Bird Photography IMAGE EDITING | I Edit YOUR IMAGES Ep. 3 - Jan Wegener VLOG

[Music] hi everyone and thanks for joining me for episode 3 of I integer images we've got a great collection of images to work through today and I'm excited to see what I can get out of them before we get started I want to talk about one thing that I've noticed almost all the images that have been sent to me and also when I'm out in the field with people I see them make the same mistake and that is under exposing your images severely you usually have to pull them up one or two stops during the royal conversion process to get them to the point where there should be but what does that do to your image if it's too dark and then your lightening it severely during the post-production process it introduces a lot of noise into your image it messes with the colors and it also degrade the overall image quality I totally understand why it happens that we run during our images and I've been making the same mistake in the past but it's just a bad habit basically in the field we're always crabbing shutter speed so naturally we're prone to having a shutter speed that's fairly high and we also don't want our images to be noisy so naturally we're trying to have a fairly low ISO but what happens if we use a low ISO and the high shutter speed we usually get a too dark image and I think this is exactly the mistake that a lot of people make in the field they don't want to shoot over like let's say ISO 400 but still one to two thousand or two thousand five hundredths of a second in their shutter speed and even if they go down to f/4 a lot of times that image will still be severely underexposed so what you have to do instead is learn how to read your histogram expose the images as far to the right as possible so they are nice and bright and free of noise when it comes to starting editing process and then get out there and set your settings accordingly if you're using eyes off 400 underexposing by three stops the image might end up looking more noisy my image properly exposed at ISO 1600 so I'd highly recommend for all of you to check out my video on mastering exposure so you can get yourself in a position to get the absolute most out of your images during the editing process and not making it unnecessarily hard on you let's jump into our first image a Baltimore Oriole by Cindy so when we're looking at this raw file now we can sit decent gap on the right hand side of the histogram indicating that we're a little bit on next posture we will have to brighten the image during a role conversion process and whenever I see a red orange or yellow bird my alarm bells go off because these are the three most difficult colors to handle during the post-production process when I'm looking at Oriole here I can see how the orange and the bird goes from kind of too bright and yellow on the wing to kind of oversaturated on the belly in the chest so this is something that I will definitely have to work through during the editing process and be aware [Music] [Music] and there's our final image thank you managed to really nicely make this stunning bird stand out dealt with the orange color stir variations and the colors and really make that image shine so let's click of all my lights and I'll show you what I've done so this is the file right after the raw conversion process where I lighten it and I try to bring a little bit more details into the blacks and also into the orange so after the raw conversion process there were still a few areas on the bird that were too bright that I couldn't contain within the one raw file so I created another file that dealt specifically with the areas on the bird's wing and some of the orange areas in the bird's chest so I pulled back situation pulled back vibrance pulled the highlights all the way down increase the shadows a little bit and dark and expose you a little bit so that I could get something that I can brush in just to those two bright orange areas the next layer is my liquify and I want to show you that now it's basically what people are using as well if they want to take a few pounds of a model for cover shot or things like that so first I'll show you what I've done basically I just Shrunk the purge slightly so let me do that now for you so I press ctrl shift alt + E to make a merge layer of all the visible layers and then I go to filter liquify and then I go to up here on the left to forward warp tool and then what I can do I can just push in certain areas of the perch making them look a little bit smaller a little bit nicer to look at what you have to be careful you don't do that on the birds if you do it on the bird you're kind of messing with its shape so you don't want to do that or pull down on the leg too much I don't use it very often but on an image like this it kind of lends itself towards it because the bird is so nice the background it's nice and even the purchase really nice it just is a little bit overpowering for the birds of pushing it in slightly can work quite well so from there I created and saved two selections of my background one feathered one not feather I saved them on an empty layer that are filled with black and when I now press control and click on that empty hidden layer it loads my selection and I can always go back to it so if I unclick it and hold ctrl and click left click on that layer I get my selection back so whatever done after that levels adjustment then I did a curves adjustment that darkened down all the areas in the image that needed some darkening all the blacks some of the bright areas on the wing and those two bribed lichens on the perch from there did another curves adjustment that could just kind of balance out some of the orange on the belly and also brought a