IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | (music playing)
| | 00:04 | Hi! I am Joseph Linaschke, photographic
storyteller, educator and the Aperture expert.
| | 00:08 | My first passion is photography, so I'm
really excited to take you on a step by
| | 00:13 | step journey of the process I use to
create a gallery of very high-resolution
| | 00:17 | black and white metal prints. Using
Aperture, onOne's Perfect Resize
| | 00:22 | and Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2, and starting
from the original RAW file, I'll take you
| | 00:26 | through the steps of prepping,
retouching, scaling, converting to
| | 00:29 | black and white, and ultimately printing
these beautiful images on sheets of metal;
| | 00:33 | truly a stunning way to view your work.
| | 00:35 | Color prints on metal are cool, but in my opinion,
this is a medium designed for black and white.
| | 00:41 | Seeing your photos come to life on a huge metal print
on your wall is something you have to see to believe.
| | 00:46 | By following the steps I'll share with you here,
you can take your own photos
| | 00:49 | from the screen to the wall with fantastic results
that will drop the jaws of anyone who sees your work.
| | 00:55 | Join me as we walk the journey from
untouched RAW photo, to gallery-worthy prints.
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1. Getting StartedThe backstory| 00:02 | Hi! I'm Joseph Linaschke, I'm a
photographic storyteller, and what really means
| | 00:06 | is that I get to travel to some
pretty interesting places, and see some
| | 00:09 | pretty interesting things, and photograph them
for some pretty interesting clients sometimes.
| | 00:13 | So, what I'm going to be talking about
today is a process that I went through for
| | 00:17 | creating a series of
prints to hang in a gallery.
| | 00:20 | About year or so ago, I was contacted by
a local wine bar looking to do a new
| | 00:24 | gallery hanging, and they normally would
do gallery hangings for local artists.
| | 00:28 | You know, I'm not a fine art photographer; I've
really never really considered myself as such,
| | 00:32 | but being approached and asked to do
a little gallery hanging of course is
| | 00:35 | quite cool and exciting.
| | 00:36 | So, to do this, I needed to do something
different; something unique, and fun, and
| | 00:41 | something that really
talked about my type of work.
| | 00:43 | So, I didn't want to just grab a random
selection of photos, and print them out at
| | 00:48 | various sizes, and formats, and so on. I
needed something consistent, some type of
| | 00:51 | a theme, and after quite a bit of
discussion, we decided that the theme would
| | 00:55 | be black and white printed on metal.
| | 00:56 | So, what you're seeing here is the
final hanging. These are a series of 20 x 30
| | 01:00 | inch prints, all black and white, of
course, and printed directly onto metal.
| | 01:04 | The reason that I approached metal
was a friend of mine, awhile before I was
| | 01:08 | approached, actually did a hinging of his
own printing black and white on metal,
| | 01:11 | and he told how successful it was, and
how cool it looked, and I thought, well,
| | 01:15 | this sounds like something I want to try.
| | 01:17 | So, I ordered of a stack of sample
prints, and what I found it right away was
| | 01:22 | that the way that this is printed
is basically two different formats.
| | 01:25 | You have a technique where the black
and white image is printed onto, basically,
| | 01:28 | a white paper, and then that is glued
or it adhered somehow to the metal print.
| | 01:32 | So, at that point, all you are really
seeing is a normal black and white print
| | 01:36 | that just happens to be mounted on metal.
It may as well be mounted on plastic, or
| | 01:40 | wood, or anything else.
| | 01:41 | But then the other technique was where
they printed directly onto the metal,
| | 01:45 | so what you end up with is, instead of
having white showing through the print,
| | 01:48 | anywhere that would have been White
becomes clear, and so you see the metal
| | 01:52 | showing through instead.
| | 01:53 | Now, these are aluminum sheets, so there
is a definite sheer and texture to the
| | 01:57 | metal, and that comes through in the
print in a really, really interesting way.
| | 02:01 | So, once I saw that, it was pretty much a
sure thing; that's what I was going to do.
| | 02:05 | So ,this entire video is talking about
how we went from the basic image, the
| | 02:08 | original photograph, through the scaling,
and retouching, and final black and white
| | 02:13 | conversion, and then sharpening before
it went off to a print. These were all
| | 02:16 | printed at 20 x 30 inches, so that's pretty
good size, but they're also printed at 300
| | 02:21 | DPI, which, to be honest, may have been
a little bit higher resolution than I
| | 02:25 | needed, but it was all part of the
experiment, and I wanted to go ahead and
| | 02:29 | print these at as high a
quality as possible.
| | 02:31 | So, throughout this video, we'll be
talking about that whole process, and here's
| | 02:34 | the images that were
hung in the gallery.
| | 02:36 | We're not going to look at every single
one of these for the entire process of
| | 02:40 | converting from the original to the
final, but we will take a look at a couple
| | 02:44 | of them, because there were
some different techniques applied.
| | 02:46 | So, basically what we would do is start
from the original image here -- let's
| | 02:50 | switch over, so this is a bit bigger.
| | 02:51 | We will start with the original image, do
some basic retouching, and color adjustments.
| | 02:55 | Let's see, there's the original, how it
started, and then we do some essential
| | 02:58 | color adjustments, levels adjustments,
that sort of thing, and also scale it.
| | 03:01 | So, this image is considerably larger
than the original. And then from there, we'd
| | 03:05 | go ahead and do the
black and white conversion.
| | 03:07 | So, we'll be talking about all of
the steps in the process here.
| | 03:09 | Hopefully, if you're following along
at home, and you have any of your images
| | 03:13 | that you want to do this to with
various pieces of software, you'll be able
| | 03:17 | to create images that are ready for
print at this size, and look really cool
| | 03:20 | in black and white, and you'll be
able to place your first black and white
| | 03:23 | print on metal order.
| | 03:24 | And I'm sure that once you see this,
you'll agree with me, that it is just
| | 03:28 | a fantastic medium, and it was
a really great way to represent
| | 03:31 | black and white photography.
| | 03:32 | So, come along for the ride, we'll have
some fun here, and we'll see exactly how
| | 03:36 | I did this process, and see if
we can learn a thing or two.
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| Reviewing the images| 00:01 | I'd like to take you on a brief tour of
all of the photographs that were printed
| | 00:05 | and hung for this gallery show.
| | 00:07 | Throughout the process of these lessons,
we're not going to look at all eight of
| | 00:11 | these. Of course, there's a lot of
overlapping techniques that were used to
| | 00:14 | create the black and white conversions,
| | 00:15 | but there are some differences that are
specific, or shot dependent, so I'll pick
| | 00:18 | a few of these to go through in detail.
| | 00:21 | I wanted to take this opportunity to
show you all eight of them, so you can see
| | 00:25 | where they started, and where they ended.
| | 00:27 | I'll just go ahead
and open all the stacks here.
| | 00:29 | I'm in Aperture right now, and of course,
it doesn't really matter what software
| | 00:31 | you're using to manage
and organize your photos.
| | 00:34 | There's actually not a whole lot of
work that's being done in Aperture.
| | 00:37 | Anything that I show you that's
done in Aperture you could also do in
| | 00:40 | Lightroom or Photoshop,
| | 00:42 | so again, it doesn't really matter where
you're starting. The specific tools will
| | 00:44 | come into play a little bit later on,
| | 00:46 | but for now, I just want to show you the
different photographs. For each one of
| | 00:48 | these, you're going to see three stages:
there's the original, the scaled and
| | 00:51 | retouched, and then the
black and white version.
| | 00:53 | For some reason for this first one here
I don't have the middle step, I must've
| | 00:56 | thrown it away along the process.
| | 00:58 | But let's go ahead and take a look at
these images and where they started.
| | 01:01 | I'm showing just the original image, so
you can see basically as it came out of
| | 01:04 | the camera, and clearly we can see
this is shot at night, it was also shot
| | 01:09 | crooked, which I really can't explain.
| | 01:12 | But what's important about this
particular image is the original size.
| | 01:15 | I'm going to go ahead and tap the Y
key in Aperture that brings up the
| | 01:19 | information down here on the bottom.
| | 01:21 | And I've actually customized this, because I
want to show some very specific data in here.
| | 01:23 | I want to show the original size of
these images. So, the original pixel size for
| | 01:27 | this particular photo was only 12.7
megapixels. This was shot quite a few years
| | 01:31 | ago, and it was shot on a
Canon 5D; the original 5D.
| | 01:35 | So, it's quite low res actually.
| | 01:36 | It was then cropped, and if tap the M
key, we go out of master, you'll see how it
| | 01:40 | was cropped, and that's how it was
cropped for the final process, and that brought
| | 01:43 | it down even further to a tiny little
8 megapixels. That then needed to be
| | 01:48 | scaled and converted to black and white.
| | 01:51 | Now, whether you do the scaling before
or after is a point of discussion, and
| | 01:54 | that's going to come up later on in the
lessons, but for all of these, I chose
| | 01:58 | to do the scaling before, and
again, I'll explain why later on.
| | 02:01 | But for here, I just
want to point something out.
| | 02:03 | Notice that the width of this image,
it's only 4252 pixels, so what we needed
| | 02:08 | to do is get this up to 30 inch wide at
300 DPI, which is obviously quite a big jump.
| | 02:13 | So, let's go ahead and go load up the
final black and white, and you can see here
| | 02:17 | the final pixel size here is a whopping
9000 pixels, so we went from original of
| | 02:22 | 4252 up to 9000 pixels, bringing the
final resolution of this particular cropped
| | 02:27 | image up to 28 megapixels, which
doesn't seem that's huge, until you realize
| | 02:31 | that it actually is, because
this is cropped so wide
| | 02:33 | we're seeing a lot of the data that
we would see on some of the other files.
| | 02:37 | So, if you go into something like this
Crow shot next, where the original was a
| | 02:41 | bit higher -- this one was at 21
megapixels; it is then cropped down to 15.8
| | 02:46 | megapixels, and then scaled up again to
this 9000 x 6000 pixels wide, and that
| | 02:50 | gives us a 54 megapixel file, which is
essentially what I used for all of these
| | 02:54 | for theblack and white conversions.
| | 02:56 | So, in this shot, we had -- let's go ahead
back to the original there -- there's the
| | 03:00 | original uncropped. You can see an
unretouched, obviously very, very dark and
| | 03:03 | underexposed photo, then cropped in,
exposure brought up a little bit, and then
| | 03:07 | converted into black and white.
| | 03:08 | So, let me go ahead and get rid of all
this info, so the pictures gets a little
| | 03:12 | bit bigger in here, and I'm also just
going to go into the straight viewer mode,
| | 03:16 | so we can toggle through
these, and show the differences.
| | 03:19 | So, here's the next one. There's the
original as it came of the camera, and then
| | 03:23 | there's one that's
been slightly straightened.
| | 03:24 | Again, I seem to have an issue with
holding the camera level. A little bit of
| | 03:28 | levels work, and some retouching.
| | 03:30 | And the retouching you're probably
not going to notice here, but you will
| | 03:33 | see this later on as we move forward.
And then there's the black and white
| | 03:36 | conversion of that.
| | 03:37 | The third image is of the Great Wall of
China. Oh, by the way, this is in Berlin.
| | 03:41 | It is a Holocaust Memorial.
That's what this is a photograph of.
| | 03:45 | This is the Great Wall of China, so
there is the original color photo, and this
| | 03:47 | is shot at full resolution.
Let's see; original was 21 megapixels,
| | 03:51 | so this is either on the Canon 5D Mark II,
or shot on 1DS Mark III, both shooting
| | 03:58 | at about 21 megapixels.
| | 03:59 | So, there's that, and then the exposure
adjustment and scaling for that one, and
| | 04:04 | if we go back here, you'll see again,
we're up to 54 megapixels, and then to
| | 04:07 | the black and white.
| | 04:08 | I guess I'll just go
ahead and leave this info on.
| | 04:11 | So, there's a pretty dramatic difference
there, and this photo was, in fact, one
| | 04:15 | of the most complicated
ones to do the conversion of,
| | 04:18 | because if we go back here, you'll
see that the wall really blends in, and
| | 04:21 | especially along here, so converting
this, and making it so the wall really
| | 04:26 | stood out took a quite
a bit of effort in there.
| | 04:28 | The next one is in Vietnam.
| | 04:30 | This is Halong Bay, and there's an
interesting point about this one; you'll
| | 04:34 | see in here that we are cropped quite
close to the tip of this boat here, and
| | 04:39 | the camera is again at a slightly jaunty
angle, so that needs to be straightened out.
| | 04:45 | So, by the time that was straightened
out, the corner here became even closer,
| | 04:48 | and you'll see a white
border that's on here --
| | 04:51 | let me jump forward a moment -- one of
my first tests looked like this, and you
| | 04:55 | can see that the tip of the boat was
cut off, and that was not going to do. I
| | 05:00 | didn't want to have that.
| | 05:01 | I wanted to add this white edge around
the photos, and using the software that
| | 05:05 | did my black and white conversion,
which is Nik Silver Efex Pro 2,
| | 05:08 | when you add the boarder, it actually
creeps into the photo, and then
| | 05:12 | risks cutting things off.
| | 05:14 | So, what I ended up doing on this one
was, before scaling it, I actually added a
| | 05:18 | white border, so that I then had some
extra room to crop in on, so if I zoom
| | 05:23 | into this -- lets get up
close here to the top --
| | 05:25 | you can see that there is an added
white border before the tip of this boat
| | 05:29 | here. Once it was rotated, or straightened,
rather, this is how close it came to
| | 05:33 | the edge, which if I then just
cropped in a border from here using
| | 05:37 | Silver Efex Pro, I would cut that off as I did
here, which obviously would not be acceptable.
| | 05:42 | So, the final result had to be an image
that that didn't happen on. So, here's
| | 05:46 | the final one,
and I'll let this draw here.
| | 05:48 | It's at 54 megapixels, and we can see
here that it is right up to the edge,
| | 05:52 | but because I added that extra border
in there, I didn't have to worry about
| | 05:54 | that cropping out.
| | 05:55 | So, if we zoom of that, you'll see
what that final piece looked like there.
| | 05:58 | So, again from here, we
started off with this version of it,
| | 06:02 | slightly straightened, added
the white border, scaled, and then
| | 06:05 | converted to black and white.
| | 06:07 | So, here's another one. Let's go ahead
and get rid of the thumbnails again.
| | 06:11 | So, there is the original there, there
is one that has been retouched, and level
| | 06:15 | adjusted, and scaled, and then
the black and white conversion.
| | 06:18 | One thing you'll notice very quickly
is the clouds really, really come out in
| | 06:22 | the black andwhite conversion techniques
that I'll be showing you later on, so
| | 06:25 | if you have any clouds in the sky,
you'll really get to see those pop.
| | 06:29 | This is shot at Crater Lake in Oregon.
That is Crater Lake, and most photos that
| | 06:33 | you see of Crater Lake actually
include the island, which is somewhere over
| | 06:36 | here. One of the reasons that the
gallery creator liked this image is because it
| | 06:40 | was of a local iconic image, everybody
knows Crater Lake around here in Oregon,
| | 06:45 | but it didn't include the island, so it
took little bit of extra thought before
| | 06:48 | you figured out what it was.
| | 06:49 | So anyway, there is the original
color image, and then scaled, there's not a
| | 06:53 | whole lot to see different there, and
then of course to the black and white, and
| | 06:57 | again, you're really seeing those
clouds come through on that. This zebra
| | 07:00 | is shot in Kenya at Nakuru National
Park, and that's just out side of Nakuru,
| | 07:05 | and as you can see here, it's just a
nice close up of the zebra; obviously a
| | 07:09 | black and white conversion
option if there ever was one.
| | 07:12 | Now, this one, like the shot of the
boat in Halong Bay, I have added a white
| | 07:17 | border in here, because I didn't want
to risk cutting too much of the ear off
| | 07:21 | on the top in there when I did the
final conversion, or final boarder adding.
| | 07:24 | So, here you can see there is almost no
image lost, as we just go back and forth
| | 07:28 | between the color version and the black
and white, almost none of the image is
| | 07:32 | lost as we cut in on the border,
| | 07:34 | unlike some of the other ones where
more of the edge is cut off. But of course,
| | 07:38 | some images, that's perfectly okay.
| | 07:40 | So, there we have it. Those are the
images that were in the gallery hanging, and
| | 07:44 | if we close all these stacks, you can see
the eight of them all side by side there, and
| | 07:48 | again, all printed at 20 x 30, or I
should say, at least 30 inches at its longest
| | 07:52 | side. This one was 30 by, I don't
know, something like 15 or so inches.
| | 07:56 | It is clearly not quite as
tall as these other ones.
| | 07:58 | So, those are the images that we have, and
we'll be going through a handful of these
| | 08:02 | throughout the process of
showing you how each step is done.
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2. Preparing the Files for Black-and-White ConversionStraightening and cropping| 00:01 | I want to talk about the cropping and
straightening that was done to handful of
| | 00:05 | these images, and talk about the
reasoning or rationale behind each of the
| | 00:09 | adjustments that was made.
| | 00:10 | For this, we'll be working with three
of eight images. I'll be talking about this
| | 00:14 | shot here, which is the Brandenburg
Tor in Berlin; this one, which is the
| | 00:18 | very bleak crow in Mumbai, India; and then this
shot of the Chinese junks in Halong Bay, Vietnam.
| | 00:25 | So, going to back to the beginning, this is the
one that gets adjusted the most. We can
| | 00:29 | see right away that it is dramatically
off kilter. I really can't explain why,
| | 00:33 | because I know this was shot on a tripod,
but I guess I just wasn't paying close
| | 00:37 | enough attention. So, clearly this
needs to be straightened, but also we have
| | 00:40 | lot of dead space; a bit at the
top, and a whole lot in the bottom.
| | 00:42 | So, this image is really begging to be cropped
in very wide format, and as you saw, it is
| | 00:47 | going to be for the final image.
| | 00:49 | So, let's start off with the Straightening.
| | 00:51 | Usually you will want to straighten first,
because the act of straightening does crop.
| | 00:54 | So, for example, here I'll grab the
Straighten tool, and let's just, for the sake
| | 00:57 | of argument, say I have to
straighten a whole bunch, like so.
| | 01:00 | You can see the lot of the image gets
cropped through the Straightening process.
| | 01:05 | So, if you take your time first to crop
the image -- let's just say that I decided
| | 01:08 | I want to crop it, like so; let's take of
the constraint. Then, for whatever reason,
| | 01:13 | I want to crop it like, and then I
wanted to straighten it, and adjust it, and
| | 01:17 | suddenly my crop will have changed
from what I originally had set up.
| | 01:21 | So, if you are doing cropping and
straightening, always do your straightening
| | 01:24 | first, and then follow
that with your crop.
| | 01:26 | You can always go back and unstraighten,
if you, for example, find that
| | 01:30 | the straightening and cropping is going
to cut off an important element, and you
| | 01:33 | really need that in, you may be
willing to sacrifice a little bit of
| | 01:37 | straightening; just leave the horizon
just a little bit off kilter to
| | 01:40 | regain that element. Of
course, that's entirely up to you.
| | 01:42 | So, let's revert this back to the
original, I will grab the Straighten tool
| | 01:46 | again, and I'm going to just click
and drag on here to straighten this out.
| | 01:50 | What I am watching for right now is the
line that appears across the traighten
| | 01:53 | grid, and I am going to align that with
the horizon line, or the horizontal line
| | 01:57 | of the building here.
| | 01:58 | So, as I just simply move that into
place, you can see it's quite easy to get
| | 02:02 | that straightened out perfectly level;
let's say right about so.
| | 02:07 | Once that's in place, we're ready to crop.
Now, as soon as I grab the Crop tool,
| | 02:11 | you'll see the entire image, and you'll
see how it has been straightened out.
| | 02:16 | So, again, back to the crop tool off,
we are seeing the straightened image, and
| | 02:21 | it cropped, and as I tap the Crop
tool, even though we don't see a crop
| | 02:25 | actually applied on here, we are seeing the
image in its entirety, and how it's been rotated.
| | 02:30 | So, now if I go ahead and I crop in here,
you'll see that there are edges I can't go past.
| | 02:35 | So, for example if you looking at
this top left corner here, I can't go any
| | 02:39 | farther, because the bottom left
corner is bumping up against the edge
| | 02:42 | here, against the wall.
| | 02:43 | So, there's always going to be a little
bit of limits to how you can crop once
| | 02:48 | you have straightened image.
| | 02:49 | Now, most of the shots in here have
been cropped at the original aspect ratio.
| | 02:52 | These were printed as 20 x 30 inch prints,
and I did want to have a full 20 x 30
| | 02:57 | inch wherever possible. By the way,
these images are all a 2:3 aspect
| | 03:00 | ratio, so a full crop will be a 20x30.
| | 03:03 | However, for this image, obviously
that just wasn't going to work.
| | 03:06 | So, this is one of those where I went
ahead and just said, Do Not Constrain, and
| | 03:10 | cropped it however I felt
it was best for the image.
| | 03:13 | Now, in general, that is what always
recommend, is cropping to whatever works out
| | 03:17 | best for the image, but that said, I
do usually try to crop at the original
| | 03:22 | aspect ratio first before I go
for any non-standard cropping.
| | 03:26 | I can't really explain why; it's
just the way that I like to do things.
| | 03:29 | So, I want to see if I can keep things
as natural as possible to begin with.
| | 03:33 | Anyway, so we're cropping this.
| | 03:34 | Right now, I have just been kind of
dragging around like a buffoon here, but
| | 03:38 | let's go ahead and actually crop it.
| | 03:40 | And what I am going to do here is
start by cropping off the top and bottom.
| | 03:44 | We'll ignore the sides, and the reason
that I am ignoring sides is because -- let's
| | 03:48 | just go the other way; let's say
I stretch this out as far as I can.
| | 03:52 | Now if I want to raise
this any higher, I can't.
| | 03:55 | You see I am hitting a wall here,
because I hit the wall there.
| | 03:57 | So, I'm going to just bring this in so
that I'm not worrying about how high or
| | 04:00 | low I can go here, and then I'll crop
this vertically as I want it to be, and
| | 04:05 | again, of course, you can
always make changes later on.
| | 04:08 | But let's bring the top to where we want
it, and of course, I don't want to go too
| | 04:11 | far down, and obviously
don't want to cut it off.
| | 04:13 | But if I go too close to it, then when
I add the border later, it'll crop in, and
| | 04:17 | if I go to high, then it's just a big
bunch of dead empty space up there.
| | 04:21 | So, let's go for something maybe, say,
right about yay-ish, and then I will take
| | 04:24 | the bottom crop, and adjust that; that's a
little bit less critical, and we'll go
| | 04:28 | ahead and pull in the sides, or
pull them out as far as they go.
| | 04:31 | Now, one of the things that I want to
watch out for here is to ensure that this
| | 04:35 | had a very even balance, or at
least as even as it could possibly be.
| | 04:39 | I don't know that I was 100% dead
center of the Tor here. It looks like I was
| | 04:42 | pretty darn close if we look at the
perspective in between these columns, or
| | 04:46 | between these walls; it looks like I
was pretty even in there, but again, I
| | 04:50 | don't even know if the
sides here are exactly even.
| | 04:53 | So, what I do what to do is just try
and get this as evenly cropped as I can.
| | 04:57 | So, what I am going to doing now is I
am going to look at the vertical lines,
| | 05:00 | and you'll see we have
two vertical lines here.
| | 05:02 | Incidentally, if you're using Aperture, and
you don't see these lines, you can turn
| | 05:04 | off your guides right here; you
can simply toggle this on and off.
| | 05:07 | And what I want to do is make these guides
line up at the same place on the columns.
| | 05:11 | So, I am going to go ahead and zoom
into the full 100% view just by tapping
| | 05:15 | the Z key; that will zoom me in, and
then I can just hold down Spacebar, and pan
| | 05:20 | around, and you can see in here that
the leftmost line is lined up pretty much
| | 05:25 | perfectly the edge of that column, so that's
great. That gives me a nice starting point.
| | 05:29 | Now let's see if it
matches on the other side.
| | 05:31 | So, I'll navigate over to
there, and well, in fact, it does.
| | 05:34 | So, I guess I got a little bit lucky
there. I was able to crop that essentially
| | 05:36 | perfectly, lining up the
way that I wanted to.
| | 05:38 | But if, for example --
let's just zoom out of that.
| | 05:40 | Let's say that I had cropped it like so,
and then I zoomed in, and I panned over,
| | 05:47 | and I find that this is a bit off at the
edge therem and I go over here, and it
| | 05:50 | doesn't match clearly, so here we can
see that there is a line there, and we
| | 05:53 | really want the line to
be in the same place.
| | 05:56 | Then I go back and forth, and just keep
on cropping, making adjustments until I
| | 05:58 | got them evened out.
| | 06:00 | And so, again, going full width on here, I
guess I got a little bit lucky; I have
| | 06:03 | got a perfect line there, and
another prefect line there.
| | 06:05 | So, I am going to call that image Cropped.
| | 06:09 | To be done, I just tap Apply,
and there is the final cropped piece.
| | 06:13 | And if I tap on the M key, we can
toggle back to the original, or the master, to
| | 06:15 | see what it looked like before I cropped it.
| | 06:18 | Let's go to the next image. This one is
of the crow, and this one doesn't really
| | 06:23 | need much cropping. The crow is a
little bit too dead center for my liking, so
| | 06:27 | I just want a kind a cut this in a
little bit. There is no straightening that
| | 06:30 | needs to be done to this image. I
think that you probably could straighten it
| | 06:33 | or adjust it, but obviously there is no
fixed horizon line, there is no locked
| | 06:36 | vertical line here,
| | 06:39 | so there is really nothing to tell
me that this image is straight or not.
| | 06:43 | So, we'll just go ahead and leave it as
it is. Let's go ahead and Revert that, and
| | 06:46 | then I'll grab the Crop tool.
| | 06:47 | So, again, I want to crop in just a bit
on here; maybe something kind of like
| | 06:51 | thereish, and see I don't have my aspect
ratio locked, so i want to go ahead and
| | 06:55 | turn that back onto Original Aspect
Ratio, because as I was saying earlier, I
| | 06:59 | want to try and keep the crop as the
original one if that works, and if doesn't,
| | 07:03 | then I will go ahead and divert from that.
| | 07:07 | So, I am not following any particular
rule; I am just going to crop it about
| | 07:09 | Yay-ish. I think that looks kind of good.
| | 07:11 | I see the barbed wire down here on the
bottom; I could choose to crop a little bit
| | 07:15 | higher. I will often look for leading
lines coming into the corners, which this
| | 07:19 | line here would be a pretty good one.
| | 07:22 | However, I also know that when I give my
black and white conversion, that may get
| | 07:25 | mushed in there and lost,
| | 07:26 | so it would be kind of relevant anyway.
| | 07:29 | I do like this line of barbed wire
that's framing the bottom of that,
| | 07:32 | so I think I would rather keep that than
try to get this corner pushed in perfectly,
| | 07:36 | So we'll just leave it, like so.
| | 07:37 | And then when I crop this corner here,
what I am watching out for is this edge,
| | 07:40 | and how it's hitting the barbed wire.
| | 07:43 | And remember, I'm going to be doing a
black and white conversion with a edge
| | 07:47 | border on it that is
going to eat into the image,
| | 07:49 | so if, let's say, that I cropped it
like so, then I would I have the border
| | 07:53 | eating in, and we'd have maybe half of
these little barbed wire knots that would be
| | 07:57 | sticking out, and that
probably wouldn't look very good.
| | 08:00 | If I go in all the way, like so, so now
we are watching to make sure this one
| | 08:04 | is completely cropped up, or actually
what it could do is even go about like
| | 08:08 | this, knowing that this is going to
get eaten out by the border, that would
| | 08:11 | probably be okay as well.
| | 08:12 | I know that for my final version, what
I actually did was crop it somewhere
| | 08:15 | right around there, and maybe I
should have gone in a little bit farther.
| | 08:19 | Hindsight is always 20/20 on
something like this, but this about how I
| | 08:22 | cropped it on the original one. We
can actually go back and see that here.
| | 08:25 | We can see there is the one how it was
it was cropped, so I guess it was a
| | 08:28 | little tighter. So, I think for the final one,
it was cropped somewhere right around there.
| | 08:33 | So, this is the original image that was
actually converted. Here we haven't done
| | 08:37 | the levels adjustment yet; we will come
to that later, and you see how it was
| | 08:40 | cropped. And so there's the final one
that was scaled; you can see a little bit
| | 08:44 | hanging off on there, but then, of
course, that gets eaten away by the border.
| | 08:48 | So, again, cropping this in, just making
it look a little bit more balanced; a little
| | 08:51 | bit balanced, a little bit
cleaner, and we can apply that.
| | 08:55 | Now, the next one is this shot in Halong Bay.
