Bird Photography editing workflow

hi this is Jamin taylor with jay hunter photography and today i'm gonna walk you through my standard editing process for processing my birds and i'm gonna start off with lightroom and then we're going to bring that photo once I'm done with Lightroom bring it into Photoshop do my final edits and call it good so I just wanted to take a minute to go through my processes with you all and so you can reference them so the first thing I want to do is I'm gonna bring up Lightroom and I've got my photo selected that I wanted to edit and this is an orange ground Warbler that I photographed recently before they decided to head south and had a chance to photograph them one last time for the season so first thing I do when I when I go into editing my bird photos is decide how I want to crop for composition now you can see that I shot the bird in my center pin so my my focusing point was right here in the middle I tried to focus on his eye and so that left the bird right smack in the middle and I really typically don't like to have my bird smack in the middle it's just how this one turned out so what I'm gonna do is is crop this and I really want there to be not as much room over here and over here I want the bird to be looking into now I also have these kind of in my opinion distracting branches this is cow parsnip that the bird was perched on and then I've got this piece of grass here also that it's a bit of a distraction so I'm gonna remove those two just so we have a really clear view of this bird and without any distraction so the first thing I want to do is go to my crop tool and I'm gonna click on my crop tool and that's gonna give me my built in thirds you can see that I have this screen divided up into thirds use the three horizontal and three verticals which provide for focal points he's break here on my focal points and that's usually where I want to try to get the bird's eye closest to or at least get the bird on one of those focus points so I'm gonna start off with a crop and the bird is kind of looking down easy as that he's kind of pointed downward so I'm gonna bring it in from the top here now one secret about the crop tool is if I hold down my shift and start my crop it it constrains the proportions meaning that it's not gonna change and get all get all wonky on me it's gonna keep the dimensions that are in my original photo now if I release shift then I can go crazy with it and do whatever I want but I'm gonna I'm gonna hold down the shift and I'm gonna go to my crop so another thing I wanted I don't want to get that tail too close to the edge I need to give the bird some breathing room so probably something like that is good you can see that top focal point is where I want my bird so I want the focus to be given the tail a little bit of room so it's not just right cropped against the edge there and overall looks good I think the bird has room to look into the frame he's not looking out of the frame there's a reminder if you've been to my workshops I'm always don't even not to not to crop it you wouldn't want to crop like this because the bird is looking out of the frame at this point and that's going to direct viewers eyes out of your photo and that's not what you want so we're gonna go ahead and do this crop and this actually takes care of this branch here which means that I won't have to edit that out so I've got a nice close in view of this bird I'm gonna crop tool again to complete my crop and there I have it I have a nice-looking close in view of this bird it's nicely perched and so now what I want to do is I want to get rid of this branch it's distracting to my eye and I want to bring your focus to the bird so I'm gonna go to the spot removal tool and here you can see that it's already it's already sized at 77 with a 45 feather and that's for spot removal and you can see I had a smudge on my lens or to me a speck of dust on my sensor before I cleaned it and I've got a couple of bone got one right here and I'm going right there so I'm gonna take care of those real quick first and alls I gonna do is click on them it's gonna sample from somewhere else that's similar and I'm good to go and then I'm second so I can identify the other one there so I just took care of those two spots just they kind of bug me I see another one thank you so I just want to remove any distractions and anything that may take away from just the smoothness of that background so now I've gotta come in here and deal with this and I'm gonna do it in two ways I'm gonna first go to photoshop I'm gonna use it or excuse me Lightroom and we use this spot removal tool to get rid of the majority of it and I'm gonna finish it off just just to smooth it out in Photoshop once we're done so I'm gonna go in here I'm going to increase the size here cuz I wanna really want to grab all of this and I'm just gonna a big ol swatch down there and then this is gonna sample it and this is way too far over so I've got a resample it'll it'll it'll kind of pick for you where it's sampling from and then you can grab that and you adjust it you can see up samples over so here you can you see that it's done a good job of removing the tree but still have some of this area going on you know you can tell us that something happened so I'm gonna take care of that in Photoshop right now I'm just going to expose my bird correctly you see it's really bright and I want to talk about some of the color and a little bit of the detail in this first one in Lightroom and then finish up in Photoshop so first thing I want to do is it was a really bright day and so some of those whites are just a little too much from me they kind of wash out some of the color so I'm gonna take my slider here and if you ever have a bird where you've got hot spots or if you've got a white bird and then it's a bright day you can recover some of those details and even in a background you have clouds or something and they're really bright you can bring down the whites you know recover some of those details really nicely and give you a better photo so I'm gonna take this down I'm just gonna bring down some of those highlights and probably -75 it and I'm going to increase I use my clarity I'm gonna pop up that pear just don't want to recover some of the details on that want to go to my vibrance tool I usually don't do a lot with saturation I would usually stick to vibrance when I'm at in color back in it usually does enough saturation in my opinion starts looking to fake and want my photos to look as natural as possible even though I'm doing some some editing to them I still want them to be realistic especially in the color and whatnot so we're just gonna do some slight adjustments to clarity sometimes it's nice just to slide it around just to just kind of see what it looks like okay I think I