jfrancho
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Registered: 01-2006
Location: Rochester, NY USA
Posts: 373
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Raw>PSD>JPEG Workflow With a Flower
Or "My anal sharpening methods with a little bit of raw work flow thrown in."
I originally posted this elsewhere, but I figured it would be useful here as well.
I took this picture using my 20D, Tamron 28-300 f/3.5-6.3 at 135mm 1/250 s. @ f/6.3 ISO 400 using my 430EX with FEC set to +2/3. I then ran it through ACR at all the default settings (not auto!), resized using bicubic sharper, converted to sRGB, 8 bit mode, and saved as a jpeg. Pretty simple work flow here. Not a bad image either.
It is a little flat, and even though I used ISO 400, I'm not sure I like the background. The Tammy is not renown for great bokeh. So I decided to go for maximum pop. Here are the new, edited ACR settings stripped directly from the .xmp file - even though it's XML, most can figure it out.
<crs:Temperature>5850</crs:Temperature>
<crs:Tint>+20</crs:Tint>
<crs:Exposure>+0.30</crs:Exposure>
<crs:Shadows>53</crs:Shadows>
<crs:Brightness>93</crs:Brightness>
<crs:Contrast>+20</crs:Contrast>
<crs:Saturation>0</crs:Saturation>
<crs:Sharpness>1</crs:Sharpness>
<crs:LuminanceSmoothing>10</crs:LuminanceSmoothing>
<crs:ColorNoiseReduction>4</crs:ColorNoiseReduction>
<crs:ChromaticAberrationR>+37</crs:ChromaticAberrationR>
<crs:ChromaticAberrationB>+55</crs:ChromaticAberrationB>
<crs:VignetteAmount>-100</crs:VignetteAmount>
<crs:VignetteMidpoint>50</crs:VignetteMidpoint>
<crs:ShadowTint>0</crs:ShadowTint>
<crs:RedHue>0</crs:RedHue>
<crs:RedSaturation>0</crs:RedSaturation>
<crs:GreenHue>0</crs:GreenHue>
<crs:GreenSaturation>0</crs:GreenSaturation>
<crs:BlueHue>0</crs:BlueHue>
<crs:BlueSaturation>0</crs:BlueSaturation>
<crs:ToneCurveName>Strong Contrast</crs:ToneCurveName>
The color temp and calibration were totally subjective decisions, as were many other settings. Note that I once I killed the background completely using the Shadows slider (being careful not to clip too much detail in the flower!) I had some CA issues that were very noticeable. The Tammy seems to make a lot of this junk. Luckily ACR has some great CA removal tools built in. I use the Ctrl-click method while zoomed all the way in to get these two sliders working in tandem to remove most of the CA. Next I went after the noise. I don't like aggressive NR in ACR, though very conservative settings can get rid of most of the blue and red blobs you'll see at 400%. A little luminance smoothing goes a long way when you sharpen later. Once I did all I could in ACR, I saved it as a 16 bit .psd in Prophoto RGB. If you have to ask why ProPhoto, try sRGB instead.
Once I opened the .psd in Photoshop proper, I went about creating surface masks for use with Noise Ninja to take fine control of noise removal. I like to use the Pro Mask Toolkit script from the The Light's Right Studio. It builds the masks using an 8-bit copy of the background image, so it works pretty quickly. After creating several different mask selections, I decided that a combination of narrow width highlights mask and medium width mid tones mask would protect most of the details in the flower highlights and let Noise Ninja do it's thing on the shadows. I copied the layer and created a layer mask with the selections. There were a couple spots in the mask that were a little goofy, so "painted them in" using my Wacom pad and the brush tool, set to a low opacity, in PS. Then I ran Noise Ninja, letting it profile the image. I turned the first three sliders for Strength, Smoothness, and Contrast down to 7. I don't use USM in NN, so those were disabled. Using NN with the surface mask zapped most of the ugly noise out of the shadows and smoothed out some of water droplets, all without blurring the details.
Then I used TLR's Sharpening scripts for capture sharpening. This just "defuzzes" the softness caused by anti-aliasing in the camera and noise removal in ACR. I used the enhanced edge mask mode to protect all that work I did previously to rid the image of noise. By using masks this way, NR and sharpening don't overlap and are less destructive.
Here are some crops showing the difference my goofy NR/sharpening process makes. It's subtle, but I think it's what gives it the most pop.
Here is where I took the crop:
Here is the side by side, sharpened is on the right:
 
The crops were taken from the full size image. The sharpened crop was taken after the creative sharpening step. I didn't take it from the output step because that image had already been resized and is represented at 100% below.
At this point, I sometimes flatten the image, and add "pop" with a curves adjustment in L*a*b mode. This image needed no pop, so I cranked ahead with some TLR Creative Sharpening. I used just about every option in the script, since you can "paint in" the amount of sharpening using the brush tool on the layer mask. Surface sharpening really added some nice contrast to the water droplets here.
Now, I had to decide where my workflow was going to take me. It is at this point that the workflow diverges, based on output and output size. I flatten and save a copy of this file in the archive. Since I chose to share this experience, I need to "WEBERIZE" it. The first thing I do resize the image to 800x533 px. I used bicubic sharper for this, because it just looked better that way. Another subjective decision. Once it was resized, it needed some sharpening to create the illusion of sharpness on the web. High Pass Filter is a great method for this. Luckily, TLR has a script for this (sound like an infomercial yet? - no, I'm not on Mitch's payroll). I set it for 800 px. but it was too harsh, so went back and tried in "expert" mode. All I had to do was lower the radius of the High Pass filter to 0.2 for the lightness layer.
Almost there. The picture is done in my book, but it isn't ready for the web. I first convert to sRGB color space, and then converted to 8 bit mode. Now I can save it as a .jpg quality-12 and upload to my hosting site to share it with you.
Here it is:
I'll probably get a print made of this as well, but that's another work flow.
I should add that the point of this is to demonstrate that the real value with using raw format is not always a safety net to rescue a bad exposure, but to have the ability to make creative decisions after the capture is made. I could have gone back and retake the shot using ISO 100, and possibly a black mat board for a background, but it had been in the mid 90s the irises were done by the time I worked on this image.
Now for the final step: Make it a Black & White Image! Very simple. For my version, I wanted darker yellows, but not so dark that the detail was lost in the abyss. I did this by making two conversions using different channel mixer settings and using a layer mask to control the blending. I also wanted to bring out the texture of the petals, without losing the whiteness either. A 50% gray overlay layer, using a very soft, and low opacity brush along with localized contrast control with USM did the trick.
Here is what I got:
There are a pile of others' interpretations on how this can be converted, if you're interested go here. It was a lot of fun. Feel free to do your own.
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