This one is a little bit trickier.
| | 08:59 | So here, again, we have a not straight
horizon, and this time at least to have
| | 09:03 | a good excuse: I was standing on a
moving boat, so that's why this horizon
| | 09:06 | line isn't perfect.
| | 09:08 | Once again, we'll start with the
Straighten tool; just grab that, and click and
| | 09:10 | drag on there to straighten the image out.
| | 09:12 | Now, as I had pointed out earlier, one
of the things that can happen when you're
| | 09:15 | straightening is you can end up
losing a part of your image.
| | 09:19 | If you were shooting very close to the
edge, very tightly cropped, as I did
| | 09:23 | here, but didn't manage to get
the horizon actually straight on.
| | 09:26 | So, that's something
I have to watch out for.
| | 09:28 | Fortunately, in here, if I am looking at
the horizon lines, I am looking at the
| | 09:32 | water line down here, I can get that
nicely straightened out, and fortunately,
| | 09:35 | I'm not cutting this off.
| | 09:37 | And by the way, if you are using with
using the Lightroom, there is a really
| | 09:39 | nice feature in there where you can
simply click and drag across the line, the
| | 09:42 | horizon line, and it straightens it up
for you perfectly, which is quite clever.
| | 09:45 | So, if you're using Lightroom, look for that
feature if you are not aware of that.
| | 09:48 | I'll go ahead and straighten this out,
right about like so. Looks pretty good.
| | 09:54 | That's nice and straight, and the
edge here is still not cut off.
| | 09:56 | But as I was mentioning in an earlier
video, if I now take this image as it is
| | 10:01 | into my Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 to do my
black and white conversion ,and add the
| | 10:05 | border in there, I am going to end
up cropping a little bit off on there.
| | 10:09 | So, that's just something to be
aware of; something to watch out for.
| | 10:13 | In this case, I will be adding a separate
white border later on to prevent that
| | 10:17 | from cutting in too much.
| | 10:19 | So, that's basically it. If we go
back to the original, or rather, the final,
| | 10:21 | there's what that's going to look like.
So, you can see it's straightened, and we
| | 10:25 | do not have the edge, or the tip
that cut off like I did in my sample in
| | 10:29 | earlier test image.
| | 10:31 | So, again, in this case, it's just a
simple straighten. No cropping required on
| | 10:34 | this particular image.
| | 10:36 | If you wanted to, of course, you could.
Let's go ahead and grab the cropping tool,
| | 10:40 | and let's see what would happen in here.
| | 10:43 | So, if I crop this out like so, I could
do that, but I don't really want to end
| | 10:46 | up cropping out any of this
extra boat piece on in here.
| | 10:49 | And by the way, I want to give you
another little Aperture tip, if you're an
| | 10:52 | Aperture user. If you're not using
Aperture, this won't be relevant to you, but
| | 10:55 | for the Aperture users out there, when you
grab the Crop tool -- let's go ahead and reset this.
| | 11:00 | When you first grab the Crop tool, and
start dragging, you'll hit the edge of
| | 11:04 | where you can reach, right, as I
explained earlier, and as I drag this up here,
| | 11:09 | you notice I can't go any farther. You might
be thinking, well, I should be able go farther,
| | 11:12 | and you would be right.
| | 11:14 | Well, if I grab the whole thing, and you
see that I can. There's this kind of
| | 11:16 | odd thing in Aperture where you have to
figure out exactly where to position the
| | 11:19 | crop box to get it as big as you can.
| | 11:21 | Well, there's good news about this; if
you're using a touchpad -- and I am going to
| | 11:26 | switch over to my touchpad now --
| | 11:29 | now I can drag this around. It
doesn't matter where I put it.
| | 11:31 | Let's go ahead and even stick it
way up in the corner, nice and small,
| | 11:34 | and now what I am going to do to expand
the crop is, instead of grabbing on the
| | 11:37 | corner here, I am going to pinch out.
| | 11:40 | So, I am using the pinch command, or the
pinch gesture on my track pad, and just
| | 11:43 | pinching out, and even though it wasn't
centered to begin with -- so, let's go ahead
| | 11:47 | and bring that back down, just to another
corner -- as I pinch out, it expands to
| | 11:51 | fill the entire space.
| | 11:53 | So, if you have a touchpad, if you're
on a Mac Book Pro, or if you have touchpad
| | 11:58 | with your desktop machine, then you'll
find that is a really nice little tip in
| | 12:01 | there to just expand that crop out.
| | 12:04 | And then you can go back to whatever
you are doing. I'm actually using a pen
| | 12:06 | right now. I like you using pen for a
lot of this work, and from there, I can go
| | 12:08 | ahead and adjust it as needed.
| | 12:11 | But in this case, I
am not going to adjust it.
| | 12:13 | This is the maximum crop; that is
the same as it not being cropped, if I
| | 12:16 | just turn off the crop --
| | 12:18 | let's reset that, and close it -- you'll
see that the image is cropped that way, and
| | 12:22 | that, of course, is cropped
slightly, because of the straighten.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Level balancing| 00:01 | The next step is to ensure that the
image is properly exposure adjusted, meaning
| | 00:06 | that if we look at the histogram here,
that we have a full range histogram;
| | 00:10 | that we are not losing detail in the
blacks, or in the whites, and again, that
| | 00:14 | we have full data range, at
least where it is appropriate.
| | 00:17 | So, if should have highlights, we want to
make sure that our histogram is reaching
| | 00:20 | into the highlights, and the
same thing with the shadows.
| | 00:23 | For this particular shot, it's, first of
all, clearly underexposed. It's quite a bit
| | 00:26 | dark, and if you look at the histogram
you will see that the shadows are being
| | 00:30 | crunched up over here, and we will
take a look in just a moment exactly what
| | 00:34 | part of the image is this.
| | 00:36 | We can also see by looking at the right
side of the histogram, while there are
| | 00:40 | clearly no blown out details, there
is nothing in the top, say, third or
| | 00:43 | quarter of the histogram here.
| | 00:45 | This mean there is absolutely no data.
| | 00:46 | Now, if this was a bright sunny day, that
would be a real problem; this would to
| | 00:48 | be an extremely underexposed image.
But the truth is, this is a really dismal
| | 00:52 | and gray day; the sky was very, very
flat and gray, and so we can expect to
| | 00:55 | not see a full range here within the histogram,
but we can certainly do better than this.
| | 01:03 | And as you will see in a little bit, we
are going to actually overexpose the sky
| | 01:06 | for very, very good reason.
| | 01:08 | Let's just go ahead and
start with what we have got.
| | 01:10 | The first step is to get rid of this
black point here. Now, what is it we're
| | 01:13 | actually looking at? What is peaking?
| | 01:14 | In Aperture, the easiest way to do that
is go to the View menu, and then enable
| | 01:21 | a Highlight Hot and Cold areas.
You'll see that the keyboard shortcut on my
| | 01:25 | system may be different than yours,
because I've remapped mine to use the letter Q.
| | 01:29 | I toggle this on and off all day
long, and the default shortcut is three
| | 01:32 | different keys, and frankly, that just
seems a bit tedious to me, so I changed it
| | 01:36 | to Q. So, by tapping the Q key on the
keyboard, I can toggle that highlight Hot
| | 01:41 | and Cold Areas on and off.
| | 01:42 | What we're seeing here in blue is
anything that is denoted as cold or clipped in
| | 01:46 | the black; so far, far too dark.
| | 01:48 | We're going to lose all detail in there.
| | 01:50 | Now, because it was shot this way, we
may not be able get a whole lot of detail
| | 01:54 | out of that. However, it is a RAW file,
so there will be some detail in there
| | 01:57 | that we can pull out.
| | 01:58 | So, how do we go about fixing that?
| | 02:00 | The first inclination might be
simply to increase the exposure.
| | 02:02 | We'll open the Exposure controls; you
see we have Exposure, Recovery, Black
| | 02:07 | Point, and Brightness, and I'll just take
Exposure, and start dragging that to the right.
| | 02:09 | And as you'll see, as I do that, the
image, of course, gets brighter, and if you
| | 02:11 | look up at the histogram, you'll see
that we've stretched this out quite nicely,
| | 02:14 | so now our big peak of
white sky is almost white.
| | 02:17 | However, we haven't eventually done
anything for the black point. Our crushed
| | 02:21 | blacks, or lost blacks are still there,
so that's not really appropriate.
| | 02:23 | So, simply raising the Exposure isn't
going to do it. We will probably come back
| | 02:27 | and do this later, but the first we
need to do is fix this black point,
| | 02:31 | so let's just reset that.
| | 02:33 | Let's take a look at a couple other
ways that you can't do this before we come
| | 02:36 | back to the right way to do it.
| | 02:37 | I'll go up to the
Adjustments, and add Levels next.
| | 02:40 | Levels is a pretty common way to
adjust a image, and if we are looking to do
| | 02:43 | just in general overall exposure
enhancement here, it could be very easy to
| | 02:47 | simply take the white point, drag it to
the bottom of the histogram here, and it
| | 02:51 | results in a overall very
nicely exposed photograph.
| | 02:55 | However, as you can see, we still
haven't solved the problem of the clipped
| | 02:58 | black, so basically we haven't done a
whole lot different than what we did
| | 03:00 | up here with Exposure.
| | 03:02 | I can lift the black floor, so here
you can see that I can crush them even
| | 03:06 | more, but I can't go negative, or backwards;
I can't take this black point, and
| | 03:08 | move it other direction.
| | 03:11 | So, Levels isn't going to do it for me,
so let's just go ahead and get rid of that.
| | 03:13 | Let's take a look at Curves next.
| | 03:16 | Curves is the one that I prefer for
almost all of my exposure work. I love
| | 03:19 | working in Curves, because it
gives me some incredible control.
| | 03:22 | However, as you'll see here, I do have
the same problem that I have with Levels.
| | 03:26 | I could simply collapse the histogram,
there to stretch that data out. I could
| | 03:30 | then increase or decrease the gamma
or the adjustments in here; increase or
| | 03:34 | decrease the shadows, and highlights,
but I'm still not going to be able to
| | 03:37 | recover this clipped out
dark shadow area.
| | 03:40 | So, once again, this is still
not quite the right tool to use.
| | 03:45 | So, let's go ahead and resettle that
again, and go back up to Exposure, and the
| | 03:47 | one that we want to use is
this one called Black Point.
| | 03:49 | Black Point is going to lift or raise the
floor, and that's the floor where the black hits.
| | 03:55 | So, if we raise this, you'll see that
just like with adjusting the Levels in
| | 03:58 | black, or the Curves in the black point,
we can clip off more blacks. Here, we can
| | 04:02 | actually go the other direction, and
so we can bring this down, down, down,
| | 04:05 | until we no longer have
any clipped blacks in there.
| | 04:09 | Now, when we're doing this, you're going
to want to zoom in close, because as you
| | 04:12 | can see here, it looks like I have a
just a couple of points, but if I tap the Z
| | 04:15 | key, and zoom in close, as soon as it
loads, you'll see there might be a little
| | 04:18 | bit more lost data than you realized.
| | 04:20 | So, it's important to zoom
in when you're doing this.
| | 04:22 | However, it's also important to
realize that even though we're clipping
| | 04:24 | this out, these little pixels here
are just going to go straight to black,
| | 04:27 | it's probably okay.
| | 04:29 | It's okay to have some of your image
that's completely black with no detail in it;
| | 04:32 | those are going to be seen as
really rich, deep, dark shadows.
| | 04:35 | Clearly, if that part of the image
shouldn't have that, then you're going to
| | 04:39 | want to raise this up, but if we watch
this, if I raise this a little bit too
| | 04:42 | much, you'll see that all we end up
with is very muddy looking area in here.
| | 04:47 | We no longer have the nice, rich,
deep shadows we had, and we've basically
| | 04:50 | tried to force light into an area where
it wasn't. Let's keep in mind that this
| | 04:53 | is a dark crow on a dark day; this is
an underside of the wing, so really we
| | 04:58 | shouldn't expect to see a
whole lot of detail in there.
| | 05:00 | So, I'll go ahead and bring the Black
Point back up. I am going to let it crush
| | 05:03 | out just a little bit, and if we zoom
back out, and I'll go ahead and toggle off
| | 05:07 | my Highlight Hot and Cold by tapping a
Q key, you'll see that the Black Point
| | 05:11 | has been appropriately lowered.
| | 05:14 | So, now we can go back to adjusting
our exposure, so we can get it either
| | 05:17 | with the Exposure slider, or my preferred way --
I'll just double tap that to reset that --
| | 05:21 | is to use the Curves.
| | 05:24 | And the reason that I like using
Curves is because I have a little bit
| | 05:27 | more control over what part of the
image is going to be stretched out to
| | 05:30 | fill in those midtones.
| | 05:34 | So, for example here, let's go ahead
and turn this on; I can take the darkest
| | 05:37 | shadows, and raise those up first, and
that's going to raise the darkest shadows
| | 05:40 | up. Or if I reset that, I can grab
midtones shadows, and pull those up.
| | 05:43 | In fact, what I can do with Curves
is really change things around by, for
| | 05:45 | example, taking the darkest shadows, and
making them darker, and the midtones, and
| | 05:48 | making them brighter.
| | 05:50 | On this image, this doesn't really
work, but just to show you have a lot of
| | 05:53 | control with curves, and
how the exposure is adjusted.
| | 05:56 | In this case, I think what I want to do
is simply raise up the darker shadows
| | 05:58 | just a bit, like so, and
let's say right about there.
| | 06:03 | The next part I want to
focus on is the background.
| | 06:06 | Now, as I said before, this was a very
dark and gray day, so I don't actually
| | 06:10 | want this to be pure white, and of course,
I am not going to get a blue sky out of it,
| | 06:13 | but if I made this pure white, then
it'd be very bright, and shiny, and in your
| | 06:17 | face, and that's probably
not exactly what I want.
| | 06:20 | However, it's important to think
about the final product. In this case, I'm
| | 06:24 | preparing this file to be
printed on metal, the metal is gray.
| | 06:28 | So, if I have something that's pure
white on the photograph, it's going to
| | 06:31 | come out as a light gray in the
final picture, and in this case, that's
| | 06:35 | actually what I want.
| | 06:36 | I don't want to be laying extra gray
pixels on top of that sky. Maybe a
| | 06:39 | little bit, but certainly not as
much as I would if I printed it here.
| | 06:42 | Now, I could continue to raise the Levels
here, and adjust brightness even more to
| | 06:45 | get this pure white, as we
can see now in the histogram.
| | 06:48 | However, in this case, it's doing a
little bit too much brightening to the
| | 06:52 | overall bird here.
| | 06:54 | I could probably find a
happy medium in there.
| | 06:56 | However, instead, what I am going to
do is go back to where I was, so now
| | 06:58 | looking at this, you will see that
we have a brighter area than we did.
| | 07:02 | If I turn off the Curves, it
goes back to where we started.
| | 07:05 | However, I've not made this pure white.
The reason I'm not doing this yet is
| | 07:09 | because I know that I am going to be taking
this into Silver Efex Pro as one of my next steps,
| | 07:13 | and when I do that, I'll be able to add U
points, or control points onto the image
| | 07:17 | to brighten the sky independently
from the rest of the bird here.
| | 07:20 | So, in this case, I'm going to go
ahead and leave it, kind of splitting the
| | 07:22 | difference, doing some of the brightening
here to the RAW file, and then I'll do
| | 07:25 | the rest of the brightening later on.
| | 07:28 | The next sample is a lot easier. I'll
go and close this out, and open this one
| | 07:31 | here. Here is a picture of the St.
| | 07:34 | Louis Arch, and as you can see, we
don't have any really dark shadows in here.
| | 07:37 | If you look at the histogram, you'll see that
there is absolutely nothing in the darkest areas.
| | 07:41 | It's exposed nicely to the right, so
we have our highlights, our hottest points
| | 07:45 | being the clouds up here, nicely
exposed in here; there's no peaking, no
| | 07:48 | clipping, so that's great.
| | 07:50 | But I do want to have a little bit more
shadow detail in here. For me, the Curves
| | 07:53 | is going to be best way to handle this.
| | 07:55 | I'll go ahead and add Curves to this,
and this time, instead of raising the
| | 08:00 | Curves like I did with the bird,
I'm going to go ahead and bring the
| | 08:02 | shadows down a bit.
| | 08:04 | Now, while I'm doing this, I'm watching
the histogram, and watching the image
| | 08:08 | itself, and of course, if you're going
to go too strong on here, you may want to
| | 08:11 | go ahead and enable
the hot and cold areas.
| | 08:13 | But in this case, I know I am not going
to go super dark in that, so I am just
| | 08:15 | not going to bother.
| | 08:17 | I'll go ahead and leave that off.
| | 08:19 | I'll still be able to see what's
happening by looking at the histogram here.
| | 08:22 | I'll go ahead and bring the shadows
down a bit, which adds some nice depth
| | 08:24 | and dimension into this side of the
arch, and I am also going to take the
| | 08:29 | highlights, and raise them up,
going the opposite direction.
| | 08:32 | What I am creating here is called an S
Curve. By drawing a simple S-shape on the
| | 08:34 | curve here on the Curves tool,
| | 08:37 | I can easily take my shadows down,
and my highlights up, adding a lot of
| | 08:40 | contrast, and depth, and dimension to the file,
and making it overall a lot more interesting.
| | 08:44 | If I go ahead and turn off Curves,
you'll see the flatter file that we had, and
| | 08:48 | by turning that back on,
you'll see the end result.
| | 08:50 | Now from here, it might be a good time
to go ahead and turn on Highlight Hot and
| | 08:53 | Cold Areas, and as you can see, we've
peaked out just a tiny bit of clouds up
| | 08:56 | there, but it's so small, I am
really not going to worry about that.
| | 09:00 | So, now what I have is a file that has
a lot more depth, and a lot more contrast
| | 09:03 | to it, and we'll be much better
prepped to go off to the next level.
| | 09:06 | Now, it is true that you could do a lot
of this work in Silver Efex Pro; however,
| | 09:09 | once we move off to that level, we're
going to be working with a TIFF file.
| | 09:12 | I would rather do as much of the
contrast, and exposure adjustments, and basic
| | 09:15 | histogram stretching while I am
working with the RAW file as I can.
| | 09:19 | There'll always be a little more tweaking
as we go, but by doing the majority of
| | 09:22 | that work now, it'll give me the best
data to work with in the subsequent steps.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Retouching: Sensor spots| 00:01 | At some point in your editing
process, you'll need to retouch your image.
| | 00:05 | Personally, I find that retouching before
you do your scaling and black and white
| | 00:09 | conversion is the best way to go.
| | 00:11 | There are, of course, no hard and
fast rules on this, and you can do your
| | 00:15 | retouching at any stage, but again, in my
book, it's best to do it as early as possible.
| | 00:19 | That doesn't mean that you can't retouch
things later on. You may, of course, find
| | 00:23 | additional errors or problems that
you want to fix after you've done your
| | 00:26 | conversion, and that's fine, but if you
can get most of it out of the way early,
| | 00:31 | then all the better.
| | 00:32 | So, we're going to start
off with this image here.
| | 00:34 | If I just tap on the M key here in
Aperture, we'll toggle back to the original
| | 00:39 | and you'll see the before and after,
so this is where we started, and this is
| | 00:40 | the image in its current state,
slightly straightened, slightly cropped, and
| | 00:44 | with a little bit of exposure or curves
adjustment applied to it. We haven't
| | 00:47 | yet done any retouching.
| | 00:50 | And the thing is, if I zoom in quite
close to this image, which of course, you
| | 00:53 | need to do in your retouching -- go ahead
and zoom into 100% -- and I start panning
| | 00:56 | around, there really doesn't appear to
be very much that needs to be done this.
| | 01:00 | It probably is going to be pretty
hard to find any sensor spots, or anything
| | 01:03 | else on here, because the image is
quite clean to begin with, but the truth is
| | 01:07 | that pretty much every shot, if you
look hard enough, you'll to find something
| | 01:11 | that needs to be fixed.
| | 01:12 | So, so far panning around in here, I'm
not actually seeing any blatant sensor
| | 01:16 | spots, or anything else
that needs to be touched out.
| | 01:18 | So, at this point, I might
think, well, we are ready to go.
| | 01:21 | But there are a couple of ways that
you can find sensor spots that might
| | 01:24 | otherwise remain relatively hidden.
| | 01:28 | The first thing I'm going to do is
open up Curves on here, and it looks like I
| | 01:31 | have already applied curves.
| | 01:32 | I want to apply new one, so I can discard
it later, and I'll just choose to add
| | 01:35 | new curves adjustment.
| | 01:37 | Of course, if you're in Photoshop you
can just add another curves adjustment
| | 01:40 | layer on top of your image.
| | 01:42 | And what I'll do here is do some pretty
extreme curves, just in the hope of
| | 01:46 | finding any sensor spots.
| | 01:48 | What I've found is, if you increase the
contrast dramatically -- and I'm really going
| | 01:50 | to focus on the sky in here, because
any sensor spots that show up over this
| | 01:53 | cement are probably going to blend in
pretty well, so I'm not going to really
| | 01:56 | look too hard for spots in here, but
the sky will reveal them quite quickly.
| | 02:01 | So, if I really increase the
contrast, you see I'm darkening the image
| | 02:04 | dramatically in there,
and then I zoom in.
| | 02:06 | In fact, if you look right up here,
you'll see one that just kind of starts to
| | 02:10 | appear as I pull that out. See that little
spot in there? At least it looks like a
| | 02:13 | spot. We need to zoom in closely to be
sure, and again, you do have to go in at
| | 02:17 | 100% to really make sure you're
finding what you're looking for.
| | 02:20 | So, let's zoom in, and sure enough, that is
a sensor spot. So, that's a spot that we
| | 02:25 | didn't notice before. Let me turn off
this curves adjustment, and well, you can
| | 02:29 | see it, but you know, you can't
be blamed for missing that one.
| | 02:32 | That's a pretty hard spot to see right
there. So, let's turn that Curves back on,
| | 02:35 | and now I'm going to go
ahead and retouch it.
| | 02:37 | Now, here is the really cool thing about
doing this type of retouching in Aperture.
| | 02:41 | If I grab my Retouch brush, and let's
go ahead and size this over the spot, so
| | 02:45 | I'm going to put the dotted lines
right over the spot. That's going to be the
| | 02:48 | concentrated area of it, and then we
will feather out to the solid line.
| | 02:51 | I'll just tap, and it's going
to go ahead and heal that.
| | 02:54 | Now, here is the thing; the retouching
has been applied to the image with this
| | 02:58 | current super extreme curves adjustment
applied to it, so you might think that
| | 03:00 | if I turned off this curves, then
what we would end up with is a very dark
| | 03:04 | healed spot area there, but
that's not the way that Aperture works.
| | 03:07 | Aperture concatenates or renders
through all of the different adjustments in
| | 03:11 | real-time, so if I turn something off
or even remove it entirely, everything
| | 03:20 | their current existing state or color.
| | 03:23 | So, this curves adjustment that
was there is no longer being used.
| | 03:26 | gets re-rendered, and that spot is now
repaired based off the surrounding pixels at
| | 03:26 | If I turn it back on, of course, it'll
be re-rendered, and the spot retouching
| | 03:29 | goes back to the way it was done before.
| | 03:32 | Let's go ahead and look
for some more like this.
| | 03:35 | I see a tiny one here; that might not
really be a spot, but we'll just fix it
| | 03:38 | anyway, and let's keep panning
around and looking for a few more.
| | 03:44 | There's a pretty big one there, actually.
Go ahead and make this spot circle a
| | 03:47 | little bigger, touch on that, and that's
good, and we'll keep on panning around.
| | 03:52 | So, basically by going into your Levels
and Curves, and drawing some pretty dramatic
| | 03:56 | adjustments onto the image, chances are,
you're going to find all kinds of spots
| | 04:00 | that you would have missed otherwise.
| | 04:01 | Now, this works pretty good, but you
may find even from here that once you
| | 04:05 | jump into your black and white
conversion in Silver Efex Pro 2 that even more
| | 04:09 | spots are revealed.
| | 04:10 | So, what I'm going to do next is, instead
of just trying to complete the job here
| | 04:14 | with the Curves, I'll go ahead and get
rid of these curves -- in fact, I'll just
| | 04:18 | select it, and tap the Delete key to
remove entirely. -- I'm going to now send this
| | 04:22 | image off to Nik Silver Efex Pro 2
and do some adjustments in there.
| | 04:24 | Now, these adjustments that I'm
about to do are not meant to be final
| | 04:27 | adjustments at all.
| | 04:29 | In fact, I'm not even thinking
about the black and white conversion.
| | 04:31 | In fact, in fact, if you were going to
be taking your picture into any other
| | 04:35 | filter, any other plug-in, or really
just doing any other work with it all, and
| | 04:38 | not going to black andwhite in the
first place, you could still go into
| | 04:42 | Silver Efex Pro 2 to help you find
those spots. As you're about to find out,
| | 04:46 | Silver Efex Pro is a great tool
for isolating and locating the spots,
| | 04:50 | and what I'm going to show you is how
you can use this tool to find them, and
| | 04:53 | then go back into Aperture, retouch
them, and apply those retouching back to
| | 04:56 | the original image.
| | 04:58 | So, the trick in Silver Efex Pro is
Structure. I'm going to take the structure
| | 05:02 | all the way up on here, and I'm actually
going to take the structure of the
| | 05:05 | Highlights, and the Midtones, and the Shadows,
and the Fine Structure, all the way up.
| | 05:11 | As you can see, this image has gotten
really sharp and crunchy, and in some
| | 05:15 | regards, it's actually kind of cool,
but it's definitely way overdone, but
| | 05:18 | that doesn't matter.
| | 05:19 | What matters to me right now is that
what I'll have just done is show any other
| | 05:23 | hidden spots that are hiding out in
these clouds up here, and of course, you can
| | 05:26 | look through the rest of the image as
well, but as I said earlier, for this
| | 05:29 | particular photo, I'm probably not
going to worry about it too much, for any
| | 05:32 | spots that might show up over the cement here.
| | 05:35 | So, let's go ahead and zoom into the
image. I'll go in to a 100% on here, and
| | 05:41 | I'm going to use the navigator up here
in the corner to navigate around. And
| | 05:43 | also, within Silver Efex Pro, if you
tap on the Tab button on your keyboard,
| | 05:46 | it'll hide the rest of the controls
here, so you can have a little bit more
| | 05:47 | space to work with.
| | 05:49 | Now, right away, I see another spot. There
is one here, there is one up there, and
| | 05:54 | if I keep on dragging around,
chances are I'll find some more as well.
| | 05:54 | the retouching in here.
| | 05:58 | Let's see, we'll keep on going through
here, and looks like it did a pretty good
| | 06:01 | job of finding them in here. So far
we've have seen at least two. Oh, there is
| | 06:05 | another one.
There is a big one right there.
| | 06:09 | So, as you can see, there's quite a
number of spots in here that we have revealed
| | 06:11 | using this technique that we missed
earlier by simply using the curves.
| | 06:13 | Now, you don't have to use the curves.