like this about there so and I really think that looks decent I've got some good color on the bird here this is still a little watch out car but hey now this is also a fall bird and a lot of the color from its 3d images it's not there so I think this looks actually pretty good and I think it's ready for export now I export these as Photoshop documents and I dump them all into a folder and I've got a huge backlog of photo this don't need to edit a usually end up editing the best ones and posting them either Flickr Facebook for whatever and then not kind of go through and later on through the winter you know as the birds are scarce I'll pull up something from summer both of those but usually the best ones I closed correctly so I'm going to go up here and go to file export and it's say yes I want to put this in untitled export and I'm gonna call this orange contour blur OCW may have orange Graham Warbler in there so I it'll it'll yeah see it'll say hope you've already got one in there called that so I don't want to overwrite that so I've got to follow something else OC Warbler that'll work okay we'll wait for a minute as its exports and we're done so at this point I'm going to minimize its Lightroom and I'll go into my untitled exports folder here and there's my Warbler it's gonna double click this he's already a Photoshop document so it's gonna open it up in Photoshop and here's my bread so the first thing I do when I open up in Photoshop he is I go to filter here and I've downloaded a number of different plug-ins for Photoshop from topaz labs and the two that I use the most often he is denoise and adjust addy noise is a really nice tool so I'm gonna go ahead and open up my photo denoise and I'm just gonna get rid of all the grain you can see that it already when I open it up it's already on a setting so when I'm moving this around you can see the original and then when it snaps back you can see what it's doing and it takes out a lot of the grain I get some detail there and so I usually have this on the preset strong and you can do adjustments do adjustments to overall strength and get even more precise with it you can go into detail recovery and really spend a lot of time I found that just clicking on strong usually does a good job it's good light my ISO was low enough and that strong preset is usually good enough to get rid of most of he noise so I'm just gonna hit OK he's gonna process for a minute and it takes a few minutes the process really let's see the detail here all of those little teeny feathers and these are the things I really want anything else you see that part that usually takes the longest but the results are really nice and it's finished here there we go alright so now we are all ready to edit the verb itself so I'm gonna go up here to my quick selection tool that you can see if I click on that and it's already out of good size set 54 mix so listen I'm just gonna go in here and start selecting the bird I actually want to select this branch as well too I like the detail in it as a perch and this will do a lot of times when I have a detailed search something like moss or like in or something interesting that battle I'll go in and select that too so I want the details to come out of bag I think all of that it's interesting creates dynamic looking photos this direct selection tool is really super nice really does a good job of selecting and getting what you want in here you can see the tail was slightly out of focus and I kind of like that I like the softness of it but when I when I go into select me and I need to fine-tune this selection a little bit because I kind of want to hide the effects that I'm using I don't want any hard lines and I want any hard edges to the selection I want everything to be soft and natural looking so I'm gonna hit the Q which is gonna put me in quick mask mode here you can see it everything is red it's not been selected so what I want to do is give this a really nice feather so that when I apply my adjustment with layers that that would all kind of just be a really super nice fade so you can see I'm at 220 and it's a it's a blurred selection tool it doesn't have the hard edge like this this circle does it's just got a really nice nice border so I'm just gonna go through around this a little bit just soften those edges now if I wanted to I keep going if I need to make micro adjustments to my selection if you can see here some of the bill it's not been focusing selected correctly I'm gonna go in here to my polygon lasso tool and when I hold down option I'm on a Mac too might be different if you're on a PC but on my Mac I'm holding down option and so I'm gonna get rid of this little green so I pushed option and then I clicked and I'm just gonna start selecting the edge of this of this bill there and I come back around you can see the circle there that closes my selection and there we go so in addition I also need to select the rest of the bill so to do that I click shift easy little plus sign there I'm gonna start right here and these are just really neat and turn back to my starting point and that's why I started over here so I mean I could see clearly where my starting point was sometimes I have a hard time finding my starting point again but here you can see it's closed the logo click there and I have a nice selection and I'm not too worried about selecting every little feather here I've already done my smoothing might be noise and these little details are still there and they're gonna remain there what I'm gonna do next once my selection is made and it's I'm happy with my selection I'm gonna soften that just even of my selection in general so if there's a few places here like I want to get smoothies it's a nice feather sphere so it's gonna kind of go in look around thing there is a mist it doesn't have to be perfect because I'm gonna I'm gonna contract some of this selection but I just want to make sure it's nice and even now sit-ups pretty good no I'm not weird about this - there's not a lot of detail there so I've got my bird selected and I've got my ranch selected so I'm gonna be up here and I'm gonna modify my selection and then go here to modify I'm gonna contract this I'm gonna contract this like five pixels and then I do that you can see that it's brought it in just a little bit so I'm gonna go back in and modify and then I'm gonna do a feather I'm gonna feather this by five pixels so what that does is give me a nice soft edge instead of a part of rough edge so that way when I go in and I do my adjustment by sharpening I don't get any hard rough lines drawn sharp - unsharp it's a nice soft transition looks more natural so I'm happy with this selection so from this point I'm going to go back to toe pads labs and go back to gonna click on topaz adjust and go open up screen and topaz is really