bit more detail around the bird's eye and then when I was looking at the image I thought that now the bird just doesn't have quite the right color it's a little bit too yellow a little bit washed out so use the selective color adjustment in the yellow channel to just give the bird more of that colour that I remembered having when I saw them in the field from there did an overall s curves adjustment to give nice contrast to the image nice brightness and then also ran a slight selective color adjustment on the background I think in the red channel or and a neutral Channel actually just sliding away from the green adding a little bit more red to the background just because I think it matches the bird of all a little bit better and then from there I ran my detail extractor specifically to get more detail back in the orange feathers and I think you can see that that made quite a big difference in helping me to get more detail throughout those areas and up here in the wing and I've done the same on these like and C as well just making they're not so bright after that I just slightly adjust that the color balance made it a little bit more warm and then ran another curves adjustment this time in luminosity mode so it's only affecting the brightness and the contrast but not my colors after that like always I run my Nick white neutralizer and Pro contrast when I looked at it at the end there was just three more things I thought the wing was still a little bit too bright so I did another curve to darken that down and lastly I pulled down minus 20 situation in the red Channel allowing me to take off saturation out of the orange in the bird chest why do I do that because I think it's still all situated a bird already it's quite orange it doesn't need to be floor or orange and also if I'm saving this file for WEP and I have to convert it to srgb it will be incredibly hard to maintain the detail in the bird's chest because srgb is a more limited color space so by desaturating it before saving it for srgb I'm avoiding then the orange just becomes one orange mess without any details and that is something that will likely happen if you're not careful with oranges yellows or red before converting your fault for the web and that's how we got to this really nice image if we now look at Cindy's image she's done a great job personally I would prefer the image to be bright and I think I nicely managed to bring back to detail in those two bright areas on the wing both edits are quite nice it's a stunning bird and as I always say with editing a lot of times it just comes down to your personal preference and the style you're after do you still feel a little bit lost and overwhelmed when it comes to image editing and how to apply certain tools and techniques that I'm using to your work if that's the case check out my image editing masterclass down there in the description and in my master class I'm taking you with me and show you slowly and step-by-step through my editing technique and teach you how you can apply all the tools and techniques that I'm using to your own images to make them look amazing so check out the master class get yourself a copy and make your images to stand outs the next image we're going to edit is this amazing great gray owl in flight image by Fabian so when we look at that image the first thing we notice again is that it's severely underexposed when we look at the settings we can actually see that it was quite a struggle to pull off this imagery going 600 millimeters with a 1.4 extender F 6.31 16 hundreds of a second wise old 1250 so there's not that much sculpted change things this is a difficult case because he still needs a high shutter speed for the bird and flights he can't really decrease your shutter speed to get a brighter image so what I would have probably done in this case is bum eyes or two thirty two hundred at least you're using a 5d Mark four so you can probably get away with it and looking at this image now it's so dark that we likely have to increase the brightness by two or three stops anding more noise in the end to it than if we had shot the image and 3200 and exposed it much brighter to begin with but because we're using a 5d Mark 4 we should still end up with a really nice image [Music] [Music] [Music] there's our final image really really amazing and it's such a cool bird to look at so what have I done so as you can see during the Royal conversion process I dramatically increase the brightness of the image and edit a lot of warmth to the image giving me a kind of nice and even base file to work with next step was to cry selection of my background one feathered one not feathered and then I usually always start with the levels that's what I've done here as well just brought in the blacks of fair bit and then lifted the mid-tones again because I didn't want the image to go too dark but if you're printing for instance is important that you don't have like a really big gap on the left hand side of your histogram so I always like to bring in the blacks to the point where they just start clipping and then if the image turns to dark I lighten it back up with the mid-tone I pulled a lot of blue color out of the El you can see the El has a really bad kind of blue cast and this is something that happens a lot in our images and it's the main reason that our images don't look quite right or don't appear quite right or sharp to us because a lot of times we look at an image and like a great gray owl our brain thinks it should be great but in this case it has a severe blue cast so we're kind of confused when we look at the image because we expect something to be gray or white but it has a color cut so if we remove that color cast we can make our images look much much better and