Of course, you can come straight into
| | 06:15 | Silver Efex Pro and do this, and
you'll find even more spots that way.
| | 06:19 | It's really up to you, but I find that
doing in multiple methods will pretty
| | 06:23 | much guarantee that you're going to
find any spots that are hiding in there.
| | 06:26 | Now, one thing to watch out for:
notice these hotspots in the clouds are
| | 06:28 | completely blown out, so if there are
any spots in there, chances are, I might
| | 06:32 | miss them, so what I'm going to do is
bring my controls back again, tapping my
| | 06:36 | Tab key, and I'll actually takes the
contrast down a little bit, just to kind of
| | 06:40 | darken those whites a bit in there;
see if I can find anything else, just to
| | 06:44 | make sure I'm not missing any
spots that are hiding out in there.
| | 06:46 | Okay, so what we have done so far in
here is identified the simple fact that
| | 06:50 | there are a bunch of spots. We know
where they are, but of course, I can't do
| | 06:55 | So, what I need to do is actually render
this back to Aperture, so I'll go ahead
| | 06:58 | and clean on Save, and let this render
out, and the way Aperture works is we'll
| | 07:02 | have created a whole new
version of this photo.
| | 07:04 | If you look back at the thumbnails,
you'll see here's the one we just created,
| | 07:08 | and here's the image that we sent to
Silver Efex Pro 2. So, there is one that
| | 07:12 | already has my retouching. You can
see that over here, here's my four strokes
| | 07:15 | of retouching that were applied
before sending it off to SEP 2.
| | 07:19 | Now that we're here, though, we have all
these other retouches that we need to correct.
| | 07:22 | Now, here's the thing; what I'm going to
do is add some retouching to this image,
| | 07:27 | and then lift the retouching off of this
image, and stamp it onto this one here,
| | 07:31 | but you need to be careful here.
| | 07:34 | If you'd already applied retouching
onto this image, you can't just create them
| | 07:38 | here, lift them, and stamp them onto
here, because what that will do is remove
| | 07:41 | the retouching you've already done.
| | 07:43 | Let me show what I mean.
| | 07:47 | Let me just go into this one, and we'll
zoom in here; we'll find one of these spots.
| | 07:49 | Let's see here; there's a good one.
I'll tap the X key to bring up the
| | 07:52 | Retouching brush. Looks about the right
size. I'll go ahead and tab on that, and
| | 07:56 | it does my retouching. Great!
| | 07:57 | Now if I close this out, you'll see
that I've add a retouching, and there's
| | 08:00 | one stroke on here.
| | 08:03 | Now remember, the image before already had four
strokes applied to it. Let's go back over here.
| | 08:08 | I'm going to go ahead and lift the
adjustments, so here is the Lift button, just
| | 08:11 | tap on that, and you can see it's
lifts all the metadata. Everything else is
| | 08:13 | turned off, and all I'm seeing is the
adjustments on here with retouch, and that's
| | 08:16 | great. There's my one stroke, and then I
go to the other image the old one, and now
| | 08:20 | what I'm going to do is
stamp this in here.
| | 08:25 | However -- pay attention over here --
notice it says Retouching 4 Strokes. If I
| | 08:28 | click on Stamp Selected Images,
| | 08:30 | it retouches it with just the one stroke.
| | 08:33 | So, it has now replaced the old
retouching, which is exactly what I didn't want
| | 08:37 | to do, so let's just undo that.
| | 08:39 | Now, what I have to do instead is
start with this image; start with the one
| | 08:43 | where I've already applied retouching, lift
that, go to the new one, and stamp this in place.
| | 08:48 | Now, be careful; the only thing you want
to stamp in the Retouch. The Straighten,
| | 08:52 | Crop, Exposure, and Curves I don't want,
because those have already been applied,
| | 08:55 | so I'm just going to go ahead and tap
the Delete key while those are selected,
| | 08:58 | and those are now removed.
| | 09:00 | Now I can go ahead and add the
Retouch for the 4 Strokes onto this image.
| | 09:03 | Remember, it doesn't need it, and we're
not actually retouching this image anyway;
| | 09:07 | we don't care about this image.
| | 09:09 | This one is going to get thrown away,
but this way I'm retaining the stroke
| | 09:12 | work, the retouching work
that I have already done.
| | 09:14 | So, let's go ahead and stamp this in,
and when I do, you'll see that last spot
| | 09:17 | that we just fixed come back, because
I have now replaced the retouching with
| | 09:20 | this old retouching, so
now I can add on to this one.
| | 09:23 | So, let's go ahead and grab the
retouching brush again, bring that back up, and
| | 09:28 | now I can go in here,
and start adding to it.
| | 09:31 | So, as I click on here to add that
retouch stroke in, you'll see that the
| | 09:34 | Retouching Stroke count has gone up to 5,
so now I know that I've added that one
| | 09:37 | into there. So, now I can go ahead
and continue doing our retouching.
| | 09:40 | So, here is a spot here; let's go
ahead and get rid of that one. Make this
| | 09:42 | a little smaller, click on there,
pretty good; pan around a bit more. I know
| | 09:46 | there's couple more in here somewhere.
See if you can find them, retouch those,
| | 09:51 | and then drop them back
onto the original image.
| | 09:55 | Here's another one here that we'll go
ahead and get rid off, and we'll call that
| | 09:57 | good enough for now.
| | 09:59 | So, as you can see, I have added a few
more strokes onto here. We went from 4 up
| | 10:02 | to 7, and now I can go ahead and lift
and stamp the strokes from this image, our
| | 10:06 | temporary image, and put them back on
to the real one. So, let's go ahead and
| | 10:10 | lift this. We'll just close up the
retouching first, click in the Lift button,
| | 10:14 | you can see it's lifted the retouching,
go back to the original image, and
| | 10:18 | we're going to stamp this in.
| | 10:20 | Do make sure that you have Add selected
here. If you choose Replace, it's going
| | 10:23 | to replace all the rest of the
adjustments that you have in place here, so we'll
| | 10:25 | simply select Add, and Stamp Selected
Images, and as you can see, our Retouch
| | 10:29 | count went from 4 to 7.
| | 10:32 | Now we're ready to take this
image off to the next level.
| | 10:35 | We've done a pretty good job
retouching this, and again, if you find some
| | 10:38 | more flaws later on, you can still
correct them, but getting rid of as many
| | 10:41 | of the flaws you can early in the game
is going to make the final image that
| | 10:44 | much better.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Retouching: Stuck pixels, noise, and more| 00:02 | In the previous video, we looked at
finding and eliminating sensor spots.
| | 00:06 | In this, we'll look at something
that's a little bit more common:
| | 00:08 | things like stuck pixels, and just general
dust or spots that may show up in your photos.
| | 00:13 | We're going to start with this
photo here of the Brandenburg Tor.
| | 00:16 | If you look at the background, it's
clearly shot at night, and ultimately I'm
| | 00:20 | going to want the sky to be pure black.
| | 00:22 | I'm not going to want
anything to show up in there.
| | 00:25 | And looking at it right
now, it looks pretty good.
| | 00:27 | It doesn't look like there's any spots
in there, but the thing is, you have to
| | 00:31 | make sure that you zoom in at 100%,
and pan throughout the image looking for
| | 00:35 | any spots that might be hiding.
| | 00:37 | If a spot is only one of two pixels wide,
as you zoom out, chances are, that pixel
| | 00:41 | will now be drawn, and so you
may completely miss the spot.
| | 00:44 | So, let's just go ahead and zoom in. In
Aperture, tap on the Z key to go to a 100%,
| | 00:49 | and then I'll start panning around in here.
| | 00:51 | This is still looking pretty good until I
find this one green spot over here on the right.
| | 00:55 | So, let's zoom in even closer to this,
just Command+plus or minus zoom in and out.
| | 00:59 | As you can see, this is a pretty
small spot, but it's a nasty one; it's one
| | 01:05 | that we definitely want to get rid of.
| | 01:07 | So, in this case, I'll just grab my
retouching tool, make a very small brush; you
| | 01:11 | can here that I can make the brush
just the size of the spot itself, and just
| | 01:17 | click on that to make it go away.
| | 01:19 | In cleaning up sensor spots like this, it
can actually be a bit easy carried away.
| | 01:23 | Let's pan over here to this close up at
the top of the tower, and if I zoom back
| | 01:28 | in just a little bit again, you'll
notice that there are a few slight red spots
| | 01:33 | hanging out around here.
| | 01:35 | This is really just digital noise, and there's
couple of things we could do to get rid of it.
| | 01:39 | The most common idea might be to
use a simple noise reduction filter,
| | 01:43 | but I really don't like using
reduction unless I absolutely have to.
| | 01:46 | I find that it tends do nasty things
to the rest of the image. While it may do a
| | 01:50 | great job of getting rid of the noise
here, overall, the result may detract form
| | 01:54 | other parts of the image.
| | 01:56 | So, if I can avoid it,
I'd rather not use one.
| | 01:58 | In a situation like this, it might be
easier to just go in and manually retouch
| | 02:02 | some of the bigger offenders. So, for
example, there's a spot there we'll get rid
| | 02:06 | of, and how about that one in
there, maybe over here, and so on.
| | 02:09 | Now, keep in mind, if you look closely,
you're going to find hundreds, maybe even
| | 02:14 | thousands of these spots, and you
probably don't want to spend all day looking
| | 02:18 | for spots, and retouching them by hand.
| | 02:20 | It really just comes down to the image
that you're working with, and what your
| | 02:24 | final expectation is. Because this file's
going to be printed with a solid black background,
| | 02:27 | I know that when I take this into
Silver Effects Pro 2 to turn it into black
| | 02:32 | and white, I can take that background,
and ensure that it is absolutely
| | 02:35 | positively pure black, and that any
spots that might have been hiding out in
| | 02:38 | their get eliminated.
| | 02:40 | If you find that you do need to use
noise reduction, just take care that you
| | 02:44 | don't too much damage
to the rest of the image.
| | 02:46 | It's also worth considering that if
you are planning to convert to black and
| | 02:49 | white, as we're in this series, any
digital noise that's hiding out in
| | 02:53 | their may simply look like grain,
| | 02:54 | and in this situation, I'll actually be
adding a little bit of digital grain into
| | 02:58 | the image for the final
black and white print,
| | 03:00 | so any noise that was hiding in
there will be completely covered any way.
| | 03:04 | So, in this case, I'm really
not going to worry about it.
| | 03:07 | But let's take a look at one more
image where we also have a small
| | 03:11 | problem hiding in there.
| | 03:13 | Once again, on this shot, the sky looks
nice and white, and the boat over here
| | 03:17 | looks nice and dark, and I don't
see any spots hiding in there.
| | 03:20 | But once again, just like with the
previous shot, you have to zoom in to a 100%,
| | 03:24 | and by doing so, you'll spot things
like this tiny little red spot here. Again,
| | 03:28 | probably from a stuck pixel.
| | 03:30 | So, I'll just bring up my retouching by
tapping X, and just tap right on that dot.
| | 03:36 | Just don't forget to pan around the
rest of the image looking for any other
| | 03:39 | spots that might be hiding in there.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding a border (if needed)| 00:02 | This video is all about adding a
border to your image before you send it off
| | 00:06 | to Silver Efex Pro 2.
| | 00:07 | This video is actually
quite a bit complicated,
| | 00:10 | and you might be thinking, well, how complicated
can it possibly be adding a border to an image?
| | 00:14 | As you'll see in a few moments, while it
seems simple, to get it exactly right,
| | 00:18 | you'll have to do a little bit of
math, and a little bit of calculations to
| | 00:22 | figure out just what size border put on.
| | 00:24 | First, let's talk about why we
have to do this in the first place.
| | 00:26 | This is the image you'll be working
with, and you might recall this image from
| | 00:28 | earlier discussions, where we have this
front of the boat that's very close to
| | 00:31 | the top of the frame here and we're quite
concern with not clipping off the tip of that boat.
| | 00:36 | You may also recall when I talked
about the final images that it talked about
| | 00:40 | a border that was added around every single
photograph that went into the gallery hanging.
| | 00:43 | Now, as you notice if we go back to this
original shot, since the tip of the boat
| | 00:48 | is so close to the edge,
| | 00:50 | if I don't add a border on before I
send it to Silver Efex Pro 2, I won't be
| | 00:54 | able to get a result like this. In fact, what
will happen is I'll have something more like this.
| | 00:58 | So let's take a look at what I am
talking about by just jumping into Silver
| | 01:00 | Efex Pro very quickly just to show what would
happen if I try to add a border to this image.
| | 01:07 | Borders are added over here on the
bottom under Finishing Adjustments, and
| | 01:12 | then Image Borders.
| | 01:14 | The border that I used on all of these
was Type 10, and when I add that on, right
| | 01:19 | away you'll see that the border is
clipping off the tip of the boat. We'll spend
| | 01:21 | a lot more time here later on, but
you may have notice that there's a Size
| | 01:25 | slider here, and if I grab that Size
slider, and drag it to the left, you'll see
| | 01:28 | that the border size gets smaller, and
in fact I can make it small enough so
| | 01:31 | that it doesn't overlap the tip of the boat.
| | 01:35 | So, you might be thinking, well, that's
fine; just do it like that. But there's a
| | 01:38 | couple of problems here.
| | 01:40 | First of all, because this going into a
gallery hanging, I need the border to be
| | 01:43 | consistent across all of the prints, so
I can't have one border being very small,
| | 01:47 | and another being much larger. So, you
might be thinking, well, that's fine; just go
| | 01:50 | ahead and do it this size, and
expand the border later in Photoshop.
| | 01:54 | Well, let's take a closer look
and see why we can't do that.
| | 01:57 | Notice how the border here nicely goes
right past the tip of the boat, but then
| | 02:03 | it appears to go up beyond
the edge of the page.
| | 02:06 | If I was to take this image as it was
and bringing it into Photoshop, and just
| | 02:10 | expand the canvas to make a larger
border, the problem is that you would probably
| | 02:12 | see right where the edges of this frame
comes up, and then it suddenly cut off.
| | 02:16 | So, you would see a clear line between
the old border, and the new one, so that
| | 02:21 | wouldn't work either.
| | 02:22 | So, what I really need to do is add a
large white border on the image to begin
| | 02:25 | with, so that then when I'm here in
Silver Efex Pro, I can go ahead and add the
| | 02:29 | border that I need, without having to
worry about cutting off the tip of the boat,
| | 02:31 | or going off the edge of the frame.
| | 02:34 | I'll cancel out it here for now,
because we don't need this.
| | 02:37 | Now I'm going to take this image
off to Photoshop to add a border. I'm sure
| | 02:40 | you can add a border and any number
of applications. I'm just going to use
| | 02:43 | Photoshop, because I have
it on my system.
| | 02:46 | Before I jump into Photoshop, let's take
a look at the settings inside of Aperture.
| | 02:49 | If you're an Aperture user, you know
that with in the export preferences, you
| | 02:54 | have the choice to set up your
external editor. We also have the choice to
| | 02:56 | choose the file format, You can choose
between TIFF and PSD at 8 bit or 16 bit.
| | 03:00 | It's important that you make an educated
decision now as to what format you're
| | 03:04 | going to set this into, because this is
the point where you're converting from
| | 03:07 | RAW into a TIFF or PSD file.
| | 03:10 | If you're going to choose 8 bit, you
want to make sure that you're not going to
| | 03:13 | be limiting yourself later.
| | 03:15 | For most of this work, I choose to go
16 bit. It may be a bit overkill, but
| | 03:18 | frankly, I have got the hard drive
space, and I'd rather not have the risk of
| | 03:20 | running into the edges
of the 8 bit color space.
| | 03:24 | Speaking a color space, make sure that
your external editor color space is set.
| | 03:26 | By default, it may be set to No Profile
Selected, and it appears that you have it
| | 03:30 | set to that that Adobe RGB will be
selected for you automatically, but just to
| | 03:35 | be sure, I recommend that you set
that here in the Export preferences.
| | 03:38 | Finally, you have your resolution. It
doesn't really matter what you set this to,
| | 03:42 | so I'll just leave to 300 DPI.
| | 03:44 | Now I'm ready to send this to Photoshop.
Right-click on the image, and choose
| | 03:47 | Edit with Photoshop, or of
course, whatever editor you're using.
| | 03:52 | Now that we're in Photoshop, there's a
couple things we want to point out before
| | 03:55 | I get to work. I have rearranged the
interface a little bit to show the Info
| | 03:57 | panel up here on the top right, and the
History underneath it, just because I'll
| | 04:00 | be using this quite a bit in this
presentation. All the other tools, like the
| | 04:04 | Histogram, and Adjustments, and so on are
down here at the bottom closed away. I'm
| | 04:07 | not going to need those.
| | 04:08 | So, the first thing to do is
add the border onto this image.
| | 04:12 | The easiest way to add a border is
to stroke it, so I'll just select the
| | 04:15 | Marquee, hit Command+A to select all,
go to the Edit menu, and choose Stroke.
| | 04:20 | Now, from here, I can set a size, and a
color, and then I choose whether that
| | 04:22 | stroke is goinn to be inside of the dotted
line, on the center, or on the outside.
| | 04:28 | What I really need is to put this on
the outside, but I can't do that here,
| | 04:31 | because the canvas isn't big enough.
I don't have any extra spaces to add a
| | 04:34 | white border around this, and of course,
if I choose Inside, all it's going to do
| | 04:39 | is cut off part of the boat,
so that's not good.
| | 04:42 | The next obvious thing is to go up
here and choose Canvas Size, and then add a
| | 04:45 | border on the outside of the image by
simply expanding the canvas. All I need to
| | 04:47 | do is add the number of pixels that I
want to the outside of the canvas. I have
| | 04:50 | it set to Pixels. I also have this set
to Relative; that means that I don't have
| | 04:54 | to do the math to figure out what,
let's say, 150 pixels is on top of this. By
| | 04:59 | simply tapping Relative, it starts at 0,
and I can just say add a 150 to the
| | 05:02 | width, and add a 150 to the height.
Click OK, and I have got a nice, simple, even
| | 05:08 | border around the entire image.
Unfortunately, this isn't quite right.
| | 05:11 | While it may look good right now,
| | 05:14 | the problem is that I've
just distorted the aspect ratio.
| | 05:17 | The aspect ratio of this image started
off at two to three, which would allow me
| | 05:20 | to create perfect 20 x 30 inch print.
| | 05:24 | By adding this border, I've altered the
aspect ratio. Not by much, but it has changed.
| | 05:27 | Even though this aspect ratio
is different, I could still print to 20 x 30
| | 05:30 | print. I mean, I could just have a
slightly bigger border on one side or the
| | 05:34 | other, or I can make sure that the print
was actually cut so that it was ever so
| | 05:37 | slightly smaller, and just fit the
exact size of the print that I sent.
| | 05:40 | That might be perfectly fine, if you're
just going to make one print and hang it home.
| | 05:43 | However, remember that we're hanging a
series of these in a gallery, and so I
| | 05:46 | want every single print to be the exact
same size. I really don't need to have
| | 05:50 | one print being a quarter inch
bigger or smaller than another one.
| | 05:53 | So, it's important to get the aspect
ratio right, so that I can have consistent
| | 05:57 | border, and a consistent size.
| | 05:59 | So, why isn't quite right?
| | 06:00 | Well, let's go back to the beginning
here, and I'm going to make a quick change
| | 06:03 | to the image that will
help to follow along.
| | 06:06 | Under the Image menu, I'll go to Image
Size, and we're not actually going to
| | 06:09 | resize the image; by disabling resample
image, all three of these components are locked.
| | 06:13 | Now any change that I make to one of
these will affect the other, so that the
| | 06:16 | image size itself doesn't actually
change. Let's go ahead and type in 30
| | 06:20 | in here for the width.
| | 06:21 | So, by putting 30 in the width, we see
the height is taken to 20, and we see the
| | 06:24 | resolution at 177.3, but we don't care
about that; ignore that for now. All I'm
| | 06:29 | worried about is a width and the height.
| | 06:32 | Now remember, this hasn't actually
changed the image. I can go in here and type
| | 06:36 | 300 inches, 300 x 200, and you will see
the actual width and height of the pixels
| | 06:39 | and the file size have not changed.
| | 06:43 | All this is is a ratio of how
things are being interpolated from the
| | 06:46 | resolution to everything else.
| | 06:49 | So, 30x 20. Good. Now we click OK, and if
I select all in the image, and go over
| | 06:53 | here to the Info panel, I'll go ahead
and switch this from pixels to inches,
| | 06:56 | we'll see my size here:
30 x 20. Perfect.
| | 07:00 | Now remember, this is the image
just as it came out of Aperture.
| | 07:02 | So, let's go back to the Canvas Size menu,
and we'll set this back to Pixels again,
| | 07:07 | and add in another 150 pixels.
| | 07:10 | It's still set to Relative, so that's
going to add a 150 pixels all the way
| | 07:14 | around. This is exactly what we did before,
but now we'll be able to see the problem.
| | 07:17 | Let's go back to Image, and choose Image
Size, reset our Width to 30, and now look:
| | 07:24 | our height is now 20.274. It's a little
bit over quarter inch too tall. If I set
| | 07:28 | this to 20, now I'll see that the width
is actually just a little bit too short;
| | 07:32 | about 0.4 inches too narrow.
| | 07:34 | So, by simply adding a 150 pixels of
white all the way around the image, it's just
| | 07:37 | not going to cut it.
| | 07:39 | So, let's go ahead and cancel this, and
I'm going to back up to where we started.
| | 07:43 | So, let's look at the other option.
| | 07:45 | Under the Image menu again, we'll go to
Canvas Size, and remember, before we added
| | 07:49 | pixels; this time, instead,
let's go ahead and add percent.
| | 07:53 | If I change the percentage of both the
width and the height to the same amount,
| | 07:56 | then the aspect ratio should
stay the same, right?
| | 07:58 | So, let's just go ahead and add 5%
on the width and height, and click OK.
| | 08:04 | So, the aspect ratio is the same, but I
think the problem is pretty obvious here;
| | 08:08 | the border on the top and the bottom of
the image is one size, and the border on
| | 08:11 | the left and right is another.
| | 08:14 | The reason this is a problem, of course,
is because when I go into Silver Efex
| | 08:17 | Pro 2, and I adjust my border size to
just go past that white line, about
| | 08:20 | somewhere between the edge of the
image, and the tip of the boat, that's
| | 08:25 | probably going to end up somewhere
around here on the sides, and of course,
| | 08:28 | that's not going to look good either.
| | 08:30 | So, what's the solution?
| | 08:32 | We need to have an even sized border
around the image, but we can't have the
| | 08:35 | aspect ration change. Well, if you look
at the image right now, you'll see that
| | 08:38 | the answer is right front of us.
| | 08:40 | What I need to do is basically make
this border the same size as this one, so
| | 08:44 | how would I do that?
| | 08:46 | Well, I can make the image itself wider,
or make the image itself less tall. Less
| | 08:52 | tall is the way to go. I don't want to
stretch the image out wider, and I don't
| | 08:55 | want to use any kind of content aware
fill to just add pixels, because I don't
| | 09:00 | want to distort any pixels in this image.
| | 09:02 | So, unfortunately, what that means is that
the only solution is to crop pixels off
| | 09:05 | of either the top or the bottom of the
photo. Obviously, I can't cut any of the
| | 09:08 | top, but I can sacrifice
some from the bottom.
| | 09:10 | So, now the next step: figuring out just
how many pixels we're going to cut off.
| | 09:15 | Let's start by just reverting this
image back to where we started again, and I
| | 09:18 | want to check it how many pixels are
actually here to begin with. I'll just
| | 09:22 | select all Command+A, and I'll see my
size read out over here. Looks like I
| | 09:27 | need to switch that to pixels, and we'll see
that it is 5319 x 3546. Let's write this down.
| | 09:33 | I'm going to do a little basic math here,
so let's just start off by writing 5319
| | 09:38 | x 3546. Okay, let's go back to Photoshop.
| | 09:43 | We know that a 150 pixel border looks
great, so let's go ahead and add that
| | 09:47 | again; back up to the Image menu >
Canvas Size, add a 150 pixels on both sides
| | 09:53 | there, hit OK, and we're good.
| | 09:56 | Now that I have added a 150 pixels
on each side, how big is the canvas?
| | 09:59 | Once again, we'll just hit Command+A to select
all, and here's the new size here: 5469 x 3696.
| | 10:06 | Let's write that down too.
| | 10:08 | So, here it's +150, and that gave us 5469
x 3696. Great. But remember, what we now
| | 10:20 | have is an image that is no longer the correct
three to two aspect ratio, so let's fix that
| | 10:24 | next. We'll go up under Image, and
choose Image Size, and first set this to the
| | 10:28 | proper 30 x 20, so we'll type in 30; of
course, you see that's a little bit too
| | 10:33 | tall at 20.274, and that's
the part that we need to fix.
| | 10:36 | So, remember here, we're not actually
resizing; we're just pumping in new
| | 10:40 | calculations, and from there, I can go to
the Canvas Size, set this to Inches, and
| | 10:45 | now make my actually correction.
| | 10:47 | So, here is the 274.
Lets just get rid of that.
| | 10:49 | When I choose to delete that, it is
going to be cropping the canvas, so it's
| | 10:53 | going to throw out the warning dialog
saying that your canvas size is smaller,
| | 10:56 | some clipping will occur, and that's just
fine; none of this is real anyway. We're
| | 11:00 | just making calculations.
| | 11:01 | So, now I have my third size. Let's
select all of this, and check the new size;
| | 11:05 | 5469, and of course that width hasn't
changed, and the new height is 3646, so let's
| | 11:10 | write these down as well.
| | 11:15 | This is my 3:2 conversion. We'll just
add that in there, so we don't forget, and
| | 11:18 | once again, 5469 x 3646.
| | 11:23 | So, now we're ready to do our math.
| | 11:25 | Remember, all we did here was cut off
part of the image. This was the image size
| | 11:29 | that we ended up with, but then we had to cut
it down to something else to make it three to two.
| | 11:33 | This tells us how many pixels we have
to cut off. On the wide side, we don't
| | 11:37 | have to cut out anything, but on the
short side, in this case, the vertical side,
| | 11:41 | we do. We had 3696, but we need to get
it down a 3646, so that, of course, is a
| | 11:46 | difference of just 50 pixels.
| | 11:49 | So, 50 pixels is the magic number.
This is what we have to get rid of.
| | 11:53 | So, if we go back to our
original size, 5319 x 3546;
| | 11:56 | if we take 50 pixels off of this, and
then add our 150, we'll end up at the right
| | 12:01 | aspect ratio. So, that means we need a
new size of 5319 by -- what's 3546 minus
| | 12:09 | 50? That's just 3496,
so there's our new size.
| | 12:14 | So, now we need to crop the original
image down to this size, and then add the
| | 12:18 | 150 back on. Let's go back into
Photoshop, we'll reset the image again, I'll
| | 12:24 | choose the cropping tool, and I'm going to set
this to the width by height for a resolution.
| | 12:29 | The nice thing about this tool is, I'm
going to punch in the exact size that I
| | 12:33 | want, and even if I leave the resolution
blank, it'll still do the crop for me. So,
| | 12:37 | remember, our number was 5319 x 3496, and
you can see exactly how it's cropped in
| | 12:45 | there, but I can move this crop guide.
I can move it up to the top, or down to
| | 12:49 | the bottom in there, and it'll snap into
place. Of course, I want to move to the
| | 12:53 | top, because it's the bottom that I
want to cut off. You can see down here what's
| | 12:57 | about to get cut, and we'll
just go ahead and apply that.
| | 13:00 | Now that that's cropped, I can go back
in to the Canvas Size, add my 150 pixels,
| | 13:07 | hit OK, and we now have a perfect white
border. If you want to double check it, let's
| | 13:12 | just go back up to Image, choose Image
Size, punch in 30, and sure enough, we have
| | 13:18 | the exact height of 20, so there we go.
