Spring blossoms along the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia invariably present a challenge for the photographer. If you wait too late - and today was almost the last chance - you miss the blossoms, which peak much sooner than many flowering trees in the area. If you go on time, like I did today, you usually hit stormy, dark weather, which is a thrill to see in person but a problem for the camera's metering system. As dark as the clouds appear to be, they tend to be overexposed when the camera meters for the grass and blossoms, with the result that you end up with a playback screen that is dancing with "blinkies", those annoying alerts for overexposure. A neutral grad helps, but on a shot with trees the grad tends to darken the treetops on the right too much, in a very obvious way. So here's how I approach this shot, all the way through Lightroom and Photoshop:
The crucial first step is to shoot with a custom white balance setting. Most cameras, including my EOS 5D, do not shoot well on Auto white balance on a dim day, and today was exceedingly dim, to the point where many cars were driving with their lights on. The procedure varies by camera, but on the Canon all you have to do is switch to spot metering and take a picture of an "18-percent gray card". It doesn't even have to be in focus; it just has to be properly exposed. I like the WhiBal card because it is relatively cheap, is made of tough plastic that fits in my shirt pocket, is easy to hold, and has a logo that allows me to quickly see if I'm getting glare on the card and need to change its angle. Then I just go into the Menu setting for Custom White Balance, select that photo, hit Select, and choose the Custom White Balance setting on the top of the screen. That's all there is too it.
Next, I look for a scene where the dark, rather bland sky is a minor part of the scene, yet still provides a sense of place. And, for this shot, I used the picnic bench as an "anchor" to the composition to keep the grassy foreground from overwhelming the shot. I took two exposures: one with a neutral grad, and one without, and ended up liking the one taken with a .6 soft grad held at the angle on the left. I do it by hand, making sure the grad is fully over the lens. I have a bad habit of allowing it to creep as I reposition it, with the result that the edge of the grad shows up in the picture. I also take a lot of pictures with the tip of a finger in there. But, overall, hand-holding is the way to go for pinpoint positioning of the grad.
Back at home, I view my shots first on the TV, and make a note of the keepers. I only import the keepers to my aging iMAC, which can't be upgraded for memory any more than I already have done. Even by being selective, I still put in 24 Camera Raw and 24 JPEG shots, which was enough to slow the computer down enough to where Lightroom couldn't be operating at the same time as Photoshop. Yes, at some point I need a new computer, but first comes a new zoom lens. I forgot to mention that my old Tamron zoom is so beat that I have to yank on it to make it extend. Next month it will be replaced by a spiffy, larger Canon 28-200. I'm just going to have to live with the glaring white color of that lens.
Lightroom is the next step. Straight out of the camera, the RAW image looks overly flat and listless. I'm not an ace at using Curves in Photoshop, in fact I hate it, so my solution is to quickly flip through presets in Lightroom, while watching what happens to the image in the little preview window. It's amazing how sometimes, like today, a preset can magically transform a shot, and it's instant, as opposed to the hours of fiddling that might be involved with Curves. Today's magic preset was Creative - Direct Positive. That often is a very bad choice, but in this case, on a shot taken on a dim day, it really brightened things up and made the colors pop, without overdoing it. It mainly did this by boosting exposure by 1.15, and in the Curves box, making a steep curve, primarily by boosting exposure by 60 and lowing shadows by 60. It would have taken me all day to figure that out. Next, I used a preset that I fished off of the web called "Fuji Reala + 2 stops auto," which basically simulates the look of Fuji Reala film. That brightened things up even more. These steps, by the way, rarely get used when lighting is great. They're wonderful, however, when it was dark like today. Finally, I used Lightroom's grad tool to lighten the sky a little, and then used the adjustment brush on one sky area that became too bright. For sharpening, I used a general-purpose landscape sharpening setting of .91 amount, .7 radius, .56 detail, and .36 masking. Then it was on to Photoshop. And, by the way, all the above action only took about 10 minutes. I just spent more time describing what I did than actually doing it.
Once in Photoshop, I cloned out two dust spots. Yes, I have a slightly dirty sensor, dating back to last summer when the wind was gale-force at Drake's Beach north of San Francisco. At least once a year I take the camera to Canon's facility in New Jersey, about a hour's drive from here, to have them clean it for $35. Much less scary than doing it myself, and they do a perfect job. Next I do what I do on many shots, I go in Pixel Genius' program and add midtone contrast masking and a film effect called Vivid that essentially boosts contrast. The nice thing about the program, particularly for the masking, is that they do automatically what you would have to do with about 20 steps in Photoshop, and you can change the strength to suit. I also used their Dodge tool to slightly brighten the upper 1/3 of the photo, although I wanted to keep a good bit of the drama resulting from a dark top and a lighter band below.
And that was it. The key things here were the custom white balance setting, and playing with presets in Lightroom. I like to take pictures, but I have an aversion to spending too much time on processing. This image illustrated how to can get the result I want without getting too frustrated in the process.
Hope you liked this. And, by the way, my other blog, Photo Stories, features images and commentary by a growing number of people. The blog was chosen as a featured blog by Blog.com. and has been viewed by people in more than 30 countries. Check it out here:
http://jpics.blog.com/
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