Post Processing: A Guide For Nature Photographers

By Glenn Bartley

The era of digital photography has brought tremendous advantages to bird and wildlife photographers. The ability to take hundreds or thousands of photos in one day allows us to continually raise the bar and strive for excellence in the images that we create.

Many aspiring wildlife photographers that I meet, however, are bogged down by digital issues of file management and having an efficient workflow. It is common for photographers to waste a significant amount of time at the computer and as a result, many good images that could become great images remain untouched and un-shared on hard drives. These images simply never live up to their potential.

This E-book is designed to share the strategies and techniques that I have developed over the years to improve and simplify Post Processing. In my own processing I use primarily two software platforms (Breezebrowser and Adobe Photoshop). As such, this book is aimed primarily at photographers hoping to learn to use Adobe Photoshop. However, many of the skills and techniques in this book could also be transferable to other software platforms.

This guide is for you if you want to:

- Spend less time at the computer
- Learn to use Adobe Photoshop
- Streamline your processing workflow
- Take your best images and take them to a whole new level
- Display your images to family and friends

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483526768

Book preview

APPENDICIES

INTRODUCTION

The era of digital photography has brought tremendous advantages to bird and wildlife photographers. The ability to take hundreds or thousands of photos in one day allows us to continually raise the bar and strive for excellence in the images that we create.

Many aspiring wildlife photographers that I meet, however, are bogged down by digital issues of file management and having an efficient workflow. It is common for photographers to waste a significant amount of time at the computer and as a result, many good images that could become great images remain untouched and unshared on hard drives. These images simply never live up to their potential.

This E-book is designed to share the strategies and techniques that I have developed over the years to improve and simplify Post Processing. The chapters of this book are organized in a logical way to work through the following steps:

Creating a logical and efficient file management system

Culling images effectively and selecting your best work

Converting RAW files

Processing images in Adobe Photoshop

This guide is for you if you want to:

Spend less time at the computer

Streamline your processing workflow

Take your best images and take them to a whole new level

Display your images to family and friends

Included with this ebook are:

Downloadable Photoshop Actions designed to save you time.

Sample Images to work on (cloning, layer mask, noise reduction)

Links to online video tutorials

Thank you so much for purchasing this book. I sincerely hope that you find it useful and that it both saves you time and improves the quality of your processed digital image files.

All the best!

Glenn Bartley

CHAPTER 1

GETTING

STARTED

BUILDING THE FOUNDATION OF AN EFFICIENT WORKFLOW

From Memory Card to Computer

The obvious first step when moving from the field to the computer is to download your images from your memory card on to the computer. Many photographers choose to allow Adobe Lightroom to automatically download the images on to the computer’s hard drive and create a folder to put them in. There is certainly nothing wrong with this approach. It is, however, essential that you understand where on your computer these images are going. I have met many photographers who, when I ask them where their images are on their computer, tell me that they are in Lightroom. It is very important to understand that Lightroom is simply a program that provides an interface through which to see the images. The images themselves reside in a folder on the computer’s hard drive. A program such as Lightroom may have a slick and automated way of creating folders automatically to store the images. Just make sure that you as the photographer know exactly where the image files are stored in case you ever need to access them manually.

When I download my images from my memory card to my computer I prefer to do so manually. I simply make a new folder on the desktop that is named based on the date and a short description (e.g. 2013_09_23 – Peru). I then open the memory card folder by accessing My Computer (or Finder if using a Mac) and drag all of my images from my memory card(s) in to this folder that I have created.

If you are going to use Lightroom as a part of your workflow and a different third party program to do your culling (such as Breezebrowser or Photo Mechanic) it makes a lot more sense to make your folders manually and do your culling before importing these images into Lightroom. This will avoid cataloguing errors and missing files.

Once you have the images from your card(s) downloaded to your computer you may wish to make a quick backup of the images just to be on the safe side. If you are not in a rush to format your cards then you can wait until you are done culling. However if you need the cards right away you should make a second copy of the images. Once you have completed your culling, renamed your files and perhaps added metadata (such as the species name, location shot, etc.) you will make your final backups.

Culling Images

Digital capture has given photographers the ability to shoot hundreds, or even thousands of images in a day. For nature photographers this is a wonderful thing! Keeping and processing every single one of these images however would take far too long and would be a storage nightmare.

Before actually beginning to edit your digital images an essential aspect of post processing is deciding which images to keep and which to delete. Digital photographers often call this culling their images. The culling process allows photographers to eliminate any images that have flaws, to compare similar images to determine which may be slightly better, and to refine the day’s collection of images to only the absolute best.

In the film days when shooting on film was the only option the old saying was that the biggest difference between a professional and amateur photographer was the size of his waste basket. Back then, slide film was expensive and it was generally only professionals who could afford to shoot large quantities of images. These professionals would meticulously go through their slides using an imaging loupe and discard all except the very