That's how we create our image border at
| | 13:23 | a perfect size, with a
perfect aspect ratio.
| | 13:26 | You may have to sacrifice a few pixels here,
but it all depends on what you're going for.
| | 13:30 | Remember, the reason I want this to be
exact is because I'll be hanging prints
| | 13:33 | side by side, so I really want them
precise, but if you're just doing one image
| | 13:36 | to hang in your home, don't worry about
it. Go ahead and let the print size be a
| | 13:41 | slight bit off,
and I think you'll be okay.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Converting from RAW| 00:02 | At some point in your editing process,
you're going to need to convert from
| | 00:05 | RAW to a TIFF file.
| | 00:07 | In general, you want to do as much
work as you can with the RAW file before
| | 00:11 | you convert it to TIFF.
| | 00:12 | If you're working in Aperture, you're
always working in RAW until you send it
| | 00:16 | off to another editor.
| | 00:17 | That could be, as described in the
previous step, to simply add the white border
| | 00:20 | to file, or if you're not doing that, it
may not be until you send it of to Silver
| | 00:25 | Effects Pro, or whatever
plug-in you might be using.
| | 00:28 | If you're using Photoshop, on the other
hand, you'll be converting from a RAW
| | 00:31 | file at the time you open it using Bridge,
or you can open it as a Smart Layer as
| | 00:36 | well, and we'll talk
about that in just a moment.
| | 00:38 | For now let's talk about
working in Aperture.
| | 00:40 | This photo here has already been adjusted,
| | 00:42 | and if we look at the original file
by tapping on the master icon down here,
| | 00:46 | you'll see that the original was a
little bit overblown up in the sky.
| | 00:50 | However, the lower half
is pretty well exposed.
| | 00:52 | This is a difficult shot, because it does
have some pretty extreme dynamic range;
| | 00:55 | the darkest shadows under the trees in
here are a lot darker then the brightest
| | 00:59 | highlights in the sky.
| | 01:00 | So, we're probably going to need to
compress this a little bit, just to make sure
| | 01:04 | that we have all the detail in the
highlights, and in the shadows.
| | 01:08 | Before do anything, let's see
just how bright the sky is.
| | 01:11 | If you're using Aperture, under the View
menu, you can enable Highlight Hot and
| | 01:14 | Cold Area, and this will
show the blown out areas.
| | 01:17 | If you had anything that was too
dark, such as, for example, the tiny little
| | 01:21 | shadows under here in archways,
you would see them go blue.
| | 01:23 | Now, things like that don't matter.
| | 01:25 | We don't care if we lose detail in
this shadow that is obviously completely
| | 01:28 | black to begin with. However,
this up here is unacceptable.
| | 01:31 | We don't want to have this super bright
spot up here in the sky. The challenge
| | 01:35 | is, if I took this file as it was as RAW
image, and didn't do any processing to
| | 01:39 | it, and then sent it off to TIFF file,
and I choose to only save it to an 8 bit
| | 01:44 | TIFF, then all the extra data that's
currently hiding in the RAW file that
| | 01:47 | would allow me to reveal the texture
in the sky here would be clipped off.
| | 01:51 | Essentially, it's almost as bad
as if add shot JPEG in the camera.
| | 01:55 | If, however, you convert a 16 bit TIFF,
you will retain most of that data.
| | 01:59 | But still, I think it's much better to
get your data out of the RAW file than it
| | 02:03 | is to pull it out of the TIFF.
| | 02:05 | For this particular image, all I had to
do is lower the exposure, and then adjust
| | 02:09 | the Curves a little bit.
| | 02:10 | Let's go out of the master version, and
then scroll over here, and you'll see that
| | 02:14 | Exposure dropped down quite a bit, and
I enhance the Shadows in the Curves.
| | 02:18 | So, I brought the detail backup.
| | 02:20 | Let's go ahead turn that off.
| | 02:22 | And I think we'll find how to little
bit of highlights work done as well. I'll
| | 02:25 | turn that off, and go back up to
top, and finally, turn off Exposure.
| | 02:28 | So, now we're back where we started,
except for a little bit of retouching, which
| | 02:32 | by the way, you want to make sure you
do as well to the RAW file if you can.
| | 02:37 | In this case, I took Exposure down.
Let's go ahead and turn that back on, and
| | 02:41 | I'll reset it, and then just
take Exposure down a little bit.
| | 02:45 | If you're doing this with Highlight
Hot and Cold areas turned on, you'll see
| | 02:48 | exactly what's happening to
the sky as you drag this down.
| | 02:51 | Now, you may get to a point where to
make all the red spots disappear,
| | 02:55 | the image just gets way, way too dark.
| | 02:57 | In fact, here you can see that I've
gone down two full stops, and yet I still
| | 03:01 | have overexposed areas in the clouds here,
and, of course, the remainder of the shot
| | 03:05 | has become unusable.
| | 03:06 | So, that's probably not the best way to
go. Usually it's a balancing act, and in
| | 03:10 | this case, I think I had somewhere right
around here, and then I further save the
| | 03:14 | highlights by taking the
Recovery slider, and pulling that down.
| | 03:17 | What that's going to do us just pull in
the absolute brightest spots in the image.
| | 03:21 | If you're watching the histogram while
doing this, you would have noticed that
| | 03:25 | up in the highlight areas here, the
brightest parts, or just the top, top part
| | 03:29 | was being adjusted when I
adjust to Recovery slider.
| | 03:31 | Here, let's do that again; watch the histogram.
I'll the take Recovery slider all the
| | 03:35 | way back down, and then
bring it back up little bit.
| | 03:38 | As you can see, we're only adjusting
the top part of the histogram, whereas if
| | 03:41 | I was to grab the Exposure slider, and drag
that down, the entire histogram is going to move.
| | 03:47 | Again, it's usually a balancing act, finding
just the right amount of Exposure,
| | 03:52 | and Recovery to adjust.
| | 03:53 | And you can always leave
a little bit of blow out.
| | 03:55 | Things like this, super hot highlights
in the clouds, or if you're, for example,
| | 03:59 | pointing right into the sun, it will
probably never be fully recovered.
| | 04:03 | You can always try to see what's in
there, but sometimes you may want to
| | 04:05 | sacrifice a little bit of specular
highlights just to retain highlight detail in
| | 04:09 | other parts of the scene.
| | 04:10 | Now that the sky looks great, the
bottom area does still look too dark. Not as
| | 04:14 | dark as when I'd taken the Exposure all
the way down, but it is still a bit too
| | 04:19 | dark for the work that we're going to do.
| | 04:21 | So, I'll scroll down, and now I'm going
to adjust Curves. As you can see, I've
| | 04:25 | already adjusted this, but let's just
go ahead and reset it, and do it again.
| | 04:29 | In this case, it's the darkest part of the
scene that want to brighten up a little bit.
| | 04:34 | We can see here on the histogram that
there is a huge spike of dark, and then it
| | 04:38 | gets into a lot of evenly
balanced midrange and highlights.
| | 04:41 | So, what I really need to do is just
lighten up the dark areas of the shadows,
| | 04:45 | but as you can see, if I do this, I am
going to very quickly blow out the rest of
| | 04:50 | the scene, and it's also
going to look very flat.
| | 04:52 | So, I really do, once again, need to
exhibit some balance here, and just find the
| | 04:56 | right amount of brightening to do for
the shadows, and maybe even pull the
| | 05:00 | highlights in just a
little bit to protect those.
| | 05:02 | If you're not careful, you could end up
very flat looking image, but if you find
| | 05:06 | an image like this, where you've got
the exposure the way you want it for the
| | 05:10 | main part of the scene, but is still
lacking some of that punch, some of that
| | 05:14 | bottom end, what you can do is go
back up to the Exposure adjustments, and
| | 05:18 | adjust the Black Point.
| | 05:19 | Just like Recovery will adjust only
the brightest parts of the highlights, the
| | 05:22 | Black Point will adjust just
the darkest part of the shadows.
| | 05:25 | So, I can go ahead and raise this Black
Point, and even if I throw in a little
| | 05:29 | bit of crunchy, crushed black down here in the
shadows, that's probably going to be okay.
| | 05:33 | It's just going to add a little bit
of depth into the scene, and frankly the
| | 05:37 | deepest darkest shadows under these
trees are probably not really worth
| | 05:39 | worrying about anyway.
| | 05:40 | If you want to see what this
looks like a little bit more clearly while
| | 05:44 | you're adjusting it, you can always
go back to the View menu, and turn off
| | 05:48 | Highlight Hot and Cold Areas.
| | 05:51 | I think that looks pretty good there. I'll be
able to do further adjustment work inside of
| | 05:55 | Silver Effects Pro once I take it there,
| | 05:57 | but remember, before I go there,
I'll be converting it to TIFF.
| | 06:00 | This is a good point to discuss whether
you can convert this file to and 8 bit
| | 06:04 | TIFF, or to a 16 bit file.
| | 06:05 | In Aperture, if you go to the Preferences,
you have the choice under the Export
| | 06:09 | preferences to choose what your external
editor file format is going to be.
| | 06:13 | You can choose between TIFF, and PSD, and
for each you can choose 8-bit or 16-bit.
| | 06:18 | At this point, choosing 8-bit is
probably going to be okay, because we
| | 06:21 | really have pulled in all the
details in the darkest shadows, and the
| | 06:24 | brightest highlights.
| | 06:25 | And if we have look at the histogram,
well, it's just a little bit crushed
| | 06:29 | blacks in here, so that means there's a
little bit of detail hiding out here, but
| | 06:33 | I've decided I'm not going to worry
about that, because I want to have
| | 06:36 | increased contrast in the file, and you can see
here that I have recovered all the highlights.
| | 06:39 | So, with that said I could probably go
ahead and is convert it to 8 bit, but
| | 06:42 | considering what I'm going to be doing
to this file in the future, scaling this
| | 06:45 | up to almost double its original size,
taking it into Silver Effects Pro, and
| | 06:49 | doing quite a bit work in there,
| | 06:50 | I don't want to risk pushing up against
the edge of 8-bit, so I'm going to go
| | 06:55 | and choose a 16-bit for this.
| | 06:58 | Again, it may be a bit overkill, but
frankly if you have the horsepower and
| | 07:00 | storage space to handle it, why not?
| | 07:02 | By choosing TIFF at 16-bit here, when do
open this up in an editor, whether it's
| | 07:06 | Photoshop, or one of the plug-ins or
anything else, it's going to be converted to
| | 07:09 | a TIFF at 16 bit before it's sent off.
| | 07:13 | Let's take at a look at
a Photoshop workflow.
| | 07:20 | When you open up the RAW file, Photoshop
will open it into Adobe Camera Raw.
| | 07:23 | Right away, we can see that overexposed
area again, and we can see here that ACR
| | 07:27 | is highlighting it for me,
telling me that I have some clipping.
| | 07:30 | So I can go ahead in here, and just like
I did in Aperture, adjust things like the
| | 07:34 | exposure, contrast,
shadow detail, and so on.
| | 07:37 | Now, I'm no expert in Photoshop, so I'm
not going to or try to show you how to
| | 07:42 | adjust the file here,
| | 07:43 | but suffice it to say, all the RAW
conversion can be done here before you
| | 07:47 | open the file in Photoshop. However,
you do have another option. If you don't
| | 07:50 | want to sacrifice your RAW editing
inside Photoshop, instead of clicking on
| | 07:53 | Open Image here, if you hold down the Shift key,
you'll see that it converts to Open Object.
| | 07:58 | When you do that, Photoshop will create
a new file with that RAW image embedded
| | 08:02 | it as a Smart Object.
| | 08:03 | Now you can do some work to this file,
but if you ever want to go back to the
| | 08:08 | RAW version, you can simply double-click
on it, and it will take you back
| | 08:11 | to Adobe Camera Raw.
| | 08:12 | However, again, at some point you're
going to need to convert this to TIFF file.
| | 08:16 | So, once again, you want to make sure
that you've done all the recovery work you
| | 08:19 | need before you do that, and commit to
the pixels that you have in front of you.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Scaling the FileWhen and how much do you scale?| 00:02 | At some point in your Editing process
you'll have to decide if you're going to
| | 00:06 | scale, and if so, when.
| | 00:08 | Let's start off with When.
| | 00:09 | For this series of images, I decided to
scale before I took the image into Silver
| | 00:14 | Efex Pro 2 for the
black and white conversion.
| | 00:16 | For most projects, you'll probably hear
that it is best to scale at the very
| | 00:21 | end, right before you can go to print.
You will do all of your effects to the
| | 00:25 | original image, and then scale it, and
applies the final sharpening at the very
| | 00:28 | end, and for most cases,
that's probably the best idea.
| | 00:31 | However, in this case, because
I was going to be converting to
| | 00:34 | black and white, and adding a whole lot
of a grain and texture into the image, I
| | 00:38 | decided that any artifacting that I
might gain by scaling the image from one
| | 00:41 | size to larger one I would probably
be able to cover up once I added in the
| | 00:45 | grain in Silver Efex Pro 2.
| | 00:47 | Further, I didn't want the grain that I was
going to be adding to end up getting scaled
| | 00:51 | along with everything else.
| | 00:52 | So, by scaling first, and then adding the
grain, I was able to hide any artifacts,
| | 00:56 | and have a truer to life
grain simple at the very end.
| | 01:00 | So, let's take a look at what I did.
| | 01:02 | Here is the file at 21 megapixels.
That's how it came out of camera, and in this
| | 01:07 | case, this image was not
cropped before being scaled,
| | 01:09 | so we're seeing the full
21 megapixel resolution.
| | 01:12 | The next file here is the exact same file,
but it's been scaled up to 54 megapixels.
| | 01:17 | So, we went from 5616 X 3744
to 9000 X 6000.
| | 01:23 | Let's take a look at what that
look likes on the image itself.
| | 01:26 | I'll start by going down the original
file, and then just tapping to Z key to
| | 01:30 | zoom into 100%. I'll go
ahead and show just the viewer,
| | 01:34 | and then I am going to pan over
here to this seam on the arch.
| | 01:38 | As you can see, here we have this big
weld seam, or something like that, and then
| | 01:42 | a big crease in here; you can see
here pretty clearly what this looks like.
| | 01:46 | Now let's go ahead and take a look at
the scaled image. That's the next one in the
| | 01:49 | bunch, and at first glance, it
doesn't look very different.
| | 01:53 | In fact, it doesn't look a whole lot bigger.
Let's go ahead and put these two side by side.
| | 02:00 | On the left, we now have larger one;
you could see at the bottom it's the 54
| | 02:08 | megapixel file, and on the right we
have the original the smaller one.
| | 02:11 | When you look closely, there is a
little bit of extra artifacting, and a
| | 02:15 | little bit odd chunkiness that came
up here along this texture. That's a
| | 02:19 | remnant of the scaling process.
| | 02:21 | And if the final way to view this file
was to look at it onscreen at 100%, I
| | 02:25 | might not think this looks that
great, but remember, this is going to be
| | 02:28 | printed at high resolution,
| | 02:29 | so what you're seeing here is going to
be actually compressed to quite a small
| | 02:33 | area, and on print, so it's
probably going to look just fine.
| | 02:36 | However, remember, I'm still not done
here. The next step of the process for me
| | 02:40 | was to convert to black and
white, and add the grain to it.
| | 02:42 | So, let's go ahead and
bring up that file as well.
| | 02:45 | We'll zoom into the same part of the
file, and have a look at that. As you can
| | 02:51 | see, there is a lot of extra noise and
texture that's been added to this image.
| | 02:55 | In fact, let's look at adjust this
image; we will make that a bit bigger, and as
| | 03:01 | you see as I pan around this. There
is a lot of beautiful texture that's been
| | 03:04 | added to this, and a nice grain
pattern in the sky here shows up beautifully
| | 03:09 | on the metal as well.
| | 03:10 | If we pan over here to where the
observation windows are, we can see that
| | 03:15 | we have some really good sharpness
and contrast here, and again, the grain
| | 03:19 | pattern is seen throughout.
| | 03:22 | This image does not look like an image
that's been scaled, and again, a lot of
| | 03:26 | that has to do it's a noise
pattern that was added afterwards,
| | 03:29 | to give it that look of grain, and again,
to hide some of the artifacts that were
| | 03:33 | left behind from scaling.
| | 03:34 | At the end of the day, it really
depends on what type of images you're doing
| | 03:38 | when you decide what you're going to scale.
| | 03:40 | In this case, I made the decision
to scale up before I converted
| | 03:43 | to black and white.
| | 03:44 | Now let's talk about
how big we're going to go.
| | 03:46 | How did I decide to go from
5616 x 3744 to 9000 x 6000 pixels?
| | 03:50 | Well, that was a pretty easy decision.
| | 03:53 | I knew exactly what size I was going
to print at, and I knew what resolution I
| | 03:58 | wanted. In my case, I was printing at
30 x 20, and I wanted to have prints that
| | 04:02 | were printed at 300 DPI.
| | 04:03 | Well, how high of a DPI do you need?
| | 04:05 | Well, that really depends on what
type of print that you're making.
| | 04:08 | Ultimately, what you will want to do is
talk to the printer who will be handling
| | 04:12 | your print job, and find out what the
ideal resolution is for them to print at.
| | 04:16 | They may tell you a 133 DPI, or 166, or
150, or 200, or 300; whatever they say
| | 04:22 | is what you are probably
going to want to go with.
| | 04:24 | In this case, I wanted to print at
full 300 DPI. To be honest, it's probably a
| | 04:29 | little bit more than I really needed,
| | 04:30 | but it also gives me the ability to
print at even larger size later on.
| | 04:34 | So, let's do the quick math in here, and
figure out how we get from the size we
| | 04:39 | started at 5616, up to the full 9000.
| | 04:44 | First, let's take a look at what
resolution I'd be to print at, if I wanted
| | 04:49 | to print at 20 x 30,
and not do any scaling at all.
| | 04:51 | So, 5616 divided 30 inches is a 187 DPI.
| | 04:58 | So, that's pretty good actually; that's
a pretty high resolution print, and it'd
| | 05:02 | probably look absolutely fine.
| | 05:03 | But let's say in the future I decided
I wanted to do something even bigger.
| | 05:06 | So, let's do that again 5616, and
this time let's say I want to go up to 60
| | 05:12 | inches; well, now it's only 93 DPI.
| | 05:16 | So, considerably lower resolution.
| | 05:18 | Now, the truth is, if you are doing a
print that big, you probably aren't going to
| | 05:22 | be standing that close to it,
| | 05:23 | so even if it does look a little bit
pixelated when you put your nose right
| | 05:27 | up to the print, the thing is, with
prints that big, they are not meant to be
| | 05:31 | viewed that closely.
| | 05:32 | You are meant to step farther away from
them, so you can get away with printing
| | 05:36 | at a lower resolution.
| | 05:37 | But maybe you just don't want to. Maybe,
for whatever reason, you want to have a
| | 05:41 | really big, really high
resolution image.
| | 05:42 | In my case, I wanted to that, because I
knew these were going to be hanging in
| | 05:47 | the gallery, where people would be able
to walk up, and quite literally put their
| | 05:50 | nose right on the print.
| | 05:52 | So, I wanted to make sure that the image
looked as clean as absolutely possible.
| | 05:55 | So, again, I am going to print at 30 x 20,
30 inches wide by 20 inches tall, and I
| | 05:59 | want print at 300 DPI. Well, that's pretty
easy math; 30 inches by 300 DPI equals 9000
| | 06:05 | pixels. And of course, for the vertical,
that's as 20 x 300, so there is 6000.
| | 06:09 | So, there is the final pixel
count that I need: 9000 x 6000.
| | 06:15 | Just out of interest, let's see how
big of a percentage growth that will be.
| | 06:18 | If I want to end up with 9000 pixels,
divide that by 5616, and we are looking at
| | 06:25 | 1.6, or 60% growth in the image.
| | 06:27 | So, it really isn't that
big. It's not even double.
| | 06:30 | I think the growth of this file will go quite
well, and it should be a pretty easy scale.
| | 06:34 | If you are starting with a much lower
resolution file, and you're going to scale it
| | 06:38 | up to, let's say, 200, or even 300%, you'll
want to look very closely during the
| | 06:42 | scaling process to see
how it's handling it.
| | 06:44 | Some files simply can't handle it,
and it will fall apart very quickly, and
| | 06:48 | you'll be able to tell right away that they
look absolutely horrible scaled up that big.
| | 06:52 | But other images, you might be surprised
at just how much you can scale them, and
| | 06:56 | still have them look great.
| | 06:57 | As another point of interest, let's just see
how many megapixels the final file will be.
| | 07:01 | Remember, we started off with 5616 x 3744,
so 5616 x 3744 = 21 million. That's my
| | 07:10 | 21 megapixel image.
| | 07:12 | So, now what is 9000 x 6000
going to be?
| | 07:16 | That is a 54 megapixel image.
| | 07:18 | As you can see, the file size gets quite big,
quite quickly. We're well into medium
| | 07:22 | format territory here.
| | 07:24 | Now, I know this is not same thing as
shooting with a medium format camera,
| | 07:27 | but it does give us
that big huge file.
| | 07:29 | Since we're going to be sending this
file off to Silver Efex Pro, and doing a lot
| | 07:33 | more work to it, the final result is
going to be look pretty darn good.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Comparing scaling methods| 00:01 | When it comes time to scale your image, you
have several choices of how you can do it.
| | 00:06 | We'll explore a few of the options here,
but ultimately, the choice that you make
| | 00:10 | really depends on the image itself.
| | 00:11 | One image may scale better with one algorithm,
and another may scale better with another.
| | 00:16 | So, if you have the tools at your
disposal, the best thing you can do is
| | 00:19 | simply compare them.
| | 00:20 | Of course, you may not have all these tools
that I'm about to display on your computer,
| | 00:25 | so you may just have to
work with what you have,
| | 00:27 | but let's take a look at
a few different options.
| | 00:29 | First we'll start off by
simply using Aperture.
| | 00:31 | Many people don't realize this, but
from within Aperture, you can actually
| | 00:35 | export out and scale up
at the same time.
| | 00:39 | We all know that you can use the
Image Export presets to scale down to any
| | 00:43 | particular size, but you can also scale up.
| | 00:46 | In this case, remember that we want to
make a 9000 x 6000 pixel image, and we want
| | 00:51 | to make that as a 16-bit TIFF.
| | 00:53 | To create new preset inside of Aperture,
just select any one of the existing
| | 00:56 | presets, and duplicate it.
| | 00:58 | I'll go ahead and select this one
here, TIFF - Originals Size(16-bit),
| | 01:02 | and duplicate that.
| | 01:04 | Now let's go ahead and rename this,
and instead of original size, of course, its
| | 01:08 | going to be 9000 x 6000.
| | 01:12 | On the right, you'll see the different
settings that you have. TIFF 16-bit is
| | 01:15 | already set. We'll leave
the metadata turned on.
| | 01:19 | And here's the key; we can size it
to be original size, or fit within any
| | 01:23 | particular dimensions, or
a percent of the original.
| | 01:27 | Let's go ahead and set it to pixels, and then
put in 9000 by, not 6000, but actually 9000.
| | 01:37 | This way, that will ensure that the
image that I export, regardless of whether
| | 01:41 | it's landscape or vertical, will fit it
9000 pixels at its longest dimension.
| | 01:46 | The DPI really doesn't matter, but I'm
going to go ahead and put in 300, because
| | 01:49 | at some point, I'm going to
need it to be 300,
| | 01:52 | so I may as well set it there now.
That's all I want to do. Click OK, and we
| | 01:57 | have our new preset.
| | 01:58 | Now just select the image you
want to scale, right-click on it, and
| | 02:01 | choose Export > Version.
| | 02:04 | Choose your scaling preset, and if you
just created it, it will automatically
| | 02:08 | be selected for you,
and then export that out.
| | 02:11 | Now to bring that file back into Aperture,
you can drag and drop it in, or import
| | 02:16 | it to the standard import dialog.
| | 02:20 | Here is the image that I just brought in.
| | 02:25 | I'm going to go ahead and color code
this, so it's easier to spot later.
| | 02:27 | There; the one that I exported out
of Aperture and scaled up is yellow.
| | 02:31 | Now let's take a look and see
what that looks like at a 100%.
| | 02:34 | I'll just go to viewer only mode, and tap the
Z key, and then pan over to see how this looks.
| | 02:40 | Overall, it looks like a pretty good scale.
| | 02:43 | In fact, let's compare it
side byside with the original.
| | 02:46 | There is the original one, and now the
scaled up one on the right; zoom into
| | 02:51 | same part of the scene, and as
you can see, it looks pretty good.
| | 02:56 | It could stand to do with a little bit
of sharpening, and it's not really the
| | 03:00 | best scaling I've ever seen,
| | 03:01 | but if this is the only tool that you
have available, this can be a great way
| | 03:05 | to do your up-scale.
| | 03:06 | If you have another tool, like Photoshop,
you might want to try using that as well.
| | 03:10 | I'm going to go ahead back to the
original image that we started with, and I'll
| | 03:14 | go ahead and open this up in
Photoshop by choosing Edit with Photoshop CS6.
| | 03:18 | In Photoshop, to scale your image, all
you have to do is go to the Image menu,
| | 03:22 | choose Image Size, and then
punch in the new size that you want.
| | 03:26 | We want it to be 30 x 20 at 300 DPI.
| | 03:28 | There is our 9000 x 6000
pixel number, and then click OK.
| | 03:33 | However, before you do, notice at the
bottom that you have a couple of different
| | 03:37 | options of how you are going to scale.
| | 03:39 | Basically, what algorithm
you are going to use.
| | 03:41 | There's Nearest Neighbor,
Bilinear, and then a series of Bicubic.
| | 03:45 | You can see the different descriptions
here, best for smooth gradients, for
| | 03:48 | enlargement, reduction, or by Bicubic Automatic.
| | 03:51 | Nearest Neighbor is not
going to look good for photos.
| | 03:54 | Bilinear and Bicubic both do.
| | 03:56 | Bicubic Automatic is probably going to
give you the best result, but if you want
| | 04:01 | to compare them, we can do
two versions of this file;
| | 04:04 | one is Bilinear, and one is
Bicubic, and see how they look.
| | 04:07 | So, before I actually scale it,
I'll go ahead and duplicate this.
| | 04:10 | Under the Image menu, I can choose
Duplicate, and now I have a second copy of it.
| | 04:17 | Here is the new one
called copy, and the original.
| | 04:21 | Let's start with the original one, and
scale this one using Bicubic Automatic.
| | 04:26 | Again, 30 x 20, click OK, and that will
scale in just a couple of seconds.
| | 04:32 | To make sure I don't confuse which
algorithm I use later, I'm going to go ahead
| | 04:36 | and rename the layer on here to Bicubic.
| | 04:39 | Now let's go to the other file, the
duplicate, and I'll scale this one as well.
| | 04:43 | 30 inches, and we're going
to choose Bilinear.
| | 04:49 | I'm also going to
rename this layer to Bilinear.
| | 04:58 | Now let's go ahead and
compare them side by side.
| | 05:03 | You'll want to make sure that
you're viewing them both at a 100%.
| | 05:08 | Now, with Scroll All Windows enabled, I
can easily compare them side by side,
| | 05:12 | and look for details that might reveal
which one is better. Pretty hard to tell there.
| | 05:16 | Let's take a look at
another part of the image.
| | 05:18 | I'm going to scan over here to the
observation windows, and we'll find that on
| | 05:28 | both images, and compare
these two side by side.
| | 05:32 | Very similar, but here we
are able to see a difference.
| | 05:35 | The one on the left is a little
bit softer than the one on the right;
| | 05:39 | however, the one on the right is
showing a little bit more noise.
| | 05:42 | So, at this point, you need
to decide what's better.
| | 05:45 | Would you rather have a softer, less
noisy image, or a higher contrast, slightly
| | 05:49 | sharper, but slightly noisier image?
| | 05:51 | In this case, I'm going to choose the
one on the right, because I know that I'll
| | 05:55 | be adding more grain in Silver Efex Pro 2
later, I'm not going to worry about a
| | 05:59 | little bit of noise added
here now. So, which one is that?
| | 06:02 | Well, it's the original file;
it's the Bicubic one. Great!
| | 06:05 | So, now I know which
algorithm I want to use.
| | 06:07 | Another tip if you want to compare
the two, and you are having a hard time
| | 06:10 | looking at them side by side, is to
simply copy the layer from one file
| | 06:14 | on top of the other, and then toggle it on and
off, and see if you can spot the differences.
| | 06:19 | So, for example, I could take this
Bicubic layer, and duplicate that, move it over
| | 06:24 | to the other file, and now let's take a
look at the one that has both layers.
| | 06:32 | Bicubic on the top,
and Bilinear on the bottom,
| | 06:36 | and you can just turn one on
and off, so you can see the difference.
| | 06:41 | If you're scaling in Photoshop, and
taking it back to Aperture, all you need
| | 06:44 | to do is save the file, and close it, and it will
automatically update back in Aperture for you.
| | 06:49 | In this case, I'm just going to close out
of here, and not save either of these files.
| | 06:53 | When opening a file from Aperture
into any other application or plug-in, it's
| | 06:58 | going to create a new version for you.
