

This is where I do the bulk of my manipulations, and you could write a book on just these controls alone (after all this is basically what black and white photography was all about for over a century)

Saturation and Vibrance

Saturation and vibrance control the variety and “amount” of colors in your image. I use them with a very light touch, because over saturation is very noticeable and unless you are doing it on purpose for artistic effect, generally isn’t all that pleasing to the eye. (at least not mine) Sometimes I get images that have lots of colored light in them, and I want to mute that color a bit and bring out the band member, or sometimes I’ve had to seriously wack the white balance to get rid of the blueberry effect, and now i’m stuck with a color washed image that needs a kick. This is when vibrance and saturation come in. Generally speaking saturation is the broad stroke, and vibrance is the more refined touch. Thats not exactly what’s happening, but its how I think about it. Most of the time I de-saturate a tiny bit (we’re talking 4 or 5 on the outside) and then crank up the vibrance to compensate.

HSL / Color

These sliders control specific colors in your image. In most non-music photography you don’t really use them unless you are doing something artistic. But they have one very specific use in my music photo editing: getting rid of the dreaded blueberry face. Used in combination with white balance and desaturation, I can restore the color of someone’s face to a relatively human tone by removing blues and/or red tones from the image. Obviously if I go too far with it, you get a very strangely colored image, but it has saved the day more times than I can count.

Noise Reduction / Sharpness

High ISO shooting generates grain, and shooting things that are moving at low shutter speeds makes it so that even properly focused images are a bit soft around the edges. The easiest way to fix both issues is to use a combination of noise reduction and sharpening tools to crisp up the image. I generally reduce noise before I sharpen. Otherwise you are simply sharpening noise, and since noise tends to be disparate spots with defined edges in your image, they will get sharpened a lot, and it will be noticeable. Honestly I usually stick with just the noise reduction and I only sharpen if its an image I really really want to use but it is not quite sharp enough to publish. Note that there are both sharpening and NR features built into both lightroom and photoshop, but I find that external plugins are usually easier to use and produce better results for me.

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Thievery Corporation @ Terminal 5 (this guy was a soft, noisy, blueberry before post processing

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