From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

779 Crop and develop a great white shark

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

Start my 1-month free trial

779 Crop and develop a great white shark

“

- Hey gang, this is Deke Mcclelland, welcome to Deke's techniques. Now last year I had the privilege of cage diving with great white sharks off the island of Guadalupe in the Pacific Ocean, and I got some great shots with my Canon 70D, inside a not-a-cam housing. Including this bad boy right here, now you might look at this photograph and say Deke, that is a terrible composition, no, it was a terrible composition before I cropped and developed it inside Camera Raw, at which point it became this. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right here's the unedited and shamefully wide original photograph. And here's the cropped version that we're going to develop inside Camera Raw, and sharpen inside Photoshop, even though it doesn't look all that sharp, and that's because we're currently previewing the image inside Adobe Bridge. All right so I'll go ahead and press the escape key, so that we can see this particular open inside Bridge, and I'm going to go ahead and select as DNG file, and I want to show you what's going on with the metadata. Now by default the metadata panel is located in the bottom right corner of the screen, when you're working inside the essentials work space. Which you can get to just by clicking on the word essentials up here at the top of the screen. I'm going to click on this fly out menu icon, in the top right corner of the metadata panel, and choose preferences, because I want you to see that I've turned off the hide empty fields checkbox, so that we can see what's missing. All right so I'll just cancel out of there, and I'll scroll down the list until I come to camera data (Exf), and I want you to notice as I scroll down here, that the camera captured the focal length, which is only 17 millimeter, and it knows that I was working with the 10 to 17 millimeter lens. However, if I scroll farther down the list, we can see the make and model of the camera, and the lens specs, but we're not seeing a make or model, and that's because for some reason the lens and the camera aren't effectively communicating. But in any event, I'm just making note of that because we are going to have to enter that information manually. All right, so I'll go ahead and double click on this DNG file, in order to open it inside Camera Raw running inside Photoshop. And then the first thing I'll do is switch over to the lens corrections panel, right here, make sure that the profile tab is open, and turn on this checkbox, enable profile corrections, which immediately does nothing, and that's because, as we can see, indicated by this warning, Camera Raw cannot find a matching lens profile because it doesn't know what lens was used. I know the lens, however, so I'm going to set this make option to one of the later ones in alphabetical order, Tokina right there, at which point, Camera Raw successfully identifies the correct lens, in part because it's the first one in alphabetical order, but also because it's the only 10 to 17 millimeter model. All right so just so you can see the difference, this is how the image looks without the correction, this is how it looks now. This image doesn't really have that much in the way of chromatic aberrations, except where this fish, which is a jack, is concerned, in the top left corner. But you might as well go ahead and turn this checkbox on. All right, now notice that you can change the amount of distortion, which is actually being applied for the sake of correcting the image, and I ended up taking it just a little bit down to 80. All right, the next thing I want to do is crop this image, and so I'll go ahead and grab the crop tool, and I'll click and hold on it and set the aspect ratio to two to three, because that is the aspect ratio of the original photograph, and then I'll draw my crop. Now normally I'm not a big fan of cropping in the way, a large portion of the animal, especially its dorsal fin, however, in this case I really want to get tight on those teeth, and as you can see here, in my case, the new crop is going to measure 2577x1718 pixels. I want it to be tighter than that so I'm going to crop it inward like so, until I arrive at a value, and this can be a little tricky, actually, inside the program, I wish we had a heads up display, it would really help out a lot, but I'm not sure the Camera Raw team is most interested in the needs of video trainers. But you can see if I just keep dragging this thing around I'm ultimately going to come up with 2356x1571, you know what, that's good enough, it's a little wider than what I want, but it's going to work. And then to apply the crop, I'll just go ahead and press the enter key, or the return key on a Mac, which is going to switch me back to the zoom tool. All right now I'll switch back to the basic panel so that we can develop the image, and of course the first thing I want to do here is adjust the white balance. So I'll go ahead and grab my white balance tool, which is available to me in the horizontal tool bar, up here at the top of the screen, and it has a keyboard shortcut of I. And then you could click inside of a gray region of the shark, or if you prefer you can drag in order to get a more balanced result. And the degree of white balance is up to you, you can go with a very warm effect like this one here, and so notice with a single click, I've set the temperature value to 10,500, and I've got a tint of +84, or I could drag around that region and that's going to cool things down. All right at this point I went ahead and jumped down to the clarity option, and I took it way up because I want this shark to be absolutely visceral. So I'm going to take that guy up to +70, and then I want to sync the shadows by taking the dehaze value up to 20, and dehaze is a pretty great control when you're editing underwater images, because water is, I'm sure you're aware, is denser than air. All right next I'm going to tab to the vibrance value, and take it up to +20, just so we have a little additional saturation, and now I'm going to increase the exposure value a little bit, just a +0.25, and now I want to make sure that we're not clipping too much information here, so I'm going to press the alt key, or the option key on a Mac, while dragging the slider triangle for the whites value, and I'm going to take it down until we're seeing less in the way of white pixels on screen. Ideally we'd get rid of all of them, but I don't really want to go this low, and so I eventually came up with a whites value of -30, then I'll alt or option drag the black slider triangle until I'm seeing just a few blue pixels. So notice right off the bat we're seeing cyan, which means that we're clipping into red channel, once we're seeing blue, we're also clipping a little bit in the green channel. And so the colors we're seeing on screen, when you're alt or option dragging the black slider triangle, are complimentary. All right now I want to go ahead and open the image inside Photoshop, and I want to open it as an editable smart object, and you do that by pressing the shift key, at which point you'll see this open image button, switch to an open object button, and then if you click, that will open the image as an editable smart object here inside Photoshop. And finally he's little bit too big, at least where this screen is concerned, and so to scale the animal down a little bit I went up to the image menu, and chose the image size command, and notice that the resample checkbox is turned on, I've got the interpolation method set to bicubic smooth gradients. I know a lot of people prefer automatic, which actually grabs bicubic sharper, I however do not recommend working that way, because you're going to introduce a degree of sharpening that does not work with the other sharpening options that we'll be applying later. So I'll go ahead and switch to smooth gradients right there, and then you can see that the width and height values are locked together, so that we're going to scale the image proportionally, and that my unit of measure is set to pixels, at which point I'll go ahead and set the width value to 1950 pixels, which I just happen to know works well at this particular screen size. After which point, I will click okay to apply that change, and then I'll press Control + 0, or Command + 0 on a Mac, to center my zoom. And that's at least one way to crop and develop a great white shark so that you can really take in it's teeth using Camera Raw. All right now if you're a member of LinkedIn learning, I have a follow up movie in which I show you how to sharpen the detail in our great white shark, using a combination of Camera Raw and the high pass filter. If you're looking forward to next week, we've got still more great white sharks, at which point I'm going to show you how and why to combine low vibrance with high saturation. Deke's techniques, each and every week, keep watching.

Contents