That version would automatically be
| | 07:01 | updated with any changes that I made in
Photoshop, or whatever plug-in I was in.
| | 07:05 | In this case, I didn't actually make any
changes, so I don't need this file anymore.
| | 07:09 | I can safely delete it.
| | 07:10 | Now let's go back to the file that we
started with, and take a look at a third
| | 07:16 | way to do our scaling.
| | 07:18 | I have a tool installed called Perfect
Photo Suite, and part of Perfect Photo
| | 07:23 | Suite is the Perfect Resize tool.
| | 07:26 | Perfect Resize is an amazing tool for
doing scaling, especially if you are doing
| | 07:31 | extremely large scaling, for
example, over 200%, 300%, or even more.
| | 07:35 | There's a lot that you can learn
about scaling using the onOne
| | 07:38 | Perfect Photo Suite.
| | 07:39 | We are not going to get
into all the details here,
| | 07:42 | but I'll just show you the basics.
| | 07:43 | Once you've opened a file into Perfect
Photo Suite, click on Resize on the top
| | 07:47 | right corner, and that's going to
open up the Perfect Resize tool.
| | 07:50 | Once it's opened, as you can see, you have
a whole variety of tools here that you
| | 07:54 | can use when doing your scaling.
| | 07:56 | First things first; all the changes
that you make on the right are going to be
| | 08:00 | updated as quickly as possible on the left,
| | 08:02 | so you want to make sure that you're
viewing your image at one to one size.
| | 08:06 | So, up here, just click on 1:1 to make
sure that you are viewing it at a 100%.
| | 08:11 | Essentially, you just want to run through
the controls here from top to bottom,
| | 08:15 | choosing which adjustments
you want to apply.
| | 08:16 | We can start by punching in either the
pixel dimensions, or the document size.
| | 08:21 | Here, just like in Photoshop, I don't need
to worry about what the pixel count is;
| | 08:24 | I can simply select the width or height
that I want, and type that in, and at
| | 08:29 | whatever DPI I want.
| | 08:30 | As soon as you make a change in here,
the image is going to update on the
| | 08:34 | left, as you see there.
| | 08:35 | So, now I'm looking at a preview of what
the scaled image is going to look like.
| | 08:40 | This is very powerful, as it allows you
to experiment with various sharpening,
| | 08:43 | textures, and more, to see how it's
going to look on your final image.
| | 08:48 | This tutorial isn't about learning how
to use Perfect Resize, and there are quite
| | 08:52 | a few controls you have in here,
| | 08:54 | but I'll just point out
a couple of things.
| | 08:56 | Sharpening, for example, you can turn on,
and add a little bit of sharpen to the image.
| | 09:00 | I recommend adding a small amount of
sharpening to your image at this point.
| | 09:04 | However, remember, we are going to
do a lot more work to it later,
| | 09:08 | so we don't need to be super
careful about the sharpening now.
| | 09:11 | That said, if you oversharpen the image
here, you'll probably be forgiven later
| | 09:14 | when add the noise
inside of Silver Efex Pro.
| | 09:17 | Of course, it's entirely going to
depend on what you're doing to your image,
| | 09:21 | so again, you are going to
want to be careful in here.
| | 09:24 | On the onOne software Web site,
you can view tutorials on how to best
| | 09:27 | apply sharpening, film grain,
and so on.
| | 09:31 | This tool even includes a feature called
tiling, so if you're making an extremely
| | 09:34 | large print, you can actually cut it
up into multiple size files right here.
| | 09:39 | Once you've come up with a combination
that you like, you can add your own
| | 09:43 | preset, which can come in very handy
for doing multiple images the same way.
| | 09:46 | Keep in mind, however, that the sharpening,
texture, or anything else that you
| | 09:50 | apply to one image may not necessarily
work on another. Because scaling is
| | 09:55 | such an important part of the process,
you'll want to take some time to look at
| | 09:59 | each image individually, one at a time,
to make sure that you're giving it the
| | 10:02 | best treatment possible.
| | 10:03 | When you're done scaling in Perfect
Photo Suite, all you have to do is click
| | 10:07 | Apply, wait for that to
process, and then click Save again.
| | 10:14 | Once saved, just close the file, and
that will take you back into Aperture.
| | 10:19 | From here, you can compare the different
scalings you may have tried. Whether you
| | 10:22 | did them in Photoshop, Perfect Resize,
or just in Aperture, you can now easily
| | 10:26 | compare them side by side.
| | 10:27 | For example, that one that's selected
now is the image I just created in
| | 10:31 | Perfect Photo Suite.
| | 10:32 | I'm also going to select the one on
the right that came out of Aperture.
| | 10:36 | Now let's compare these
two side by side.
| | 10:37 | I'll zoom into a 100%, pan around to
the same part of the image on both of them,
| | 10:43 | and we can see how they look.
| | 10:44 | The image on the left is clearly superior;
| | 10:46 | it has sharper edges,
and more definition to it.
| | 10:49 | So, all in all, it is going to be a
better tool to do your scaling with,
| | 10:52 | but if you don't have access to that
tool, you can always use Aperture to do your
| | 10:56 | scaling as well, and apply then
some sharpening from here.
| | 10:59 | You may not get the same result, but
it's probably better than not scaling it at
| | 11:03 | all, but again,
you just have to experiment
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Black-and-White ConversionIntroduction| 00:02 | These next videos are going to be a
quite different than the ones previously.
| | 00:05 | The earlier videos were quite technical,
and therefore quite structured.
| | 00:08 | These videos however, are going to be
all about the creative process of how
| | 00:12 | I developed the images into the black and
white files that you see in front of you.
| | 00:16 | Now because it is a creative process,
and it's not perfectly repeatable,
| | 00:19 | the result that we come to over in the
next few videos may be different than ones
| | 00:22 | you see in front of you now.
| | 00:23 | But that of course is part of the beauty.
| | 00:25 | What you need to do is find exactly what
works for you at any given time,
| | 00:29 | using the tools that you have.
| | 00:30 | The tool that I'll be using a Silver Efex Pro 2.
There are, of course, a variety
| | 00:34 | of other Black and White conversion tools out there,
| | 00:36 | that just happens to be the one that I like to use the most.
| | 00:38 | So as you follow along you may see some different
results than the ones you are looking at here.
| | 00:42 | However the whole point is we're going to
go through the creative process together.
| | 00:46 | You may see we make some mistakes,
have to backup and undo some things,
| | 00:50 | wonder what I should do, try few
different things, and overall try and come to a
| | 00:54 | satisfactory Black and White conclusion.
| | 00:56 | So let's get started.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Image conversion: Brandenburger Tor, Berlin, Germany| 00:02 | This photo of the Brandenburg Tor in Berlin,
Germany, started off as quite a low-resolution file.
| | 00:07 | As you can see over here in the Info tab,
it's only 4339 x 1514, that's just 6.6 megapixels.
| | 00:14 | The original file, if we look at the Info panel,
actually came off of a Canon EOS 5D, that's the original 5D.
| | 00:20 | Now it's only 6.6 megapixels here because it's been cropped.
| | 00:24 | The original is a bit bigger than that,
but certainly nowhere near the 9000 pixel wide
| | 00:28 | file size that we ultimately want to get to.
| | 00:31 | So for this particular photo, once it
was scaled up, it was scaled up over 200%.
| | 00:35 | Here we have the version of the image
that was scaled using Perfect Resize.
| | 00:39 | As you can see from the pop-up window,
the pixel size now measures 9000 pixels wide.
| | 00:43 | And if we look at it quite closely,
I'll just zoom in to 100% in here,
| | 00:48 | you'll see that this file is a bit chunky.
| | 00:50 | This is not quite as sharp or crisp as
any of the other photos we'll be working with,
| | 00:54 | but I'm using this one just to show
that even lower resolution files scaled
| | 00:58 | up to massive size, once treated with
the black and white effect and having a
| | 01:01 | little grain added to them, can
still give you an excellent result.
| | 01:04 | At the end of the day, this is not the
sharpest print that was hanging on the
| | 01:09 | studio wall, however, it was still a
beautiful print that many people enjoyed.
| | 01:12 | To open your photo in the plug-in of choice,
simply right-click on it and choose Edit with Plug-in.
| | 01:15 | And in my case, I'll be using Silver Efex Pro 2.
| | 01:20 | But here is something to realize about this file.
| | 01:22 | See this error that just popped up?
It says could not open the image file.
| | 01:26 | That's because even though I have my
preferences set to create a 16-bit TIFF file,
| | 01:30 | when opening in an external editor, for reasons
we'll come to, this file has come back as a PSD.
| | 01:36 | Next plug-ins want to have TIFF files, not PSD files.
| | 01:40 | So how do we get to a PSD file on the first place?
| | 01:43 | Going back to the resize process, because for
this image I choose to use Perfect Photo Suite
| | 01:47 | and then Perfect Resize to scale it, Perfect Photo Suite
| | 01:50 | automatically creates a PSD file, regardless of the
setting that you have in your Aperture Preferences.
| | 01:55 | It does that because Perfect Photo Suite
allows you to create layered files.
| | 01:58 | However it does at least honor the 8-bit
versus 16-bit choice. So it has
| | 02:02 | created a 16-bit PSD file, but again that PSD
file can't be opened inside of Next plugins.
| | 02:08 | There's a couple of ways we can go
about doing this, but the easiest way is
| | 02:10 | actually incredibly simple.
| | 02:12 | What you might think is the most obvious
would be to simply open this up in
| | 02:15 | Photoshop and resave it as a TIFF file,
but then you need to reimport it in and
| | 02:18 | that adds an extra step.
| | 02:20 | Instead, all I have to do is trick Aperture
into thinking that this is not an
| | 02:24 | externally edited file. And I know that
it thinks that it is, because of the little
| | 02:27 | target icon right here, that's the one
that tells me that it's an external file.
| | 02:32 | So to trick Aperture into thinking that it isn't,
I can make any adjustment to it,
| | 02:35 | for example, crop it or anything else like that,
but of course I don't want to
| | 02:38 | change the file, it's ready to go.
| | 02:40 | So instead, I simply select it and under
the Photos menu, choose Duplicate Version.
| | 02:46 | This isn't going to duplicate the actual file itself,
it's just going to make a new reference to it.
| | 02:49 | And as you can see that new reference
no longer has the target icon.
| | 02:53 | Now when I right-click on it
and choose to Edit with Plug-in,
| | 02:57 | Aperture will create a new 16-bit TIFF file
based off of that 16-bit PSD.
| | 03:01 | You're not going to lose anything by doing this.
| | 03:04 | However, just keep in mind that when
you come back to Aperture later on,
| | 03:07 | you'll have a little bit of clean up to do.
| | 03:08 | You don't need this extra version laying around
and you may not even need the
| | 03:11 | PSD file that you started with anymore.
| | 03:15 | Usually when working with one of these
plugins, I like to start by going through
| | 03:18 | the presets and looking to see if there's
anything that I like as a starting point.
| | 03:22 | It also can help to give me some creative ideas.
| | 03:25 | Because I'm going to be creating a
whole gallery hanging of these, I do want
| | 03:29 | there to be some consistency across them.
| | 03:31 | So I am going to want them to look
somewhat similar, but of course each image is
| | 03:35 | going to be treated individually,
based off the content of that photo.
| | 03:38 | I quite like the way this one is starting off,
it's called High Structure
| | 03:41 | (harsh) preset 5. I'm going to go
ahead and mark that as a favorite by just
| | 03:44 | tapping on the Star icon there,
maybe we'll come back to that.
| | 03:49 | These High Key ones aren't very good.
| | 03:50 | We can see this already in the preview,
so I'm not even going to look at the rest of those.
| | 03:54 | That's too dark.
| | 03:56 | That's pretty interesting as well, maybe
I'll save that one to come back to.
| | 04:03 | I think I have a pretty good starting point.
| | 04:07 | Let's go ahead and just look at
the favorites and try these two out.
| | 04:14 | I think between the two of these,
I like the high structure the most.
| | 04:20 | I do like the darkness of this one
called Push Process, but there's a bit of
| | 04:23 | detail that I'm getting in the structured
one that I really like, so I think I'll
| | 04:26 | start with this and then just add on to it.
| | 04:29 | Overall, I do want the image to be a bit brighter.
| | 04:31 | This is a little bit too dark.
| | 04:33 | Now that I'm done with the presets,
I'm just going to hide that Preset window,
| | 04:35 | so I get a little bit bigger working space.
| | 04:38 | Overall this image is a little bit too
bright for my taste. I want to take the
| | 04:41 | overall brightness down a little bit.
| | 04:43 | So let's just see if I can do that
simply with the Brightness slider.
| | 04:47 | Of course, it's always going to depend on
what's in your image whether this
| | 04:49 | will work or not, but I think that's
going to work out quite well;
| | 04:52 | bring it down just a little bit.
| | 04:54 | The next thing I want to focus on is the background.
| | 04:57 | The sky in here of course is dark.
| | 04:59 | This was shot at night and I want the sky
to go completely black.
| | 05:02 | So one way that we can make sure that
the sky is actually totally black,
| | 05:05 | and going to go pure black in print,
is to go down here under Loupe & Histogram
| | 05:09 | and at the very bottom,
you'll see that you can enable various zones.
| | 05:13 | As you roll over each zone, the image is highlighted
with what parts of the image fall into that zone.
| | 05:18 | Zone 0 is pure black, absolutely no
detail whatsoever. And that's what I want
| | 05:22 | my sky to be. I can roll over and see that
my sky is black and I can also click on it.
| | 05:28 | By clicking on it that locks it on and turns that on there.
| | 05:30 | So for example, let's say I took the brightness up a little bit.
| | 05:34 | Actually let's take the brightness up pretty high.
| | 05:36 | You'll see here that my sky is no longer pure black.
| | 05:40 | Now obviously, I can see that even without turning this on.
| | 05:43 | However, having this enabled, allows us to see
for sure what zone something is falling into.
| | 05:48 | When I'm creating black and white images,
especially for print, I really want to make sure
| | 05:51 | that every zone is represented as it should be.
| | 05:54 | Of course again every image is going to be different,
| | 05:57 | so not every photo is going to have
Zones 10 or 9 or maybe even 8.
| | 06:00 | But chances are you're going to want to
find a conversion, that's going to fill
| | 06:03 | up pretty much every zone in here.
| | 06:05 | So let's go ahead and darken the image
back to the way I had it,
| | 06:10 | down to let's say right about there.
As we can see the sky here is fully black
| | 06:16 | in the background. Between these two center
pillars it's nice and black, but there is
| | 06:20 | something happening in between these
pillars here, probably some kind of a
| | 06:23 | streetlight that was in the background,
that's lighting up the sky.
| | 06:26 | So let's go ahead and take a closer look.
| | 06:28 | We'll tap the spacebar to zoom in and
from here, you can hold down the spacebar
| | 06:32 | again and pan around or you can use
the navigator to drag around your scene.
| | 06:36 | This is zoomed in a little bit too close on the screen.
| | 06:40 | I'm going to go ahead and back up to 50%,
so I can see it a little bit more at once.
| | 06:44 | Let me just disable the hashing really quick.
| | 06:46 | Notice by the way as well, that as I
roll over additional zones, I can actually
| | 06:50 | turn on more than one zone at once, so
for example let's say I want to look at
| | 06:54 | Zone 0 and 2 and 4 simultaneously, I can do that.
| | 06:57 | Now if I want to turn those off,
instead of having to back in here and
| | 07:01 | individually turn each one on and off,
I can simply tap on the checkbox here
| | 07:05 | to temporarily disable all those different zones
without having to reenable each one individually.
| | 07:10 | In my case though, I'm just looking at Zone 0.
| | 07:13 | So this part of the scene here I'd like to make it a bit darker.
| | 07:16 | The way that I think I'll do that
is utilizing the selective adjustments
| | 07:20 | or control points that you have
inside of the Silver Efex program.
| | 07:23 | To use it, I'll just grab a point, click on
the part of the scene that I want to darken,
| | 07:27 | adjust the size of that circle there
and lower the brightness on that.
| | 07:32 | So here's the big question.
| | 07:35 | What exactly am I darkening here?
| | 07:37 | You'll notice as I darken this down,
obviously it's darkening the background,
| | 07:40 | but it is also affecting the columns here a little bit,
which I may not want it to do.
| | 07:45 | So first of all let's see what exactly I'm affecting.
| | 07:47 | To do that, open up the Control Points
and next to the Control Point that you
| | 07:51 | just added, enable the mask.
| | 07:53 | That'll show us exactly what's being affected in here.
| | 07:56 | White is being affected completely,
black is being affected not at all
| | 08:00 | and anything in-between is going to be
affected slightly depending on how gray it is.
| | 08:04 | The lighter it is, the more it's going to be affected.
| | 08:06 | These control points are sort of masking
that allow you to create these complex masks
| | 08:10 | without actually having to draw anything in.
| | 08:12 | But as you can see it is spilling over
and affecting the columns here
| | 08:15 | and I really don't want it to do that.
| | 08:17 | So what I'll do next is add a couple of
protection points onto these columns here.
| | 08:21 | By adding another control point onto the
column itself and not actually adjusting it,
| | 08:25 | it's going to basically protect that area from this adjustment.
| | 08:30 | Notice that what I'm looking at here
is just the mask that's being built.
| | 08:34 | Again, white is affected, black is not.
| | 08:36 | Notice down here that I haven't enabled
the mask view for the second control point.
| | 08:40 | If I turn that on, that's the actual mask
that's being created by both of these points,
| | 08:44 | but remember I'm not going to adjust this one,
I'm only going to adjust this one.
| | 08:49 | So if I turn that off, I can see that
this control point is only going to
| | 08:54 | affect this area and this control point is
going to block or protect this column here.
| | 08:58 | I may want to add another one over here,
because as we can see I'm getting a
| | 09:02 | little bit of spill onto that as well.
| | 09:04 | I could just create another control point
or I can take the existing one and
| | 09:08 | Option+drag that over to duplicate that.
| | 09:12 | You may want to adjust the size of that
as well to make sure that you're not
| | 09:16 | getting too much spill into the areas that you don't want.
| | 09:19 | So here for example, I am protecting
part of the sky here, which probably isn't
| | 09:22 | really what I want. It really
just comes down to a bouncing act.
| | 09:26 | This is probably a bit big as well.
| | 09:28 | Let's see if we can shrink that down a
little bit and we can move this around
| | 09:32 | to see if there is a better place to position it.
| | 09:35 | Of course, what I could also do is take
this control point, Option+drag it over to here
| | 09:39 | and get a more solid adjustment on that
particular black part of the scene there,
| | 09:42 | but then once again I'm going to have to add
other control points here to block this out.
| | 09:48 | Tapping the spacebar will zoom you in or out,
so if you are zoomed in partially,
| | 09:58 | it'll zoom you back all the way out.
If you tap it again, it's going to bring
| | 10:02 | you back to where you left off.
| | 10:04 | I think that's pretty good there.
| | 10:05 | So essentially, what I am going to do is
control this point and this point here.
| | 10:09 | In fact, before I do that, let's go back
to looking at the entire scene
| | 10:15 | and I want to see if I need to do the same
thing to another part of the image.
| | 10:20 | Since I had a bright light over here, I may have
the same thing over here between these columns.
| | 10:24 | So let's take a closer look in here.
I'll go ahead and turn on my hashes here.
| | 10:29 | Sure enough I can see the same thing
happening in here, not as much as
| | 10:33 | it was on the other side, but there's still
a little bit of light spill that I want to get rid off.
| | 10:38 | So once again, I'll just grab a control point,
click on there to add it.
| | 10:42 | Let's bring the size of that down a bit.
We can darken that and now you can see
| | 10:46 | the background is pure black, but
once again I've probably affected these
| | 10:49 | columns a little bit as well.
| | 10:51 | So let's just go ahead and hide that.
And go into the Mask view and add another
| | 10:59 | control point to the column here to protect that.
| | 11:01 | I think I'll Option+drag this down to the bottom here,
add another one right about there
| | 11:06 | and a little bit of spill over here I think is okay.
| | 11:12 | Well, let's just go ahead, get rid of that too, there we go.
| | 11:17 | We can see a similar effect here on
the right-hand side of this column.
| | 11:20 | The dark space back there isn't being
affected quite as much, but I think, as we
| | 11:24 | saw before, by darkening this, that was
getting enough of it. So let's just see.
| | 11:28 | Let's go ahead and turn off the Mask views in here,
turn our hashes back on and
| | 11:36 | sure enough that's pretty much dark enough.
| | 11:38 | Well, you know if I really want to,
let's just go ahead and take this,
| | 11:42 | Option+drag it over to there and make sure that
that is fully black as well.
| | 11:47 | That looks good. We can see that it is.
| | 11:48 | Let's pan over here to the left again
and make sure we had a proper result here.
| | 11:52 | So it looks like I still need to darken this
just a little bit to fill that in.
| | 11:57 | So I'll take the Brightness down a little bit more,
maybe on this one as well.
| | 12:03 | And again here I'm not even looking
at the image, I'm looking at the lines,
| | 12:06 | showing me what is fallen into Zone 0.
The black is to black that's going to be on this file.
| | 12:13 | Zoom back out and to hide any of these points,
simply take your mouse off of the pictures.
| | 12:17 | You'll see that the points disappear,
except for the one that's currently selected.
| | 12:21 | So if you want to hide all of them,
just click anywhere on the picture to
| | 12:25 | deselect all the points, roll your mouse
away and now you can see just the image
| | 12:29 | without those points on it.
| | 12:30 | My background is totally black.
| | 12:31 | Let's go ahead and hide those hashes again.
| | 12:34 | I think that looks pretty good.
| | 12:35 | If you ever want to compare the image,
you can simply hold down on the Compare button
| | 12:39 | up here and that will toggle you back
and forth between the untreated
| | 12:42 | black and white, so basically a native black
and white as it was converted by default
| | 12:46 | and the conversion that you have done.
| | 12:48 | What you can also do is view a Side-by-side
or you can split the preview.
| | 12:53 | This is quite cool as it allows you
to grab this divider line in between them
| | 12:57 | and simply run it back and forth, so you can
easily see the difference between a particular area.
| | 13:02 | This can be quite handy if you're trying
to decide if you've overdone it,
| | 13:05 | or maybe you need to back off on an effect
or if you actually want to add more to it.
| | 13:10 | Like many things, you should probably view
it at 100% before making a final decision.
| | 13:14 | But here for example if I was looking
at the texture and the column,
| | 13:18 | I could see that so far I've added some nice definition
in there and I think it overall looks pretty good.
| | 13:22 | And really take a look at the sky and
the background there; we have gone from
| | 13:26 | this slightly washed out sky to pure black,
which is what I want, great!
| | 13:33 | Since the monument on top of the Tor
is such an important part of it,
| | 13:37 | I want to take a closer look at that and make sure
that I have all the detail in there that I want.
| | 13:42 | We can see that there is some kind of
a spotlight on top of this monument.
| | 13:46 | This has gotten very bright in here.
| | 13:48 | What I'll do is I'll go through the
various zones in here, starting from 10
| | 13:51 | and working my way down to see exactly where
this statue here is falling into the range.
| | 13:56 | Zone 10, keep in mind, is really
reserved for specular highlights.
| | 13:58 | This is the absolute brightest part of your image
and there is going to be no detail there.
| | 14:03 | You probably don't want anything in Zone 10
unless of course you actually have specular highlights.
| | 14:07 | Now before we can start viewing these,
I need to turn this back on.
| | 14:10 | So let's turn that on.
| | 14:12 | I'll go ahead and hide Zone 0 and let's
go ahead and start by turning on Zone 10.
| | 14:16 | So right away, I can see that I have a
little bit of Zone 10 showing up in here.
| | 14:21 | Now there may not be anything we can
do about it. There's not a whole lot in there,
| | 14:25 | but let's go ahead and zoom into a 100%
to really make sure. I think chances are
| | 14:29 | we're not going to find any detail in there,
but maybe we can drop this down just a little bit
| | 14:33 | to get it down into Zone 9.
| | 14:36 | Let's see what's in Zone 9 currently.
| | 14:38 | It's quite a bit showing up in Zone 9 and
that probably is a little bit too bright.
| | 14:43 | Zone 9 is really reserved for things
like bright white snow with the sun on it.
| | 14:47 | So essentially the brightest white that you
would print that still has some texture to it.
| | 14:50 | And that's probably a little bit too bright.
| | 14:54 | I really don't think I want these following into Zone 9.
| | 14:55 | I probably want to knock this down, so those hit Zone 8.
| | 14:58 | Zone 8, as we can see has quite a bit as well,
but of course if we darken this,
| | 15:03 | we're going to bring some of that down
from 8 into 7 and so on.
| | 15:07 | What I really want to do again is get rid of Zone 10
and get rid of most of Zone 9.
| | 15:12 | So let's see what we can do.
| | 15:14 | I am going to go ahead and use another
control point and I'll just click and add
| | 15:18 | this right into the center of the image here,
adjust the size of this sphere here
| | 15:22 | to cover that whole statue and of course
as before, we can turn on the masking
| | 15:26 | here just to see exactly what's being affected.
| | 15:28 | So as before you can see that this is not
going to affect the entire statue equally.
| | 15:33 | The brightest parts or the whitest parts
are what's going to be affected the most
| | 15:37 | and the darker they get, the least they'll be affected.
| | 15:39 | I could move this around so I get
a little bit more of the image affected,
| | 15:40 | say something like that.
| | 15:45 | But I think I'll start off with just taking the brightest
spots, darkening those and we'll see what happens.
| | 15:49 | So let's see, let's go ahead and turn off the masking,
make sure our zones are still turned on
| | 15:55 | and then I'll just take the brightness down just a little bit.
| | 15:59 | I have actually taken it down quite a ways there
and you can see that we've
| | 16:05 | now taken everything out of Zones 9 and 10.
I think this actually looks pretty good.
| | 16:11 | Let's go ahead and see now what we have in Zone 8.
| | 16:14 | You can see that's pretty good.
| | 16:15 | It's quite a bit in Zone 8, Zone 7 and 6 and 5 and 4.
| | 16:20 | Yeah, this is great we have a really
nice good even range in here.
| | 16:23 | This statue is basically being represented
all the way from Zones 2 up to Zone 8.
| | 16:28 | Nine is gone and 10 is gone and that's what I wanted.
| | 16:32 | So I'm actually quite pleased with that.