nice because me it gives me a lot of selections here you can see a ton of presets that it has and you can just go crazy going down here and seeing all this stuff - that I use the most often is this mild details or photo pop when it's small birds that I already have a lot of detail in I'm just gonna go with photo pop because it adds a little bit of color and add some of the detail back in that I may have lost when I did the D noise so click on photo pop and they'll come over here and I can adjust anything so it's not a if this is just a place to start with and if you like the results of just the preset you can just click OK but if you if not if you want to increase detail you can go here and increase this to detail Bruceton oh I'll do that real quick so just so you can see it increases the details and this screen doesn't look it's the preview screen is not how your photo actually will look it does look better than Napa this is way too many details for this so I'm gonna go back to what it was I think it's wrong wander that's close enough all I really wanted to do is recover some of the details that I already have [Music] there we go inspector back to the one so I like I I like that I like that preset and I use it a lot for my birds unless I need to do some draft more drastic recovery with the detail so I'm gonna hit okay and boom there you can see I'll do a I'll just do a quick recap so you can see the difference there's without feather bears with those you can see it just popped in a little bit more color a little bit more contrast to bring out the details and I really like that I really like how it came out so at this point I'm going to let the bird selected and now I want to I want to deal with this background so I'm gonna inverse my selection and you remember when I went and replaced that branch I kind of ended up with this weird weird thing right here you know you can tell that something was replaced so I need to fix that I'm actually guys I'm gonna do a command D which gets rid of my selection and then then I'm going to go into my smudge tool there we go so this smudge tool kind of is able to move things around so I just kind of want to get rid of some of these hard edges and so this is a large file so it's gonna take just a few minutes every time I do this can be a little tedious but the end result okay that's it take long okay you can see it it has an effect you can kind of do this with with all of that and it's gonna it's gonna take a few minutes so I think we'll just do a few of those just to break up let's wait for that to complete and while I'm waiting I can just be looking over making sure I didn't miss anything on the bird making sure I like what's happened so far composition hopefully it's not that much longer now not every photo that I do miles distractions that need to be removed there's there's times when I like we used to be in there that give the photo context and make us seen the Porticus scene but there's other times when you know got a bird on branch and really just want that bird to be so low that removing stuff can really just just bring all the attention right to your burden you think it produces a really nice photo he's taking a lot longer than I thought it would really thinking about it so if you are interested in the topes labs plugins just google topaz labs and it should bring up the right website and you can go to the plugins they also have a new release called topaz studio that is really similar to Lightroom in that it's a photo editor and I haven't tried it but it's in beta mode right now and it looks really promising and based on their other products I am really interested in using it I really like how photoshop and lightning interacts with each other and then I can go right invited into Photoshop but I think that topaz labs because of the quality of their product they can see that everywhere give chances at being a competitor to Lightroom so if you are not a like them editor user excuse me then I would recommend giving topaz studio a try and I'm sure that the plugins all look really nicely okay that's like a really long time but you can see it broke up that that hard line so I'm gonna break it up even more I'm not gonna use my smudge tool that just took way too long what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hit the Q we're just gonna put name quick mask mode I'm not going hmm just that's too good now I'm going to just paint do something area that I want you something like that now you can see it's selected everything they didn't read it's what I need to leave is they'll select but it inverse much good that's what I want so I'm gonna go up here to spill turn and go to Gaussian blur this is really going to take care of that really nicely you can see that I have a hundred three pixels that's really going to be far quite that many 27b it's pretty good you select that and you see that a pretty much essentially I've gotten rid of that hard line and you really gave it a nice soft background so I'm really pretty happy with how this turned out I'm going over it again I don't see any areas where I would change I like the color of the background the bird is nice and bright so at this point I go in and I grab here from my libraries panel grab my signature and then about my city pen this is gonna make my finishing touch here I'm gonna say yes I want to place that but I don't want to have it just this gray so I'm gonna go up here to my layers and changes from normal to color Dodge I'm gonna go and move it up there you drop the opacity but I don't want to be quite as bright I don't want to compete with my bird but also don't want people to not know who did it so I want to place it right there so there we go this is a finished product I like how this turns out orange crowned or blur on the great edge and that's it so I hope you enjoyed this video I will endeavor to make more videos this time goes on and do more edits and there's a lot more to to do there's sky replacements there's even even replacing heads and other things that that you can do so sometimes there's two images that one thing a head looks good on one place and the body will get on the other and you got to do some merging so all those things are possible and you can do them to where no one notices that they were two photos that have become one and I can walk you through those so I look forward to doing something like that in a future video well for now this is Jamie and Taylor with Jay hunter photography signing off thank you so much for dealing

Channel: Jamin Hunter Taylor

Views: 37,819

Keywords: Bird Photography, post processing, bird pic, lightroom, photoshop tutorials, lightroom tutorials, photoshop, orange-crowned warbler, photography

Id: _0FV5yRLAwA

Length: 32min 24sec (1944 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 17 2017