Kris D'Amico Photography

March 5th, 2009 by Kris

2 Week Drought – Time to talk some shop! I know you’ve been missing me. I do apologize and promise to not let that happen anytime again soon.

Work over at cabedge, has pretty much been kicking me in the rear. It’s been good to be too busy for a while – let’s us relish the time we’ve got to ourselves, right? Anyway, let’s talk about what we’ve been doing.

We have a client that we’ve made some really unbleviable images for down in Columbia, I know many have seen the IDC Hero Images so if you haven’t they are over on my Flickr page and the first image that pops up on my site are from that series. Anyway, I bring this up because we’ve had to “help” with some client provided imagery to finish up the project. They build hanger and blast doors all over the world and most are for the US military – so the contractors on the jobs usually do the photography. Now, I’ve got to “fix” these client provided images. Well, I won’t bore you with too many gritty details but lets walk though “retouching” a decent image that just has some image quality issues.

Now, let’s talk about this shot for just a minute. What works?

• the exposure is pretty spot on, nothing is too underexposed and nothing too over exposed, even still have a little blue in the sky
• interesting subject, maybe it’s my years playing with GI Joe’s – but I dig this subject
• compositionally there are a few issues, but it’s a nice angle on the bunker and there’s not a whole lot of extra “stuff” in the frame.

Let’s see what’s not working:

• Subject is the door, not the bunker – not bad, but that needs to be the focus
• as a documentation of the project the building needs to be level in the shot
• this has been shot on film, printed, and scanned – probably more than once. We’ve lost some quality here.
• color is washed out and the image feels “old,” and not in that cool grungy way.

So how do we fix this? Well first thing I did was pull this into Lightroom.

First thing I notice is the histogram up in the corner, notice how it’s slammed up against the right hand side? That is telling us that there are probablly some areas that are way too light and may cause some problems when it comes to fixing color and depth in the image.

Well, there’s a good place to start – color. I perfer to use white ballence to effect the overall look and feel of the image so I go over the the white ballence slider and see what we can do! It looks a little green to me so I slid the “tint” over towards the magenta a bit to help normalize the image color.

Next let’s straigten this image out a bit, task over to the crop tool and I like to find the vertical line that is:

1. closest to the camera
2. within the middle 3rd of the frame
3. takes up more than 50% of the image space

In this case we’re lucky because you’ve got the exterior of the door frame dead center and it’s almost the height of the frame.

You’ll see that we’re loosing a bit of the image due to the rotation of the image. I suppose if we needed to we could expand the top and bottom of the frame in photoshop – but I’m a little too lazy to do that. Besides, I dig this anamorphic frame size they gave us to work with – good on the web too.

Now, let’s work on the contrast a bit – we could go and mess with the sliders up at the top, but let’s think for a second about what we specificlly want to enhance with this image.

• Need to bring up the contrast by upping the blacks, but not loosing the details in the shadows
• Need to bring the door out a bit, without blowing out the highlights
• Need to be careful not over work the image because of it’s poor image integrity (lots of grain and jpg artifacts)

So all this said – let’s do this with curves – that way we’re affecting indvual parts of the picture in relation to the other parts. Something like this:

We needed to add some contrast, so let’s add some black by dropping the shaddows, but we also needed to pull the face of the door out some. Well, that’s a dark part of the image right? Now, we need to lower the over all areas of lightness, remember our orginal histogram telling us the image was a little bright overall, let’s drop the lights down a bit. Now, when we do that we have to pull up the highlights other wise we’ll loose that “pop” that we’re getting from adding black. The result?

Now a little increase in saturation and I think it’s ready to be dropped into the layout. Mouse over finished image to see the original and you’ll see the sum of these minor adjustments really gave a new life to this photo.