I think that looks awesome.
| | 16:35 | Now as you pan around the image some more,
you can really start to notice
| | 16:39 | especially since we've added some structure
to the file and really kind of sharpened it up a bit
| | 16:42 | using the structure tools and that of course came out of
| | 16:46 | the default preset that we choose.
| | 16:47 | You can see that there's a little bit of
chunking in here, that's a result or
| | 16:52 | an artifact from the scaling and I'd like to try
and eliminate that or at least reduce it as much as I can.
| | 16:57 | The best way to do that, as I talked about
previously, is to add some grain to the file.
| | 17:02 | I do want these to look like somewhat grainy, not super
grainy, but somewhat grainy black and white prints.
| | 17:08 | So if we go down here and look at the
Film Types, you'll see that we have Grain,
| | 17:12 | Sensitivity and Levels and Curves and
grain is really what I'm working with.
| | 17:16 | If you have watched my other training video
on Creative Adjustments with Nick
| | 17:19 | Plug-ins, you may remember that I spent
some time talking about the various
| | 17:22 | Film Types in here and how these
can be really useful starting points.
| | 17:26 | However, I'm not a big fan of using them
after you have already made other
| | 17:30 | adjustments, because they change
the image quite dramatically.
| | 17:32 | If you are going to play with the Film Types,
I recommend that you start with these.
| | 17:36 | This time I chose to start with the presets,
so I'm not even going to play with the Film Types at all.
| | 17:41 | I'm just going to go ahead and add in the Grain
here that I want to make this image look good.
| | 17:47 | So you'll notice that we have
Grain per pixel slider starting off at 500,
| | 17:50 | that's the maximum. If I take this all
the way down to one, you'll see that the
| | 17:55 | image gets incredibly grainy.
| | 17:56 | That is absolutely not what I want.
| | 17:57 | As you can clearly see here,
we've really just destroyed the image.
| | 18:00 | Let's go ahead and turn off the Zone
view here and you can see here that this
| | 18:05 | image is clearly not any good anymore.
| | 18:06 | And this is another point, you want
to make sure that you're always viewing your image,
| | 18:10 | when you're adding grain, at a 100%,
because frankly zoomed out,
| | 18:13 | that doesn't look too bad, I mean it's a
little grainy, but you know with this size
| | 18:17 | it doesn't look awful, but of course when you zoom
in to a 100% then you realize just how bad it is.
| | 18:23 | So that's just too much.
| | 18:24 | Back up to 500, nothing applied to it, so
now we just need to find that happy medium.
| | 18:28 | This is all about experimentation and
personal taste. So there's around 400 it's
| | 18:33 | looking pretty good. It really has
hidden away a lot of the artifact and that we
| | 18:37 | got from the scaling, so that's looking pretty good.
| | 18:40 | Let's just try and bring it down a little bit
more and see how that looks.
| | 18:44 | That's looking good, but to me
this is getting a little bit too much.
| | 18:49 | I think this is a little bit more grain that I want in there.
| | 18:52 | Let's go about 350 kind of split the difference
between the last two.
| | 18:55 | I am no longer seeing the telltale artifacting
from the scaling.
| | 19:03 | I'm seeing a nice softness to the grain, enough
texture to it that I think is going to look good in print.
| | 19:08 | Now another thing that I noticed while
I was in here; see the black sky here has
| | 19:15 | always little white spots in it
and that's noise from the original file
| | 19:19 | that has been showing up in
the black and white conversion.
| | 19:21 | Because this is so dark, my grain
isn't really filling in this space here.
| | 19:25 | So I think what I want to do is, even
though this is pure black, there are
| | 19:28 | obviously little white speckles on here.
| | 19:30 | I think I'm going to take another control point
and just make sure this background
| | 19:34 | is taking completely to black.
Let's see how that'll work.
| | 19:39 | I'll go back up and grab another control point,
click on the black background there.
| | 19:43 | Let's make that pretty big and actually
I want to look at exactly what I'm affecting there.
| | 19:49 | Here we go, and I'm going to take
another one of these, I'll just hold down
| | 19:55 | the Option key and drag this over.
Look at sky in there and in fact,
| | 20:00 | I'm going to take one more and put it right about there,
but I'm going to make that a bit smaller.
| | 20:05 | I want to make sure I have got
that background nicely isolated.
| | 20:08 | We can clearly see that we are overlapping
onto other parts of the scene here,
| | 20:12 | which I don't want to do.
| | 20:13 | So let's just add a few more control points
on here to protect it.
| | 20:17 | So add one there,
Option+drag that down to there.
| | 20:21 | This is not an exact science.
| | 20:24 | The beautiful thing is about using
these tools is that you don't have to be perfect.
| | 20:28 | The way that the gradation falls off
from this sphere or circle of influence
| | 20:34 | is being affected, it works out really, really well
and makes for a very clean final image.
| | 20:39 | You don't end up with any kind of lines
or halos around the darkening that you're doing.
| | 20:45 | So really what I want to do is make sure
that my background is selected,
| | 20:49 | the foreground is not,
and I think we'll be good to go.
| | 20:52 | I'm going to add another one on to
this sculpture here. Let's go ahead and
| | 20:56 | add another control point right there,
and maybe I'll Option+drag that one over to here,
| | 21:00 | just to really make sure because
I don't want to darken up the horses there.
| | 21:09 | We can also see in here that I've actually
managed to protect a lot of the grain in there.
| | 21:14 | That's probably not what I want to do.
| | 21:16 | So let's find that original control point.
Where did that go? There it is.
| | 21:20 | I'll zoom into that and perhaps I want to
move this right on top of one of those
| | 21:27 | noise points, maybe that will help me
to get rid of the noise that's in there.
| | 21:31 | Let's try another one, how about this one there?
| | 21:33 | You'll see now that's quite interesting.
| | 21:36 | By doing that, remember white is what's selected,
| | 21:41 | I now have a good white selection
on all of these little noise points there.
| | 21:45 | The background, which was already black
is not completely selected,
| | 21:48 | but that's okay because it was already black.
| | 21:50 | I think that's actually pretty good.
| | 21:51 | Let's go back over here and look at this one.
| | 21:54 | I forget sometimes when you're panning around
and zooming around in the Silver Efex Pro,
| | 21:58 | you can't just point the mouse at where
you want to zoom and tap the spacebar.
| | 22:02 | I haven't quite figured out the easiest way to do this.
I guess I'll just pan over like so.
| | 22:08 | So remember these points here,
these noise points are black,
| | 22:13 | which means they're not going to be affected,
which is the opposite of what I want.
| | 22:17 | So let's go ahead and grab this again
and position on top of one of those,
| | 22:21 | see if we can find a bigger one.
| | 22:25 | That's pretty good.
| | 22:26 | It doesn't have quite all of them.
| | 22:28 | Maybe I'll Option+drag this up and drag it
under one of these other ones here.
| | 22:33 | I think we're getting somewhere.
Let's see how this looks, let's do one more.
| | 22:42 | Let's take a look at the control point
that we added up here at the top,
| | 22:47 | and I'll do the same thing there, like so.
| | 22:52 | Okay, so what I have now is 1, 2, 3, 4
different control points that are
| | 22:58 | affecting the sky and specifically the noise in the sky.
| | 23:02 | I want to basically control all of these the same.
So what I can do is select multiple points,
| | 23:06 | just click and drag over them, hold down
the Command key to add to that selection.
| | 23:09 | So there's all four of those
and now any adjustment
| | 23:13 | that I make to one of these is going
to affect all of them at the same time.
| | 23:15 | Let's go ahead and get rid of the masking.
| | 23:18 | Here are the ones that we just added.
| | 23:21 | We're going to turn those off and in just
a moment the original image will come back.
| | 23:27 | There it is, and now I'm going to ahead and darken it.
| | 23:30 | By the way with these four points selected,
if I want to group them together,
| | 23:34 | I can do that by simply clicking here on the Group icon.
| | 23:37 | That creates a group of all four of those.
| | 23:39 | Let's go ahead and zoom back in.
| | 23:41 | Take a look over this area here.
And let's take the Brightness slider down
| | 23:46 | and see what happens. Check that out.
| | 23:53 | All of those little spots have just disappeared.
| | 23:55 | Now did that overall affected rest of the image?
No, it doesn't look like it,
| | 24:01 | might have darkened up a little bit.
| | 24:03 | Let's see I can toggle Group 1 off,
so let's just turn this off entirely.
| | 24:07 | I did affect the image a little bit,
but not in a way that I'm unhappy with.
| | 24:12 | So I think that's pretty awesome.
| | 24:13 | Now I have got a sky that is essentially pure,
pure black. What I'll do a a final step
| | 24:17 | before I go to print it is run through
and look for any stray little spots
| | 24:22 | that manage to survive this process
and I'll just clone them out
| | 24:26 | like you would any other spot on the scene.
| | 24:32 | One more point that I want to check on
this scene before I go to print,
| | 24:36 | I want to zoom back in here and make sure
that I have good detail inside of this
| | 24:40 | brightly lit part of the structure in here.
It looks pretty good here, but let's
| | 24:44 | just check our zones to make sure,
so we'll turn that back on and Zone 10,
| | 24:48 | we can see there is a tiny bit of highlighting in there.
| | 24:51 | Now when we turn that on, notice
that we have Zone 10 showing up here.
| | 24:55 | These are actual lamps that are inside
of the structure, so I think that's okay.
| | 24:58 | We're all right with that being there.
| | 25:00 | So 9, there's a little bit
and then 8, of course, is where most of it is.
| | 25:05 | I really kind of want to get this stuff
out of Zone 9, so let's just turn that on
| | 25:09 | and let's go ahead and turn Zone 10 on as well.
| | 25:12 | So Zone 9 and Zone 10 are both highlighted.
| | 25:14 | I want to darken this just a tiny, tiny bit, because
I really don't want anything to get too bright in there.
| | 25:20 | So to do that again, I'm going to use
these control points. So let's add one here,
| | 25:24 | put it right about there and just darken it
tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny bit.
| | 25:28 | I think that's pretty good.
| | 25:34 | I'll do the same thing on the other side here.
| | 25:37 | Let me just Option+drag this control point over here,
zoom back into it.
| | 25:41 | So now there are of course a couple of
little points on there, but I'm okay with that.
| | 25:50 | It's really that I just didn't want to have a
big, huge swath of this that was too bright.
| | 25:55 | You may want to do something like take
these same points and add them along here.
| | 25:58 | In fact, why don't we do that.
We can see that there is the little bit of
| | 26:03 | brighter area in there. Let's just zoom
into that and add a new point in there.
| | 26:07 | Good call, so we can see here this is a little bit too much.
| | 26:10 | Let's just take a control point,
add that there and darken that a little.
| | 26:14 | Let's do the other side as well, take that
brighter spot and just dark in it a little.
| | 26:34 | Keep in mind a little bit of patience
may be needed depending how fast your
| | 26:44 | machine is and how big the file is that you're working with.
| | 26:47 | Typically on most high resolution files
all the work that you're doing here
| | 26:50 | will happen virtually in real time.
But keep in mind that this is now a much
| | 26:54 | larger file than you're probably normally
used to working with, since I have scaled it up.
| | 26:58 | So again a little bit of extra patience may be in order.
| | 27:01 | Let's do another compare. Yup!
| | 27:02 | I like the way this is turned out, I'm ready to go.
| | 27:09 | Once you're done, simply click on Save.
| | 27:11 | Now before you do actually, because
we've put a fair amount of effort into the
| | 27:15 | over all general brightening of this,
you may want to save this Preset.
| | 27:19 | It could be a good starting point
to work with your other images,
| | 27:22 | especially if you're trying to make a consistent showing.
| | 27:24 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 27:26 | I'm going to bring my Presets back up,
go to Custom here and click on Add Preset.
| | 27:30 | Now it's important to realize that the Preset
is not going to save all your
| | 27:34 | Control Points, because remember,
all of these Control Points only are
| | 27:36 | effective for this particular image,
you can't add these Control Points onto another image.
| | 27:40 | So we're just going to go ahead and call this
Black and White Gallery 1 (B&W Gallery 1).
| | 27:48 | And I'll be able to use that in future work
to see if it's a good starting point or not.
| | 27:52 | Now that that Preset has been saved,
I'll just go ahead and click on Save here
| | 27:57 | to render this file back to Aperture.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Image conversion: Zebra at Lake Nakuru, Kenya| 00:02 | This photo we'll be printed at a full
20 x 30 inches, well I guess it's 30
| | 00:06 | inches tall and 20 inches wide.
| | 00:07 | And you can see over here that this one
is already been scaled up to 54 megapixels.
| | 00:11 | You may have also notice that this
image has a white border on it already.
| | 00:15 | So as per the previous video, I open
this file into Photoshop and added the
| | 00:19 | white border, but before that I had to
crop it down to the exact right ratio
| | 00:23 | to make sure that we end up with a final
6000 x 9000 pixel image. Again that's
| | 00:28 | giving us 54 megapixels and that's
giving us a 20 x 30 inch image at 300 dpi.
| | 00:34 | Notice the file size on these does get
quite large. This is a 16-bit file, so
| | 00:37 | we're looking at over 800 MB just for this image alone.
| | 00:41 | This file is also PSD file as we
can see from up here in the top left.
| | 00:46 | However, you may remember from the
previous video, that when we're working with
| | 00:49 | this image here we couldn't just open
the original PSD file directly into Silver Efex Pro,
| | 00:53 | because Aperture is treating as an external file
and it had the little target icon on it telling it so.
| | 00:59 | So when I try to open it, it was opening
the exact file, not a new version of it
| | 01:04 | into Nik Silver Efex Pro and it couldn't handle it
because it was a PSD.
| | 01:07 | So remember we had to duplicate the
version to create a versioned file even
| | 01:11 | though nothing had changed and then
open that up into Nik Silver Efex which of
| | 01:14 | course at that point a TIFF was created.
| | 01:16 | Here even though we're dealing with the PSD file
notice that the target icon is not there.
| | 01:22 | I honestly can tell you exactly why it's not there
that maybe that I reimported
| | 01:25 | this at another time or simply do some
other editing to it inside of Aperture,
| | 01:30 | but suffice it to say for whatever reason
without the target icon there that
| | 01:33 | means that even though it is a PSD file,
I can go ahead and open this directly
| | 01:37 | into Silver Efex Pro without having
to make a new version of it first.
| | 01:41 | At this point a 16-bit TIFF file will
be created and since it was already a
| | 01:45 | 16-bit PSD file there is really nothing happening
to the image except for file format change.
| | 01:50 | Once the image is open you can start
going to the presets as we did in the
| | 01:55 | previous video and just trying out all
the different variations to see if you
| | 01:58 | find a starting point you like.
| | 01:59 | However, remember in the previous video
we also saved off the preset that we had
| | 02:03 | created as a custom preset, so this
could be a really good starting point
| | 02:07 | allowing us to start off with last image left off.
| | 02:10 | This doesn't mean that we're done, not by any stretch,
but it does at least gives a starting point.
| | 02:14 | And again since this is for gallery hanging,
chances are you want the images to
| | 02:17 | look consistent all the way across.
| | 02:19 | So for example things like the grain
or noise that has been added might be a
| | 02:23 | good idea to leave alone, but again of
course you want to zoom in closely to
| | 02:27 | make sure that is not too much or
too little for this particular image.
| | 02:31 | Overall this image looks quite good.
I don't think there's a whole lot that I'm
| | 02:34 | going to want to change to it.
| | 02:36 | However, I would like to try to darken
the background; the value here's a little
| | 02:40 | bit too bright and to me it's distracting.
I want to see if I can darken this up,
| | 02:44 | making the Zebra's head pop out a little bit more.
| | 02:47 | I probably don't need to adjust the
overall brightness or contrast, because I do
| | 02:50 | think its look pretty good right now.
| | 02:52 | But in fact, before I commit to that,
I think what I'll do is I'll check the zones
| | 02:57 | to make sure that I am in a good bright range in here.
| | 03:00 | Now keep in mind this is white from the
zebra stripes. This part of the face is
| | 03:04 | not in full sun, so I'm not going to expect
this to get although way up to Zone 9.
| | 03:09 | This part of the zebra's fur however
is in complete sun, so I might like that
| | 03:13 | to go all the way up to 9.
But I certainly don't wanted to go to 10,
| | 03:18 | so let's go ahead and start with that.
| | 03:19 | I'm going to go ahead and zoom in,
since I've excluded the brightest spot of the
| | 03:23 | image here and we'll see what we've got.
| | 03:25 | We'll go over to the loupe and histogram area
and scroll through the zones and there's Zone 10.
| | 03:30 | Now sure enough if I tap on Zone 10 to
lock that in, we can see that we do have
| | 03:35 | some image here that is in Zone 10.
So that's definitely a bit too bright.
| | 03:39 | I don't want to go that bright in there.
Let's just back off of this for a moment here.
| | 03:43 | Oh by the way, if you this white border here,
it's always going to show up in Zone 10,
| | 03:47 | because of course that is pure white and that's fine.
| | 03:50 | So it looks like the area that's
being effected by Zone 10 is quite small.
| | 03:54 | I can't even see it when I zoomed out.
So that just gives you another indication
| | 03:58 | that it really is important to zoom in
all the time when looking at your work.
| | 04:02 | Let's see if we can see it at 50%,
allowing us to see it little bit more of the
| | 04:06 | image at once; yeah that's okay.
| | 04:08 | I know that I need to back this off a little bit.
Let's see how we are in Zone 9.
| | 04:13 | I think Zone 9 is going to be okay there,
but I really don't want to have anything in 10.
| | 04:17 | So let's just go ahead and lock 10
and let's see if I can ge away with
| | 04:21 | taking the whole brightness down.
I kind of think probably not, because
| | 04:25 | I don't want to make this too dark. So I will
probably end up using one of the control points.
| | 04:29 | But let's just see what happens anyway.
| | 04:32 | So we'll zoom back in and take the Brightness
down until those little blue hash marks go away.
| | 04:36 | So we've taken the Brightness down to -22%.
Let's see how the rest of the image looks.
| | 04:40 | I think the whole thing got a bit too dark,
so I really don't want to do that.
| | 04:45 | Let's back up. I'm going to go ahead
take the brightness back up
| | 04:49 | and then I'll effect this super bright area here
with a control point.
| | 04:52 | In fact, why don't I just go ahead
and reset the brightness,
| | 04:56 | double tap on that to bring it back to 0.
| | 04:57 | Why don't we take a look and see where
these white stripes are in the zones.
| | 05:01 | So I'm just going to roll my mouse over
the zone areas. I'm not clicking at any of them.
| | 05:05 | I'm just rolling on them to see where the white is.
| | 05:09 | So we can see there that part of the
white stripes are falling to Zone 7
| | 05:13 | and then Zone 6 and little bit in 5.
So really it's 6 and 7 where those are falling.
| | 05:17 | I think that's probably okay.
| | 05:19 | While it is white in the shade, and I think
that 6 and 7 is probably a good spot for that,
| | 05:23 | going up to 8 that's about where
I want the brighter spots to be.
| | 05:27 | And then 9 of course, is going to be the maximum,
and again, I don't want anything in 10.
| | 05:32 | So let's go ahead and turn on Zone 10
so we make sure we're looking in fact closely.
| | 05:36 | That's locked in.
| | 05:37 | We'll zoom into 100% here and over this part,
actually let's go ahead and zoom back out to 50.
| | 05:41 | And I'm going to go ahead and
add a control point on to this.
| | 05:46 | So control point, click on the brightest white area,
because I want to affect that part of the scene.
| | 05:49 | So let's grab on that, I'm going to bring this size down.
| | 05:53 | By default, they're created quite largely,
so you want to scale that down a bit.
| | 05:57 | And let's go ahead and look at the mask
and see what we're actually affecting in here.
| | 06:01 | As described before, remember that what
the mask shows us is anything that's pure white
| | 06:05 | is being affected a 100% by this adjustment,
anything that's pure black is being affected 0%,
| | 06:08 | and anything in between or any shade of gray
is going to be affected well basically partially.
| | 06:13 | So the darker the mask is the less it's going to be affected.
| | 06:17 | I think maybe I'll protect the black,
so let's go ahead and add another control point
| | 06:21 | on to the black. So we will say right about there
and that creates a cleaner mask.
| | 06:24 | That's good, I don't want to really
brighten up those blacks.
| | 06:28 | I like them where they were, but I
do want to brighten up the whites.
| | 06:32 | Let's go ahead and hide the mask and
then grab this control point on the white area
| | 06:36 | and take the brightness down
until the hash marks go away.
| | 06:43 | Remember if you're working on a really
large file, as I am here, you may have to
| | 06:47 | wait a little bit for the image to calculate
and for it to redraw on the screen.
| | 06:52 | So a little bit of a patience maybe in order here.
| | 06:54 | It looks like we don't have anything in Zone 10 anymore.
So that's good, let's check out Zone 9.
| | 07:02 | Now there is still some in Zone 9.
That's probably okay, but I think
| | 07:07 | I'm going to back it up just a little bit more.
| | 07:09 | Zone 9 is really reserved for highlights on snow,
if you've got snow in the sun
| | 07:15 | and you still want to have some texture in it;
that is pretty much what Zone 9 is.
| | 07:19 | I want to back this up just a little bit here.
| | 07:22 | I think a little bit of 9 is okay, no 10 is okay
and so I think we'll leave it like that.
| | 07:29 | Remember I also grab this black area
and I already added one to there.
| | 07:33 | And I can see here this are getting a little bit light.
I may want to darken those a bit.
| | 07:37 | So why don't we just go ahead and darken that anyway.
| | 07:42 | Even though I protected the dark areas
from the light area's here, I'm now
| | 07:45 | choosing to darken them separately.
That's a bit too much, I don't want to go
| | 07:49 | quite so dark, we just take it down a little bit.
| | 07:52 | Let's zoom out and take a look at the whole scene.
| | 07:57 | Remember to hide the control points,
all you have to do is roll your mouse off of
| | 08:02 | the image, and the control points will disappear.
| | 08:04 | If you have a control point selected,
it's not going to disappear when you roll
| | 08:08 | your mouse off, so just click again
on the image and that will go away.
| | 08:11 | And of course when you're ready to compare
just click and hold on to Compare button
| | 08:14 | up here at the top and you can see the before and after.
| | 08:20 | Let's take a look at the shadow areas.
| | 08:21 | We've obviously got a big dark spot on
the zebra's nose and his eyes are going to
| | 08:25 | be quite dark as well. We don't want
those to go too dark, so let's just take a
| | 08:29 | look at that. We want to see where
we at before we go any further.
| | 08:33 | The Zone 0 is absolute solid black
without any texture in it at all.
| | 08:37 | And frankly I don't think I want
the zebra's nose to be quite that dark.
| | 08:41 | I do want some texture showing up in there.
| | 08:44 | Zone 1 is it really about the darkest
even that might be a little bit too dark.
| | 08:48 | See Zone 2 is great for this for this sort of thing,
| | 08:52 | but I think somewhere between Zone 1 and 2
for the majority of the texture on the zebra's face.
| | 08:56 | So let's go ahead and start by highlighting Zone 0.
| | 09:00 | I want to lighten this part of
this image until this goes away.
| | 09:02 | In fact, maybe at this point, I should
brighten up the entire scene, then we're
| | 09:06 | going to have to pay close attention to
this spot over here again to make sure
| | 09:10 | they don't get to bright. You know what
I can do is actually go over here and
| | 09:14 | turn on Zone 10 as well. So now we're
looking at both Zone 0 and Zone 10 as
| | 09:18 | hashed on here; and if I make any changes here
for example brighten it too much
| | 09:22 | we'll see if that Zone 10 comes back into play.
| | 09:25 | Let's go ahead and bring this up just a little bit.
| | 09:29 | I actually go a little bit far there,
let say about 12-13%. That's looking pretty on there.
| | 09:32 | We still haven't made this too bright,
so that done a nice job of brightening
| | 09:36 | up the shadow without taking up highlights,
and that's probably going to be pretty good.
| | 09:39 | Remember, another thing to keep in mind
is what it being printed on.
| | 09:43 | If you're printing this on pure white paper
then anything that's white is going to,
| | 09:46 | of course, come out here white.
| | 09:48 | However, in this case I'm going to
be printing this on metal and so anything
| | 09:51 | that's white is actually going to be a
little bit gray. So that something to
| | 09:55 | keep in mind when creating
your image for black and white;
| | 09:58 | what is actually going to be printed on?
| | 09:59 | Now that I have gotten this far, I want
to go ahead and darken up this background.
| | 10:04 | To me again it's a little bit too bright
and distracting, so let's do that with control points.
| | 10:07 | I'll add a control point over here, you make that nice
| | 10:11 | and big to cover that whole background
area and let's just take a look at
| | 10:15 | exactly what we're affecting.
| | 10:17 | Dragging the control point around while it's
in mask mode is a great way to see
| | 10:21 | exactly what's going to be affected by it.
| | 10:23 | This also makes it easy to know whether
you need to create multiple control points.
| | 10:27 | So for example here, since I know I want to
darken the whole background and not just
| | 10:31 | this area here, I may end up wanting to
create another control point down here,
| | 10:35 | but before I do, I'll go ahead and see what
this is going to do for me. It's also
| | 10:39 | worth noting that part of the ear is
being selected as well as the white
| | 10:43 | stripes on the zebra, so I may want
to add another control point just to
| | 10:47 | protect the ear, and maybe even one
more to protect the white stripes.
| | 10:52 | Right about so that's look pretty good.
| | 10:53 | So now I have a nice clean mask for
the background there that's really not
| | 10:57 | affecting the zebra at all.
| | 10:58 | All right let's go ahead and get out
of the mask view. I'm going to turn off my
| | 11:03 | Zone warnings here. Let's go ahead and
select that control point and lower the
| | 11:09 | brightness. I think that's pretty good
there actually. Let's do a little before and after.
| | 11:18 | Maybe could even go little bit darker.
| | 11:28 | If you go too dark, you may start to
see some strange artifacting showing up
| | 11:31 | around the edges of that you're
bumping up against.
| | 11:35 | So you will want to watch out for that.
| | 11:36 | And it is always its best to zoom in to check
and make sure you're not seeing anything unexpected.
| | 11:41 | This looks like a really nice clean transition
between the fur on the ear
| | 11:44 | and the background though.
So I think we're doing okay.
| | 11:48 | I want to take the same control point
and copy it over here, so I'll just make
| | 11:52 | sure that it's selected, hold down
the Option key, and drag that over.
| | 11:58 | Here we're starting to see some of the
artifacting that I'm talking about.
| | 12:02 | Let me zoom at this a bit more closely.
You see how we're seeing this strange
| | 12:08 | double line showing up in here?
That's result of getting a little bit too
| | 12:11 | aggressive with the control point.
It's basically taking the edge and it's not
| | 12:14 | quite sure what to do with it, so you
end up with this little bit of ripple effect in here.
| | 12:19 | That's usually not going to look very good.
| | 12:21 | Let's just get rid of this just so you
can see the difference. I'll select it
| | 12:25 | and hit the Delete key on the keyboard.
| | 12:27 | And you'll see in there that the transition
already has a little bit of rippling in it
| | 12:31 | and that just part of the original photo.
But what we did with that control point
| | 12:35 | was enhance it to a point where
it didn't look good. I'll go ahead
| | 12:39 | and hit Undo to bring that control point back.
I'm just going to split the difference here.
| | 12:43 | I won't darken it quite so much.
Let me bring the brightness up a little bit.
| | 12:47 | There, that looks a little bit better.
| | 12:50 | If you having a real problem with areas like this,
what you can often do is take a control point
| | 12:54 | and add it right onto the edge.
This is an unaffected control point.
| | 12:58 | So all it's going to do is protect that area.
It may take a little bit of trial and error
| | 13:02 | while you drag this around and find the area put it on
| | 13:06 | where it's going to protect that from
having that strange halo or stair stepping effect.
| | 13:13 | That might work there.
| | 13:14 | Let's see what happens if I get rid of it.
I can either delete it or simply disable it over here.
| | 13:20 | So there is the image with it off and there it is back on.
| | 13:26 | Yeah, we're seeing a little bit less of
the stair stepping. This edge has become
| | 13:31 | that harder, but that's probably okay. Let's zoom out
and have a look at it from little bit farther away.
| | 13:36 | Well, I can still see a little bit of that double edge in there,
| | 13:39 | so I'm not totally happy with that.
| | 13:40 | It may require adding a couple of points.
Let's try that. I'll hold down the
| | 13:51 | Option key and drag this up, so now I
have two of these. You maybe put one right
| | 13:56 | on the dark edge and one on the
light edge, let's see if that does it.
| | 14:08 | You can see that this is a lot of trial and error.
You really just need to drag the control points around.
| | 14:12 | You can see if you can find an area where you're
| | 14:16 | going to get the effect that you want.
Yeah I think that's nice and clean.
| | 14:20 | Okay, we're going to leave it like that.
| | 14:22 | Just looking it at on screen and feeling like
I want it to have more contrast,
| | 14:25 | darker shadows in here. But I know by
going over the zones here that I already
| | 14:29 | have really good shadows. I have got
shadows in Zone 1 and Zone 2 and those are
| | 14:33 | going to print out beautifully. I don't
want anything to go into 0, and there's a
| | 14:37 | couple of little tiny spots and shadows
in the nose, but that's okay. But I don't
| | 14:41 | want to much there, otherwise that'll
be just be a big black mush on the print.
| | 14:45 | So you really always have to rely on the zones
and the histogram when you're doing this type of work,
| | 14:50 | to make sure that you're not just
relying on what you see on your screen.
| | 14:54 | Remember, even if your screen is
perfectly calibrated, you are looking at a
| | 14:57 | transmitter device, meaning that the
light is shining from behind the image.
| | 15:00 | However, when it's printed it'll be reflective.
So you're going to have a print
| | 15:04 | that light is shining onto and then bouncing off of.
| | 15:06 | So the overall effect will be quite different.
So once again you really do need
| | 15:10 | to trust your histogram and your zones.
I found that by relying on these
| | 15:14 | zones here inside of Silver Efex Pro,
I can always get very, very good prints.
| | 15:17 | Let's take a look at adding a border onto this image.
| | 15:20 | We already added a solid white border
and I did that in Photoshop.
| | 15:24 | I did that specifically so that when I added the
border in Silver Efex Pro, the border that
| | 15:28 | I added didn't cut off too much of the ear.
| | 15:31 | I remember from the first time that I did this
and I first didn't put the white border on there
| | 15:35 | and I found that the final border was
basically coming maybe
| | 15:38 | let's say about to here on the ear and
we're just cutting too much off.
| | 15:42 | I wanted more of that original ear in the shot.
| | 15:44 | Truth to be told, I kind of wish that
I had been a little bit farther away or
| | 15:49 | maybe raised the camera up just a little bit higher,
so I had the tip of the ear on the original photo,
| | 15:54 | but I didn't, so we have to work with what we have got.
| | 15:57 | Let's go ahead and add the border on there.
| | 16:00 | Borders are under Finishing Adjustments.
Open that up and you'll see Toning,
| | 16:03 | Vignetting, Burn Edges and Image Borders.
Let me try adding a little bit of
| | 16:06 | vignette to this whole thing here.
Let's see how that looks. Go to Vignette,
| | 16:10 | and you can see you have a variety of
presets; Lens Falloff 1, 2 and 3 and then
| | 16:14 | white frame, which is basically the opposite,
and then there's a black frame, which
| | 16:18 | is a really strong heavy one. Let's note this.
| | 16:20 | So let's go Lens Falloff 1, 2 or 3, let's see here.
| | 16:23 | Now I don't want much;
let's just go to 1 and see how that looks.
| | 16:27 | Now that's simply a preset.
You don't have to use the presets.
| | 16:31 | All the preset is it's a preset of these
three different settings here.
| | 16:33 | If I want to try out a different amount,
let's just darken that a little bit.
| | 16:37 | That's way too much, back that off a little,
maybe somewhere around there.
| | 16:41 | I can make the vignette more circular
or more rectangular; it really is going to
| | 16:44 | depend on the image. Of course your
print is always going to be square or
| | 16:48 | rectangular not circular.
| | 16:49 | But how the vignette works is just really going to
depend on the image and what you like in there.
| | 16:54 | And then of course there's the size.
I can make this a much smaller vignette
| | 16:58 | or make it quite large in there. I think
that looks pretty good right about there, actually.
| | 17:01 | Let's toggle that off just to see the before and after.
| | 17:04 | Now that that's in place, let's go ahead
and look at the borders; so image borders.
| | 17:08 | Here you do need to start with a preset.
You're not really preset so much as
| | 17:12 | just types. Each different border type here,
as you can see, has a different effect on the image.
| | 17:16 | Now keep in mind that that white border
I already added. So that's something
| | 17:21 | that this is adding on top of. So I'm
going to have to make sure that you can't
| | 17:25 | see my white border once this
other border has been added into it.
| | 17:28 | The border that I used for all of my
images was type 10. So I'll go ahead and
| | 17:33 | select that and let's zoom into this to have
a closer look at what's happening.
| | 17:36 | I am going to go ahead and focus on the corner here.
| | 17:42 | As we can see, there is this strange little edge on there.
| | 17:45 | Now I wonder if that is happening because
of the white border that I previously added.
| | 17:49 | Let's take the size a bit smaller. Nope, it's not.
It's just part of the border that's being added.
| | 17:53 | So there's the border that I created.
We can see in here and then here's the
| | 17:57 | border that Silver Efex Pro is adding.
| | 17:59 | As I change the size, we can see the
new border encroaching over the old one.
| | 18:04 | Of course what we're going to want to do
is make sure that none of that old border is visible.
| | 18:09 | So I actually may have been a
little bit of artifacting from that.
| | 18:14 | Now one of the drawbacks of doing
it this way is, as you can see in here,
| | 18:17 | there's a little bit of a border hanging out,
and it may actually be from that white border.
| | 18:21 | So if I ended up let's say, wanting
to put it here, I may need to go into
| | 18:26 | Photoshop later and just retouch this part out.
I know that I did do that on some of these images.
| | 18:32 | Since, it was the ear that I was concerned with,
I want to make sure that
| | 18:36 | I'm not going too far into the ear there.
| | 18:38 | So let's just play with that edge a little bit more,
you can take off a little bit of it like so.
| | 18:42 | It's probably going to look pretty good.
Let's go ahead and zoom out of this, nice.
| | 18:50 | Now once you have done this you are
going to want to zoom in and zoom
| | 18:54 | all the way around it or pan all the way
around the image, just to make sure that you
| | 18:58 | don't have anything strange happening with your border.
| | 19:00 | These border edges are randomly generated
and you can vary them by simply
| | 19:04 | clicking on the Vary Border number here.
| | 19:05 | As you can see when I click on that button,
its just adding a new seed number
| | 19:10 | and every time I click it the border changes.
So you want to run around the whole thing
| | 19:14 | to just make sure nothing weird is happening.
| | 19:17 | You can also adjust things like the spread.
So the spread in here will show how
| | 19:22 | much of that odd or crunchy border is
spreading into the image so you could have
| | 19:26 | hardly any at all or a whole bunch of it.
| | 19:30 | You can also adjust the cleanness or
roughness of the border. So if I wanted to
| | 19:34 | have let's say a really rough, crunchy
border on here, this is what's going to happen.
| | 19:38 | See how this edge is really sticking out in there?
| | 19:40 | Now if I vary the border we're going to see
that big huge edge popping in all over the place.
| | 19:45 | So that's a bit too much for my liking.
So I really don't want it to do that.
| | 19:50 | If I go clean then it's going to be very smooth border.
| | 19:53 | Now I didn't want a super smooth one either.
| | 19:55 | I think for most of these it's actually
left it pretty well on the middle there,
| | 19:59 | because I did like having a little bit
of this rippling out, but not too much of it.
| | 20:03 | In fact, maybe even that's a bit too much.
Let's clean that up a little bit.
| | 20:07 | Maybe just leave this spread about middle
and I think the size is pretty good.
| | 20:11 | Once again, don't forget to zoom into it.
Pan around the image to make sure that
| | 20:15 | what you're seeing is something that you like.
| | 20:17 | Even though I already saved to black-white
gallery one for the previous image,
| | 20:20 | I'm going to go ahead and save this one as well,
because now when I go to the third image
| | 20:25 | I'll have two different starting points to look at.
| | 20:28 | So let's go ahead and add a preset.
We're going to call this one B&W Gallery 2, click OK.
| | 20:34 | Let's go ahead and save this
and bring it back into Aperture.
| | 20:37 | Now that you're back in Aperture and
the image is completely rendered out,
| | 20:42 | you'll be able to pan around it a lot more quickly
than you could inside of Silver Efex Pro.
| | 20:46 | So now it's a good time to look at it a bit bigger,
tap on the Z key to get into a 100%
| | 20:51 | and just start panning around this edge here.
| | 20:54 | This will let us know very quickly if there's anything
that we need to cleanup in the image.
| | 20:58 | I think that's okay there, a little bit of an odd line,
but I think it's probably okay.
| | 21:02 | That's going to be up to you.
| | 21:05 | Now here is an edge that you may want
to clean up. This line here might be
| | 21:10 | something you want to take into
Photoshop and try and get rid of.
| | 21:14 | Again, of course, that's entirely up to you.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Image conversion: Crater Lake, Oregon, United States| 00:02 | This next image is going to have quite a bit of work
done to it, especially in the sky, in Silver Efex Pro 2.
| | 00:08 | As you can see here, the sky looks
quite plain and flat, but if you look close,
| | 00:12 | you'll see a fair amount of cloud texture
in there and all that we can really
| | 00:15 | enhance using the Black and White plug-in.
| | 00:18 | Also another particular challenge in
this shot is going to be the trees.
| | 00:21 | It's easy for trees to really fall apart
in a Black and White conversion,
| | 00:24 | and simply look like a big gray mush.
| | 00:26 | So we're going to have to pay special
attention of those to make sure that they
| | 00:30 | look great for the final Black and White print.
| | 00:32 | Once again, we can try and start with
the presets that we saved before.
| | 00:36 | Here's from the first one, the Brandenburg
Tor shot and here's one from the zebra.
| | 00:40 | Neither one of these is really going
to work out for this. And once again, we
| | 00:43 | could also go into the Presets here,
and try a whole variety of these.
| | 00:47 | But this time I want to start from scratch.
We're going to go ahead and do this
| | 00:51 | one from the very beginning,
from the basic neutral position.
| | 00:55 | When working in Sliver Efex Pro 2,
no matter what you change, let's say who have
| | 00:59 | changed the Brightness, and the Contrast,
and the Structure a whole bunch in here,
| | 01:02 | you can always reset that particular setting
by simply clicking on the curved arrow here.
| | 01:05 | That will reset that one. You'll see that the Global
| | 01:08 | adjustments have their own reset,
Selective have their own reset and so on.
| | 01:13 | However, if you just want to reset everything,
so let's say I have adjusted the
| | 01:16 | Contrast and I have added a Color Filter,
and I've changed the grain on there.
| | 01:21 | Instead of having to go through and
reset each one of these, you can simply go
| | 01:24 | to the All Presets and tab on the
first one which is called Neutral.
| | 01:28 | Neutral is everything reset back to its
default state. So it is a quick way to
| | 01:33 | go back to the starting point without
having to go through and click each one
| | 01:36 | of these reset curves.
| | 01:37 | Also, it's worth noting that whenever you
click and hold on the Compare button up here,
| | 01:41 | what you're looking at is the difference between
whatever you've done in the Neutral Base Point.
| | 01:45 | So I when I click on it, we don't see
anything happen, there is no change.
| | 01:50 | But if I was to take the Contrast way up
and click on it again, we see that it's
| | 01:54 | going back to the Neutral point.
| | 01:56 | So that's good to know.
| | 01:57 | The Compare here isn't showing
you the original color image,
| | 02:00 | it's showing you the Base Black and White
conversion, as applied by Silver Efex Pro.
| | 02:04 | So we are resetting that again and let's get started.
| | 02:07 | There are a couple of different ways
I can go about this. I could just start at
| | 02:11 | the top here with Global Adjustments,
adjusting Brightness, Contrast, Structure
| | 02:14 | and so on; and of course, going back and
forth as needed to see if we can get
| | 02:19 | something that I'm really happy with.
| | 02:20 | This can be a fine way to work, especially
if you really know what you are trying to do.
| | 02:25 | If you know exactly you are pretty
close to exactly what you're trying to
| | 02:29 | achieve, this is probably how you're
going to want to go about doing it.
| | 02:32 | Looking at this image, I can see that I
have a really wide tonal range already;
| | 02:36 | we have quite dark shadows down here,
quite bright highlights up here.
| | 02:39 | So the range is actually quite good. In fact,
we can verify that by looking at the Histogram.
| | 02:44 | Let's go ahead and switch over to Histogram View.
We can see there we have a nice wide range.
| | 02:49 | We can also look at that by going
through and looking at the Zones.
| | 02:52 | So there is Zone 0, a few speckles.
A lot in Zone 1, all the way upto the top.
| | 02:57 | Almost nothing in Zone 10, which is great,
because we don't have any specular highlights in here;
| | 03:00 | there is no sun, and no chrome bumpers.
| | 03:04 | Then in 9, the highest point, is showing quite a lot
in the sky. Probably a bit too much, actually.
| | 03:08 | But it is good to see that we
have full range already in here.
| | 03:12 | So from one sense, this image is
actually technically quite good.
| | 03:15 | But I think you'll agree, it could be a lot
more exciting and a lot more dynamic.
| | 03:19 | So I might want to do things like
adjust the Contrast, or adjust the Structure,
| | 03:23 | which will actually bring out a lot of texture and detail,
but you can get carried away with this.
| | 03:27 | So we will come back to this, we want
to be careful with it, and start playing
| | 03:32 | with these other sliders to see if you
can get something that you like.
| | 03:36 | And that's a perfectly fine way to go.
| | 03:37 | There's another tool in here that I like to work with,
when I'm not quite sure where to go.
| | 03:42 | If I am looking at this base image and
I'm thinking, well, you know, it needs a
| | 03:47 | little bit of this, a little bit of that, but
maybe not, maybe this. I am really not sure.
| | 03:51 | What I might do is skip past Global Adjustments,
and let's just collapse all these
| | 03:55 | to make this a little bit easier,
and go stright to Film Types.
| | 03:59 | So what Film Types does is it allows me to choose
from a Preset based off of old real-world films.
| | 04:04 | So for example, if you came from a
film background and used to love shooting
| | 04:07 | Kodak TMAX 100 Pro, this is a great
place to start. You can just click on that
| | 04:12 | and it basically puts in a response curve
in here that looks a lot like TMAX.
| | 04:16 | It's going to put in the appropriate amount of Grain.
| | 04:18 | And if we look at the Levels and Curves,
you'll see that the Curves have been
| | 04:22 | adjusted to tonal response of basically
what you got out of that film.
| | 04:25 | There is a Sensitivity adjustment in here too.
You can see the red and
| | 04:29 | yellows and also the cyans and blues
have had their Sensitivity increased.
| | 04:32 | Greens and violets, on the other hand, are Neutral.
| | 04:35 | That's interesting. Let's try another one.
| | 04:36 | Maybe something like Kodak 3200.
This is a really good high-speed film.
| | 04:42 | I used to love shooting with this when I was in low light.
| | 04:44 | Now this, of course, is not a low light situation,
so it may not be appropriate,
| | 04:48 | but it can be interesting to see how this compares.
| | 04:51 | Here we have our Grain per pixel dropped way down
from the 100, it's also harder grain, makes sense.
| | 04:56 | And then if we look at the Color Sensitivity,
it's roughly the same.
| | 04:59 | TMAX is pretty consistent all the way across,
but the only real change being in the ISO,
| | 05:03 | and therefore in the Grain.
| | 05:05 | Looks like a similar response curve in here as well,
but again, it doesn't really work for this image.
| | 05:10 | Let's just go ahead and go through
these one at a time and see if there's one
| | 05:14 | of these looks like a good starting point.
Each one that you rollover will give
| | 05:19 | you preview pretty quickly over in the left
and you can see what that's going to look like.
| | 05:23 | That one might be a little bit flat,
but I think it's better than Neutral.
| | 05:29 | Let's go back to Neutral, compare to the Agfa;
that's got a little extra punch in there, that's pretty good.
| | 05:34 | I think it's a bit too much in the shadows,
definitely too crunchy in the shadows.
| | 05:39 | I like that one, although it's going to be
a bit too grainy at 1600.
| | 05:43 | Let's go ahead and start with this.
| | 05:48 | I like the response on this,
let's go ahead and choose that.
| | 05:51 | I am going to immediately take the Grain up a bit,
because I know that's just going to be too high.
| | 05:56 | I remember for the first image it was
somewhere around 350, so even though
| | 06:00 | we're not looking at this closely,
and I am going to have to do that in a moment,
| | 06:04 | I am just going to go ahead and take it to about 350,
and let's make that Grain a little bit harder.
| | 06:10 | And again, I am only doing that because
I know that's roughly what I chose earlier on,
| | 06:13 | and I do want my grain patterns to be
somewhat consistent across the prints.
| | 06:17 | Now let's play with the Film's Color Sensitivity a bit.
| | 06:20 | The sky of course should be blue,
in the original photo it was a blue sky;
| | 06:24 | and in fact, if we pull this down, we can see
the original photo hiding behind an Aperture.
| | 06:28 | So if we adjust the blue Sensitivity, we should see
some changes in the sky and in the water here.
| | 06:33 | So let's go ahead and take the blue and see
what happens if we take that up or take that down,
| | 06:39 | Interesting! So the higher I drag this, the blue parts
get either brighter or darker. Well that's good to know.
| | 06:44 | So I do actually want that sky to darken a bit.
| | 06:46 | Let's the blue down, maybe even the cyan down a little bit.
| | 06:51 | In fact, let's just go through all the sliders
and drag them back and forth and see what happens.
| | 06:55 | So Violet started off at 57%. Let's see,
doesn't look like a whole lot of Violet in this picture,
| | 07:00 | so I guess that one is pretty much irrelevant.
Blue and Cyan we played with.
| | 07:04 | Green, we know there is going to be green
in the trees, so let's see what happens with this.
| | 07:09 | Actually, surprisingly little change.
Let's try the Yellow, there we are seeing more of it.
| | 07:18 | So take a look at the tree down here.
We're seeing this show up quite a bit
| | 07:22 | more with the Yellows. Let's take
the Yellow all the way up to 100.
| | 07:25 | The Green still isn't having an affect
on there. So it looks like it's really
| | 07:29 | just that Yellow that's going to affect that.
| | 07:32 | And then we can try the Red, but there
really isn't much Red in the scene.
| | 07:36 | Looks like a little bit showing up in
the mountains in the background.
| | 07:39 | In fact, I do want those to bring in,
so let's bring the Red down, bringing
| | 07:42 | those up a little bit. The Yellow is
cranked all the way up so that I lighten up
| | 07:47 | to these trees in here. The Green
doesn't have any effect at all it seems.
| | 07:52 | Cyan is having a little bit on the sky and
the water. The Blue is having a dramatic
| | 07:56 | effect on the sky and water.
| | 07:59 | We don't want to go too dark in here.
| | 08:01 | I am looking at the blue water down here,
versus here. If I go too dark,
| | 08:05 | even though this looks pretty good, that's just
gone to black and that's going to be too much.
| | 08:09 | So I think I will split the difference.
| | 08:12 | And then again the Violet had virtually no change at all.
| | 08:17 | Then you can also take a look at the Levels and Curves.
| | 08:20 | So here we're looking at a simple S curve in here; that's
the way that this film's response has been drawn in.
| | 08:23 | And of course, if you want to change that you can.
| | 08:27 | Just grab a point and start dragging it around
and see what happens.
| | 08:31 | I quite like the midtones where they are.
The Shadows might be a little bit too dark.
| | 08:35 | So I think I'll raise them up just a little bit.
Here we go, so we're putting some detail
| | 08:39 | back into the water and into the darker trees here.
| | 08:43 | And the sky is very, very blown out in here.
| | 08:45 | However, I'm probably not going to
want to bring this down to flatten it,
| | 08:48 | I think I'll adjust the sky using the Control points,
but let's just see what happens.
| | 08:52 | Yeah, see if I bring that down, even though
the sky starts to look better up there,
| | 08:56 | we're going to see some weird haloing, and
just silverization happening on the mountains.
| | 09:00 | So I definitely don't want that to happen.
| | 09:02 | Let's just go and bring that up and
then I'll use Control Points to bring that
| | 09:06 | sky back down to where I want it to be.
| | 09:10 | So this is just a starting point. Let's compare again.
| | 09:11 | The Original and the New one; little bit
higher contrast, there is a little bit of
| | 09:15 | Grain texture in there now and I
think it's off to a really good start.
| | 09:18 | Let's work on the sky. We're going to go
back up here, grab a control point under
| | 09:22 | Selective Adjustments, plop down a big
fat one right in the middle of the sky in there,
| | 09:26 | and let's just take the Contrast
and crank it up and see what happens.
| | 09:30 | Maybe I'll bring the Brightness down a little bit, too.
| | 09:38 | There we go, we are starting to get somewhere.
| | 09:42 | I'm going to start moving this around
to effect different parts of the sky.
| | 09:45 | I know we have talked about this before,
but I am going to show you one more time in here;
| | 09:49 | the easiest way to see exactly what's
being affected is to enable the mask view.
| | 09:53 | Here you can see what part of the
sky is being affected by that mask.
| | 09:57 | Remember, we can always block out
other parts of the scene, by simply adding
| | 10:01 | control points and doing nothing with them.
| | 10:03 | So in this case, I may want to protect
the mountains and the water here.
| | 10:07 | To do that, I can just grab a control point,
click on there to add that in.
| | 10:11 | Let's add another one to the mountains,
and that will pretty well protect that out.
| | 10:15 | Looks like there is a little bit on this water here,
I could block out that as well,
| | 10:19 | but I think I'll leave it for now.
| | 10:22 | Let's go back to our full view,
and play with this some more.
| | 10:26 | Now as you can see, it can be quite easy
to get this into a point where
| | 10:30 | it actually doesn't look good; you get this
weird dark spot in the middle of the scene
| | 10:34 | and that's obviously not going to work.
| | 10:36 | So what you may have to do is add
multiple control points to the sky to get it
| | 10:41 | exactly the way you want it to be.
| | 10:43 | Remember to play with the size of the
control point as well.
| | 10:47 | Of course, if I make it very small, it's going to
affect that area there, and you might think,
| | 10:50 | well, that's covering the whole area, so that's just fine.
| | 10:53 | But if I make it even bigger, you'll see the difference
that it does have on the whole scene in there.
| | 10:58 | I think you can end up with a
couple of different control points.
| | 11:04 | So let's go ahead and start with one up here.
I am going to take that v
| | 11:07 | because that's gotten a little bit too much.
| | 11:11 | Then I'll Opt+Click and drag on here to drag
the same control point down to another area,
| | 11:14 | and we will adjust the Brightness as well.
| | 11:21 | Now we are getting somewhere interesting,
some of these clouds are really starting to show through.
| | 11:24 | I like this dark forboding sky that we've got here.
Let's see if I can pull anything
| | 11:31 | out of this part of the scene as well.
| | 11:34 | See it again, Opt+Drag that control point over.
Bring that down a little bit.
| | 11:41 | Might be getting a little bit too contrasty in there.
Let's flatten that out just a touch.
| | 11:45 | And now we are getting somewhere.
| | 11:48 | However, this point here looks like it has affected
this part of the water quite unfortunately;
| | 11:52 | it does look a little bit odd in there,
So let's grab one of our protection control points
| | 11:56 | and just add that up there. Maybe bit too much.
| | 11:59 | Let's find a place to put that, or we are now
going to have a strange haloing effect.
| | 12:05 | We are going to have to keep close
attention on that; we've to definitely going
| | 12:09 | to have to come back to this later on
and make sure that we're not messing up
| | 12:13 | this kind of still part of the lake in there.
| | 12:17 | It's clearly showing up differently
than the rest of lake here.
| | 12:18 | Remember that anytime if you want
to look back at the original, we can just
| | 12:22 | pull this out of the way, and you see the difference.
| | 12:25 | Now it looks like the wind was blowing,
and so we have some nice texture on the lake here.
| | 12:29 | But this part of the lake was quite still,
so it has a very clear reflection of the sky.
| | 12:34 | So that is showing up quite differently in there.
| | 12:37 | And since it's the reflection of the sky, anything we're
doing to the sky above it, is affecting that as well.
| | 12:42 | We'll have to remember to come back to that a little bit.
| | 12:45 | Let's go back to the Global Adjustments
in here and I think I want to add a
| | 12:49 | little bit more crunch into this whole thing.
Oh, it looks like I have really
| | 12:53 | darkened up the tree there as well.
Why don't we just fix that while we're here.
| | 12:57 | Grab a control point, add that down here
to the bottom, maybe you need to brighten
| | 13:00 | that up a little bit, goodness,
nope, that's not going to be good.
| | 13:04 | I think maybe some of these are getting
little bit too big, they are affecting
| | 13:07 | just too much of the scene in there.
| | 13:09 | Let's take these down a little bit.
It seems like once I get a too big,
| | 13:14 | it really starts to effect the entire image
in a negative way; so watch out for that.
| | 13:17 | Make sure they are not getting too big.
| | 13:20 | And if you're starting to see these points
showing up where it looks like a
| | 13:23 | definite localized point of change,
you can help counteract that by putting
| | 13:27 | the point up against the edge or even
in the corner of the scene;
| | 13:31 | and that may help that a bit as well.
| | 13:32 | So make sure none of these are all the way up
and that one is definitely smaller.
| | 13:37 | I'm going to go ahead and turn off the Previews
over here, and turn on the Double view,
| | 13:41 | so we can see the two side-by-side.
So we will always be able to
| | 13:45 | see the original point, and over here on
the right, the one that we're working with.
| | 13:49 | Let's see what happens if I play with the Structure.
| | 13:51 | Structure is one of these things that basically
adds contrast around the edges of things.
| | 13:54 | It can make it look very, very cool and very
sharp and crunchy, but not in a bad way.
| | 14:00 | However, you do have to be careful that you
don't overdo it. It's easy to overdo the structure
| | 14:04 | and you end up with something that looks over sharpened,
| | 14:07 | and we all know that over sharpened images
are just awful to look at.
| | 14:10 | So let's just start with some basic structure here.
| | 14:12 | As you can see, as I drag that up,
I am getting some great texture showing up in
| | 14:17 | the sky here, and also in the water.
| | 14:19 | Look at all the ripples in here that are just showing up.
| | 14:22 | If I take that off, in fact, I can probably
just toggle the Global Adjustments off;
| | 14:25 | yeah, the only thing I've done in here is Structure,
so I am going to toggle that off.
| | 14:30 | Look at the difference, look at how much more of
the texture of the water is suddenly coming through.
| | 14:35 | Now again we're going to zoom in close
to make sure we haven't overdone it.
| | 14:39 | That's off to a pretty cool start there. I quite like that.
| | 14:42 | Keep in mind that this is adding
structure for the whole image,
| | 14:45 | including Highlights, Midtones and Shadows.
And we can go in here and isolate certain areas
| | 14:49 | and just increase the Structure for example
in the Shadows. Let's try that
| | 14:52 | to see what happens in the trees in there.
| | 14:54 | So that's getting quite cool, but I'm
already seeing a problem with this.
| | 14:58 | Look at this tree down here. Look at where
the halo that has just appeared around it;
| | 15:02 | that's from the Shadow Structure slider.
| | 15:03 | So if I reset that back, it looks pretty
much fine, I think that's acceptable there.
| | 15:07 | But if I drag this up, notice the haloing
starting to appear around it.
| | 15:11 | That's something you have to be really wary of
| | 15:14 | when you are playing with the structure,
especially in the shadows.
| | 15:16 | There are a lot of midtones in here, but
it looks like I have already cranked up
| | 15:21 | their texture, or rather structure.
| | 15:22 | The highlights a pretty well treated, as well.
| | 15:24 | Let's go ahead and zoom into this thing 100%,
I want to take a look at this more closely.
| | 15:29 | Actually, given the size screen we are working with,
I am going to look at it at 50%
| | 15:33 | and then we can back it off from there later.
| | 15:36 | Okay, here we're starting to see some
pretty good effects happening in here.
| | 15:40 | I see this little dark halo that's showing up
around the edge of the mountains;
| | 15:45 | that is something I may want to fix.
| | 15:47 | I may not bother with it,
but it is something to be aware of.
| | 15:50 | These kinds of dark edges that show up
against a bright sky when you've got a
| | 15:54 | bright sky that you're trying to darken
against an already dark foreground;
| | 15:58 | it can be pretty hard to get rid off and
it can be a pretty telltale sign that the
| | 16:02 | image has been heavily adjusted.
| | 16:03 | So that's a small area there, but I'm
going to keep an eye on that and make
| | 16:08 | sure that it's okay for the final image.
| | 16:12 | Here it's not so noticeable, but it is
still showing up a little bit.
| | 16:18 | Here it's showing up pretty badly. So here we
have kind of a double edge, you have the dark,
| | 16:21 | and then the bright, and then back to the darker sky,
so that's definitely going to have to get fixed.
| | 16:29 | Looks like we did okay with the water in here though.
| | 16:33 | Remember there is that still area of the lake
that I was concerned with,
| | 16:37 | but it's looking like we managed to do that okay.
| | 16:38 | But again, this part in here I am concerned with;
| | 16:40 | that is definitely not going to be okay for the final print.
| | 16:43 | So let's see what we can do with it.
| | 16:46 | The first step may be trying to figure out
where it's coming from. What is causing it?
| | 16:49 | Is this something that we can simply reduce a little bit,
maybe just reduce the effect of, to eliminate that.
| | 16:55 | So let's see here, do we have anything applied to this one?
No, that's just a protection point.
| | 16:59 | I have got this one here; that's got quite a bit of
change to it, and that might be what's doing it.
| | 17:05 | Let's go ahead and just toggle that off,
by going into here, under Selective Adjustments
| | 17:08 | and turn that off; that's definitely doing it.
| | 17:13 | So I think what we'll do is take the Brightness up
a little bit. We have got too much Brightness.
| | 17:17 | I guess you could call it negative Brightness,
because we're darkening it on here.
| | 17:21 | Let's just brighten this up a little bit, and see
if we can get that edge to look a little cleaner.
| | 17:27 | I don't want my sky to get too bright, so
that's going to be the challenge in here.
| | 17:38 | I am going to try using a control point
to see if I can knock that halo back on there.
| | 17:44 | For this I definitely want to go to 100%.
| | 17:46 | I really don't know if this is going to
work or not, but we're going to find out.
| | 17:51 | I'll just grab a clean control point, drag that on,
let's make this a little bit smaller here.
| | 17:56 | So remember what this is doing is protecting wherever
it's set from the rest of the effects around it.
| | 18:05 | That looks good, let's zoom back out
of this a little bit, let's go to 50%.
| | 18:12 | I might need to make this a little bit bigger now.
| | 18:18 | That's actually worked out surprisingly well.
| | 18:20 | If I toggle that off, there is that halo, it's definitely there.
Now with that on, it's virtually gone. So that's great.
| | 18:29 | Let's go back over here and see if we
can do the same thing with this dark one.
| | 18:32 | So this is a much smaller one.
Let's add another control point on to here,
| | 18:36 | let's make this a bit smaller here.
| | 18:41 | And really it comes down to getting in
just the right spot, so we're going to
| | 18:44 | have to drag this around a little bit,
figure out where to put it.
| | 18:48 | And I think ultimately what you want
is to have it right on the edge.
| | 18:54 | That's almost protecting it too much.
| | 18:55 | This is getting too bright in the background;
| | 18:57 | maybe I can darken it just a little bit here.
| | 19:04 | We may not be able to get rid of that black line
completely. Again, it's not a big one, it is quite thin.
| | 19:08 |
The darker lines are much less
distracting than the bright ones.
| | 19:16 | I think we might be okay with that. Let's try that off,
see if it's really making any difference at all.
| | 19:21 | Yeah, I think it is making a difference,
I think I'll go ahead and leave that on.
| | 19:29 | I am going to zoom out and take a
look at the whole thing again.
| | 19:34 | Just do a compare side-by-side
one more time. Huge difference.
| | 19:37 | Let's focus on the snow itself.
This is snow, it's not in full sun, so I don't
| | 19:42 | expect this to go all the way up to 9,
but I do want it to be brighter than it is.
| | 19:47 | This is just looking to dark, it really looks like dirty snow,
and no one wants to see dirty snow.
| | 19:52 | Let's go back to 25% view and pan down
here to the snow itself, and once again
| | 19:58 | control points are going to make the day here.
| | 20:00 | So just control point, click one on the snow,
and let's make that a bit brighter.
| | 20:07 | Now how bright do we want to get it? Well,
let's go ahead and use the Zones for that.
| | 20:11 | So I definitely don't want 10 or 9;
8 is probably about where we want to go
| | 20:16 | and that's actually where it's landing right there.
| | 20:17 | I would say 8 is the absolute brightest,
even 7 would be okay, but I don't want it to be too dark.
| | 20:24 | Let's just leave it to 8. So, actually between 7 and 8 --
6, 7, 8 -- yeah, we are good.
| | 20:28 | I like that, okay, we'll zoom back out.
| | 20:30 | That made a big difference; that was easy.
| | 20:32 | Looks like the control area could be a
bit bigger in there, so let's just go ahead
| | 20:37 | and expand that, make that a little
bit bigger, get the rest of the snow in there.
| | 20:41 | Now I want to zoom in closely to the ripples on the water,
and the tree leaves themselves,
| | 20:46 | and make sure that nothing funny
is happening to them.
| | 20:49 | Because of the structure increase that I added up here,
I know that small detailed areas
| | 20:52 | like the ripples on the water, and the pine needles
on these trees could end up being affected negatively.
| | 20:57 | We don't want to find that out only once
we do a 30x20 print, because we forgot
| | 21:01 | to look at it closely while we were in software.
| | 21:04 | So let's just have a close look.
| | 21:10 | I think that looks pretty good in there.
I am not seeing any funny artifacting.
| | 21:12 | Now this texture you're seeing in the water
is in the original photo.
| | 21:16 | Keep in mind that this is a lake with a wind blowing on it.
| | 21:19 | So these are millions of tiny little ripples,
that's going to be okay.
| | 21:22 | And you know, when I first did this image
I was quite concerned about this.
| | 21:26 | When I got the final print back,
I realized that they looked just fine in print.
| | 21:29 | So it was a bit of a relief, because this
was something that I was concerned with.
| | 21:34 | It's almost a hash mark texture that's
showing up in here or pattern,
| | 21:38 | but it turned out just fine for the final print.
| | 21:43 | Comparing to the original, I got a
little bit of a halo around the tree in here,
| | 21:48 | ever so slightly. That's a little distracting.
| | 21:54 | Again that kind of haloing can be a
telltale sign of heavy image adjustment.
| | 21:57 | I think what I'll do is brighten up this
part of the water just a tiny bit,
| | 22:01 | just to try and make it match the halo
in there and see if we can hide that.
| | 22:05 | So once again, control point added there;
let's see exactly what we're affecting,
| | 22:10 | we can go a little bigger than that,
right about so-ish, we can see
| | 22:18 | the haloing already showing up there,
but of course that is just the mask and
| | 22:22 | let's take the brightness up just a little bit on there.
| | 22:25 | So now I've managed to make this,
almost match the halo, maybe even go
| | 22:31 | little bit brighter, it's easy to get
too bright, we don't want to do that.
| | 22:34 | But just find the comfort spot in there,
great, and you know let's see if we
| | 22:39 | can bring this down just a little bit more,
make it a little bit bigger. There!
| | 22:43 | So now don't forget to add the edge,
let's just do that very quickly in here.
| | 22:47 | In the previously video we talked about how to
add this edge, so I'll just do it very quickly.
| | 22:52 | I am going to go ahead and do the image border,
it's Type 10, and because this
| | 22:57 | is not an image that I was concerned
about cutting anything off of the size,
| | 23:01 | I didn't add a border beforehand.
| | 23:02 | So this one is going to be a consistent size
to the rest, and I know on the
| | 23:07 | rest I left it right about 0, so it's
pretty much the default position there.
| | 23:10 | Maybe add a little bit extra spread
in there, let's just vary the border a
| | 23:14 | couple of times, so we have
something random, and great!
| | 23:17 | Let's call it done.
Click Save and back to Aperture.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Preparing for Print and PrintingLevels and spot-checking| 00:02 | One of the final steps in this process
is going to be to do a final inspection.
| | 00:06 | You're going to want to look very closely
at these images at a 100% to make sure
| | 00:09 | there aren't any stray spots or hairs
or pixel dust or anything else that showed
| | 00:14 | up somewhere in the image that you didn't see before.
| | 00:17 | It could be something that you simply missed
or it could be something that was
| | 00:21 | made visible only by previous step.
| | 00:22 | For example, it's easy for spots that
were totally missed before to suddenly
| | 00:26 | show up in a black and white conversion.
| | 00:28 | Before you commit this to a very expensive,
very large print, you're going to
| | 00:32 | want to zoom into each image at a 100%,
pan around the whole thing and make sure
| | 00:36 | that you're not missing anything.
I'm going to go ahead and go full screen on
| | 00:41 | this, just to make sure we can really
see exactly what's happening here and pan
| | 00:45 | around the image from top to bottom.
| | 00:49 | We're looking at solid black here and
that's good, that's what I want.
| | 00:53 | So I'm just holding down the spacebar, panning
across the image here, make sure that I
| | 00:57 | don't see any spots that I don't expect.
| | 00:59 | I'm watching the navigation window here
as well to make sure that I'm actually
| | 01:04 | moving along, and here we go!
| | 01:06 | This is looking very, very clean, that's great!
| | 01:09 | So it looks like what I did in an earlier video,
where I used the control points to
| | 01:14 | eliminate all the spots worked out very, very well.
| | 01:17 | So here we have some texture, some
shadows, up here in this part of the
| | 01:21 | building and that's fine, this is almost
completely into shadow and that's just fine.
| | 01:28 | Pan around, pan around, and just keep on
looking for things that you were not expecting.
| | 01:32 | Now I'm not going to go ahead and
analyze this entire image for you,
| | 01:44 | but the point is with your photos, to make
sure that you do get in close and just to
| | 01:48 | make sure that there's nothing that you missed.
| | 01:51 | Another thing you'll want to do
is have a look at your Histogram.
| | 01:54 | Of course, we're very careful in looking at the
zones for this imagine before finishing out
| | 01:58 | of Silver Efex Pro, but it is still
worth one more check just to make sure you
| | 02:02 | don't have anything blown out or crushed
that you don't expect.
| | 02:05 | This image of course, we expect to
have a lot of black in here, because we
| | 02:09 | deliberately pushed this to pure black;
but we don't want to have anything blown
| | 02:13 | out in the highlights, and sure
enough, our highlights are safe here.
| | 02:16 | Let's go to the next image
and have a look at this one as well.
| | 02:19 | Now we're going to expect to see a
little bit of pure white, because this
| | 02:23 | border in here is going to show up a spike of white here.
| | 02:26 | As expected, we do have white spike in here
and, of course, that's from the border in there.
| | 02:30 | But as we can see as well, we don't
have a black spike, which is also
| | 02:35 | to be expected; that's what I wanted.
| | 02:36 | There's nothing in here that should be
pure black, well, maybe these little tiny
| | 02:40 | edges in there, but that doesn't really count.
| | 02:42 | In the image itself, we're looking pretty good.
One more image to look at, the zebra.
| | 02:46 | Once again, we're seeing the white spike
as expected, because of the frame.
| | 02:49 | But looking at the rest of the image here,
it looks like we have a good solid Histogram;
| | 02:53 | nothing lost in the shadows,
couple of little spikes in the
| | 02:57 | highlights here, and that's fine,
that's what we expect to find in these
| | 03:00 | brighter spots of the zebra's fur.
But nothing lost in the shadows and nothing
| | 03:04 | blown out in the highlights. This is great!
| | 03:06 | So I think we have some good images here.
| | 03:08 | Once again, this shouldn't be necessary,
because if you're coming directly out
| | 03:11 | of Silver Efex Pro and you've been careful
to look at the zones, then you should be fine,
| | 03:15 | but it can't hurt to check.
| | 03:17 | Remember just a few extra minutes here,
could save you a lot of time and money in the long run.
| | 03:22 | You don't want to send a file off
to print that isn't ready for it.
| | 03:26 | Spend a hundred or even hundreds of
dollars on a single image, only to have it
| | 03:30 | come back with a major flaw that you
could've fixed easily if you'd just taken a
| | 03:34 | couple minutes to pay close attention to it.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Output sharpening| 00:02 | The final step before sending off your file
for print is output sharpening.
| | 00:06 | While your file may already be quite sharp,
output sharpening is specifically designed
| | 00:10 | for printing and will compensate
for some of the sharpness lost that
| | 00:14 | will happen in the printing process.
| | 00:16 | So while the output sharpened image
may look a little bit over sharpened on
| | 00:20 | your screen, if done properly, it will
be done specifically for the printing
| | 00:23 | type that you're going to be using and
the final result should look much better.
| | 00:28 | There are lots of different ways you
can do output sharpening.
| | 00:32 | You can do it directly inside of Aperture
if you're an Aperture user, or you can use
| | 00:35 | Photoshop's own tools, or there are several
other sharpening tools available in the market.
| | 00:38 | The one that I want to talk about today
comes from a company called Pixel Genius.
| | 00:43 | Pixel Genius has been making this
PhotoKit 2.0 Sharpener for quite some time
| | 00:47 | and it is widely recognized as one of the
best sharpening toolkits that money can buy.
| | 00:52 | So let's go into the Pixel Genius website,
click on Store, down at the bottom it says that,
| | 00:58 | Please select your application and platform.
We're on a Mac, so I'll choose the Mac platform.
| | 01:01 | Then from here you can PhotoKit Sharpener 2.0.
| | 01:07 | As you can see, it's not the cheapest thing
that you'll add your photo collection,
| | 01:10 | but it may well be the best.
| | 01:12 | Take some time looking through the
website before you buy to checkout
| | 01:15 | testimonials from other users and you
can also check out the trial version.
| | 01:18 | I already have this installed in Photoshop CS6,
so let's go ahead and take this image
| | 01:22 | from Aperture and open it
in Photoshop for final sharpening.
| | 01:27 | Because this image has already been
roundtripped back from another tool,
| | 01:32 | in this case Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, Aperture
knows that it was an externally edited file;
| | 01:34 | I see that from the target icon here.
| | 01:36 | So when I right-click on it and choose
Edit with Photoshop, it's not going to
| | 01:40 | create a new version of it, it's
going to simply open that original file.
| | 01:44 | Sharpening using PhotoKit couldn't
really be much easier, you won't find it
| | 01:48 | under the Filters, instead you find it
under the File menu and then Automate,
| | 01:52 | you'll see three different options here once installed.
| | 01:56 | There's a Capture Sharpener, a Creative Sharpener
and an Output Sharpener.
| | 01:59 | Now you may decide to use the
Capture and the Creative Sharpener at the
| | 02:03 | appropriate points in the process;
capture is meant to be done right after
| | 02:06 | capture, creative happen sometime
during the creative editing process when you
| | 02:10 | feel you need to add some sharpening; and then
output of course is only for the final output.
| | 02:15 | I haven't added any sharpening yet to any of these files.
I tend to be wary of over sharpening.
| | 02:20 | However, you can't argue with a good
output sharpener. I'll go ahead and select
| | 02:24 | this and as you can see, there
aren't a whole lot of options in here.
| | 02:29 | The first option here is Module, and
this is simply going to switch between
| | 02:32 | the three that we're already looked at;
Capture, Creative and Output,
| | 02:36 | so we know we want output.
| | 02:37 | Next, you choose what type of sharpening.
| | 02:38 | Are you printing to a continuous tone printer?
If you are, then you want to
| | 02:42 | choose the resolution from here.
| | 02:45 | Are you printing to an inkjet printer?
| | 02:47 | In that case, the only choices you have to make
is if you're going to print matte or glossy.
| | 02:50 | You can also choose to sharpen for a half tone
output or for web and multimedia.
| | 02:56 | So how do you know if you need to sharpen
for inkjet or for continuous tone?
| | 03:00 | For that you'll need to talk to your printer.
| | 03:02 | Call the printing company you're going
to be using and ask them what type of
| | 03:06 | printing process they're using for the
specific print you'll be ordering.
| | 03:09 | It might be continuous tone or it might be inkjet,
it just depends on what you're doing.
| | 03:13 | In this case these metal prints are actually inkjets.
| | 03:15 | The ink is embedded directly into the metal,
but it is still an inkjet process.
| | 03:20 | Then you need to choose between Matte and Glossy.
| | 03:23 | For me, I ordered matte prints.
| | 03:24 | I didn't want the high-gloss prints
reflecting the gallery lights and making
| | 03:28 | it hard for people to view the images, so
I just choose Matte in here, and that's it.
| | 03:33 | There are a couple of options you can
apply at the bottom here, but those are
| | 03:37 | really just about how the final image is output
and it doesn't change the sharpening itself.
| | 03:40 | It really couldn't be much easier.
| | 03:42 | Notice over here if you want to preview it,
it does warn you that preview is
| | 03:46 | only accurate at 100%, so let's go ahead
and zoom in on the eyelashes of the
| | 03:50 | zebra here and I'm going to turn on Preview,
just to see what the difference is going to look like.
| | 03:56 | As you can see, there is definitely some
sharpening being applied there.
| | 04:00 | If this is for screen view, I might say
it's bit too much, but of course it's not.
| | 04:05 | So, go ahead and click OK and the sharpening is added.
| | 04:09 | Notice that the sharpening is actually a combination
of different layers that have been added to the image.
| | 04:14 | If you want to see what it looks like here,
just go ahead and zoom into 100%,
| | 04:18 | pan over to whatever part of the image
you want to see, and toggle this top
| | 04:22 | layer on and off, and you can see the difference.
| | 04:26 | You'll need to flatten this file before
you can send it off to the printer.
| | 04:29 | You can also choose to flatten or merge
these layers automatically when you're
| | 04:32 | in the Output Sharpening tool.
| | 04:34 | I simply chose not to, so that I could turn it on
and off here to see the before and the after.
| | 04:40 | Once you're done, you'll want to flatten the image
| | 04:45 | and then save that and go back to Aperture.
| | 04:54 | Once you're back in Aperture, you're
ready to send off the file for final printing.
| | 04:58 | The printer will determine what type of file they want,
whether they want a TIFF file or JPEG.
| | 05:03 | Most printers are perfectly happy to receive JPEG files.
| | 05:07 | and if you output a file at high enough quality,
you simply can't tell the difference.
| | 05:10 | You're already going to have an Image Export
preset for JPEG at original size at high quality,
| | 05:15 | but you may want to just make sure that
you're setting it to the quality that you want.
| | 05:19 | So this one is set to JPEG - Original Size at
Quality 10, you can go ahead and take this
| | 05:25 | all the way to Quality 12 if you want, but I can
assure you that the difference is minimal.
| | 05:30 | However, better safe than sorry, and if
you had the bandwidth for it, go ahead
| | 05:34 | and greater preset that's specifically
for printing, taking the image quality
| | 05:36 | all the way up to the highest setting.
| | 05:38 | In that case, let's go ahead and take
this back to 10, we'll take this
| | 05:42 | JPEG - Original Size and duplicate that
and I'm just going to call it
| | 05:46 | JPEG - Original Size Q12, for quality 12 and I'm
also going to go ahead and put this in a 300 dpi.
| | 05:52 | Remember, as long we're looking at the
image on screen, the resolution doesn't matter,
| | 05:55 | but we've already set this to 300,
and by exporting it out with a different DPI,
| | 05:59 | it's going to change the DPI of the output,
it'll not change the image,
| | 06:02 | so don't worry if you forget this.
| | 06:04 | The printer will still get the full resolution file,
but they'll just have to change the numbers
| | 06:08 | in Photoshop before they can print it out themselves.
| | 06:11 | Let's save them the trouble, go ahead and
make sure that's set to 300, Original Size, Quality 12.
| | 06:16 | You are also going to want to make sure that
your Color Profile is set to Adobe RGB.
| | 06:23 | Great, that's all there to it. Okay.
Now from here we're ready to export,
| | 06:28 | Export>Version, choose the Preset that
we just created, Original Size, Qality 12 at 300 DPI
| | 06:35 | and export it out. Then you'll have a JPEG file
that you're ready to upload to your printer.
| | 06:42 | If the printer does want you to send the TIFF file,
you can of course create a TIFF preset,
| | 06:45 | or since this is already a TIFF file,
you can simply export the original.
| | 06:51 | Go to the File menu and choose Export>Original file,
and the original TIFF file will be copied out
| | 06:55 | of the Aperture library and placed
wherever you want, ready for upload.
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| Ordering your print| 00:01 | When it comes time to order your print,
there are, of course, dozens or even hundreds
| | 00:05 | of places you can order from.
Whether you're ordering online, or are
| | 00:09 | having them shipped to your door,
or even printing locally, you have many choices
| | 00:12 | that you can choose from, for making your final prints.
| | 00:15 | In my case I chose to work with Bay Photo.
| | 00:18 | Bay Photo produces the metal prints that I wanted,
and they're one of the few places that do it.
| | 00:22 | If you're interested in ordering the metal prints
as I have, go under Products & Services
| | 00:26 | and just click on anyone of the
first print orders, for example,
| | 00:30 | Prints on Photo Paper and then over on the
right-hand side scroll down until you see Metal Prints.
| | 00:37 | As you can see, there's a variety of
different ways you can order your Metal Prints.
| | 00:41 | The ones we're looking for are simply Single Metal Prints.
| | 00:44 | From here you can read all about the
printing process, and it'll explain the
| | 00:48 | different surfaces and different
types that you can order,
| | 00:52 | or just go straight to Sizes & Prices.
| | 00:56 | One of the big things I'll recommend is
that you order a MetalPrint Sample Kit.
| | 01:01 | This way you'll get to see exactly what
your prints will look like once printed
| | 01:04 | on metal, you can order them 4x6 or 5x7.
| | 01:08 | What you'll get for this price is a total
of four of those prints of the same image
| | 01:12 | on the four different surfaces. that's on the
High Gloss, Satin, Sheer-Glossy, & Sheer-Matte.
| | 01:16 | The two sheer are the ones that I was most interested in.
| | 01:22 | These two, High Gloss and Satin, essentially
print onto a white paper that is
| | 01:26 | adhered to the metal. That's probably
not a totally accurate description of what
| | 01:30 | this process is, but that's essentially what you see.
| | 01:33 | It doesn't look any different than
any standard metal print, in my opinion.
| | 01:37 | However, the sheer options are much more interesting.
| | 01:40 | These are the ones that print directly
onto the metal without any white background.
| | 01:43 | So if you were to print a pure white file, all you will be
getting is a sheet of metal back; not white, but metal.
| | 01:50 | So any white in your print
will have metal showing through.
| | 01:54 | Let's go back over to Aperture for a moment.
| | 01:54 | Let me take a look at one of these photos here
and talk about what these will come out like.
| | 02:00 | This image of the crow had the most
white in the background. Now this isn't a
| | 02:05 | pure white, but it's very, very bright.
There is just a little bit of pigment
| | 02:08 | that would get laid down onto the paper
or onto the metal. This means that this
| | 02:12 | print had a ton of metal texture
showing up in the background.
| | 02:15 | Of course, the metal shows up everywhere,
even in the black; but it's most visible
| | 02:19 | in the whiter areas of the print.
| | 02:21 | So you definitely want to order the Sample Kit,
so that you can see exactly what
| | 02:26 | your photos will look like on these different options.
| | 02:28 | I would also recommend going for the
slightly larger one, the 5x7. That'll just
| | 02:31 | give you a bigger idea, especially if you're going
to be printing something really large to begin with.
| | 02:36 | One little note from experience; I actually
ordered the 4x6 prints, so they were
| | 02:40 | a little bit small. I noticed in all the prints
that there is a green cast to them
| | 02:44 | and this concerned me greatly as you might imagine.
| | 02:47 | I talk to the printing company and
they weren't quite sure how that happened.
| | 02:50 | But when I talked to another photographer,
who had also ordered the Sample Kit
| | 02:54 | and then ordered large prints after that,
he had the same experience.
| | 02:57 | The small samples actually had a green cast, but that
green cast was completely gone in the larger prints.
| | 03:03 | So I can't really say why that happened
in the first place, and neither could Bay Photo.
| | 03:07 | But suffice to say, the final prints were fantastic
without any green in them at all.
| | 03:12 | Something else to consider: metal has a grain to it.
It could be either vertical grain or a horizontal grain.
| | 03:16 | If you ask the printer to make sure that all
| | 03:21 | the prints have the same grain direction,
they'll do that for you. But if you don't ask,
| | 03:24 | you could get some with the vertical grain direction,
and some with the horizontal grain direction.
| | 03:30 | If you're not hanging them side-by-side,
it's not going to make a difference.
| | 03:33 | But when you do hang them side-by-side,
the way the light bounces off of them will change.
| | 03:38 | I can't say that one is better than the other.
| | 03:41 | All that really matters is that they're consistent.
It just depends on the angle of the light
| | 03:44 | that's shining on it and how it's going to react
as people walk by the image.
| | 03:49 | If there's a light shining directly above it,
versus a light shining from the side,
| | 03:52 | it's going to react differently, again,
depending on whether it's vertical or horizontal grain.
| | 03:56 | This is another good reason to order a
larger Sample Kit. Then you'll be able to
| | 04:00 | play with them under lighting in your own home
or wherever you're going to hang them,
| | 04:04 | and perhaps decide whether you want to have
vertical or horizontal grain in your final images.
| | 04:08 | Just ask the printer to make sure that
they're all the same and tell them what
| | 04:12 | direction you want,
and they'll be happy to accommodate.
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| Creating the placards| 00:02 | As a final note, if you're going to be
hanging your prints in a gallery,
| | 00:05 | you probably want some type of gallery placard
that you can hang next to the print
| | 00:09 | to talk about what it is.
| | 00:11 | Of course, you can create anything you like
and this is what I had.
| | 00:14 | As you can see it's a simple little placard
printed on gray to somewhat match
| | 00:18 | the metal type of the print with my
name and website at the top,
| | 00:22 | the title of the print and the type of print
that it was, because I knew a lot of people
| | 00:26 | would be interested in what this metal print was.
| | 00:29 | In this case, it's called the Dye-infused metal print,
and then there's a map of the world
| | 00:32 | with little dot showing where the photo is taken,
and underneath the location and year.
| | 00:37 | As you can see this one is the Brandenburg Gate
shot in Berlin, Germany in 2006.
| | 00:41 | Then there is the Holocaust Memorial
also in Berlin in 2009, the Zebra shot at
| | 00:46 | Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya in 2007,
and you can see the dot moving around the map.
| | 00:52 | The Great Wall, that's the Great Wall of China,
shot in the Mutianyu section of
| | 00:55 | the Great Wall of China in 2010.
| | 00:58 | The Crow shot in Mumbai, India in 2008
and the Gateway Arch, shot in St. Louis,
| | 01:03 | Missouri in the United States in 2011,
there is the Ha Long Bay boats
| | 01:08 | in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam in 2011, and
finally Crater Lake in Klamath, Oregon,
| | 01:14 | United States in 2012.
| | 01:17 | Having these placards mounted next to
each image, give a nice little piece of
| | 01:20 | information for the viewers to look at.
| | 01:22 | Depending on the gallery that you're hanging at,
if you're hanging them in a gallery,
| | 01:26 | they may have their own template
that they want you to follow or they
| | 01:29 | may not want to hang it anything at all.
But if you can make something cool then go for it.
| | 01:34 | I quite enjoyed these as others did too.
| | 01:36 | It gave them quite a bit of information about the image,
before they made their purchasing decision.
| | 01:41 | And by the way, I did sell quite a few
of these prints, which is very, very nice.
| | 01:45 | It's wonderful to see your work hanging
large on a wall and then have people
| | 01:49 | actually pay for it and walk away
with those prints. It's a great feeling.
| | 01:52 | I hope you enjoy your photographic adventures,
and I hope that you learned a lot from these videos.
| | 01:57 | I had fun recording them.
| | 01:58 | It was interesting to go back through the process
with a very analytical mind to explain exactly what I did.
| | 02:03 | Of course, the original process wasn't
quite as straightforward as what you saw
| | 02:06 | over the last couple of hours; there's a lot
more trial and error than what you saw here,
| | 02:10 | but hopefully, the time that I spent
trying to figure that out in the first place
| | 02:14 | can help you to move along more quickly
when it's time for you to do the same thing.
| | 02:19 | Thanks a lot for enjoying these videos.
I hope to see you again soon.
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