they appear even sharper simply because the colors are cleaner so that's something a lot of attention to you in that I do in my tutorial and I do - all the images that are edit if something is white or black or gray I make sure that I strip out all the colors are these colors look nice and neutral and nice and crisp so I've done that simply by going hue saturation into the blue channel and pulling the Blues way back and then brushing that into the El taking out a lot of the blue the next thing I've done I thought that our looks still way too washed out now so I've gone in and done a curves iseman darkening all the areas after L that I felt like needed to be dark and needed to have nice sort of contrast so from there I've then brightened that just kind of facial area of the L because I really wanted to make that a focal point of the image still felt a little bit sort of flat to me and just kind of grain neutral so I added a nice bit of s-curve and a nice bit of contrast mainly to the white areas of the bird to really make them stand out and grab your attention after that I did a color balance adjustment because the image still felt a bit blue green kind of to me so I added a nice bit of warmth and a nice bit of magenta to the image giving it a nice sort of warm interesting feel so after that I just increased a bit of the saturation in the background and then did another s-curve adjustment on the whole image mainly just brightening it a bit more balancing the background and the L and then from there I added more color balance to the owl because as you can see the owl is still kind of blue and green so at it a lot of red a lot of yellow and a little bit of magenta just giving it a more kind of neutral gray color after that I added NIC Pro contrast to the image and a Nick white neutralizer and it a little bit more hue/saturation overall and then also made the trees in the background a little bit more and a little bit more warmer really emphasizing that last light that's hitting the trees behind al with the al kind of already flying in the shade area and that's the final image I think it turned out really well it's such a cool shot nerd wish it was my image so when we now compare to edit that Fabian has done to my edit I think what I managed to do really nicely is to bring the focus off the image onto the help the next shot I decided to edit was this really cool headshot of an Indian roller and looking at the Royal file there's not that many things that actually need changing I think it needs a little bit of a crop probably needs to be turned slightly and then I want to bring out the colors I want to make the eyes stand out more and then I have to make a decision do you want to make the background a bit darker keep it or make it a bit lighter knowing me I will probably be tempted to lighten it a little bit but let's see what I'm gonna do and I meet you on the other end with the finished image and there's our final image I think I've managed to really nicely bring out the colors and the birds make the eye stand out and as I thought I might do I lightened the background slightly that's just my personal preference I think this image would look good with a darker background as well let's just quickly go through all my layers first thing I've done was to make a selection allowing me to treat the bird in the background individually so next I just lightened the eye area with a curves adjustment from the air by lighten the background after that I lighten some of the areas on the left-hand side of the bird that were a little bit in shape and then I darken two areas on the right inside of the bird so it even it out nicely so if we click these two on and off together you can see how I put the focus away from the area on the left hand side and shifted a kind of to the nice purple area on the bird into a area of the bird from there just added a nice overall his saturation adjustment giving really nice colors to the birds and then I also slightly shifted the colors in the background to a little bit more of a reddish tone because I've thought that kind of greenish cast in the gray color didn't really work too well then at the very end I just looked at the image and thought there's a couple more areas that need a little bit of attention so I darkened down the beak a bit more to make that really nice and standout and lastly just added a little curve overall giving a bit more nice contrast and depth to the image so if we compare that with the image that was sent to me the Edit it's actually not that different because the base image was already pretty good again it was a little bit underexposed I had to brighten it in post-production but the main difference between the two edits is now that my image has a brighter background the original edit has a bit of a darker background but other than that I think both edits are really nice I think this is a good takeaway that there's a lot of different ways to edit the same image and to get different but really good results in those different ways as well and usually if you look at five different edits off the same image you will always find things in each edit that you like and there will be things that you don't like and now we're on to our last image a tough to duck shot from Simon or I should say Zeeman because he's German he send it to me and he was saying that it was kind of struggling to get a good balance in the image because the whites are so bright and the color in the head is not really showing and some of the blacks are pretty black and the background overall looked a pretty pale so let's jump right in and I see you at the end with all the layers [Music] and there we go finished let's look at all of that in detail so this is Howard out with the white I made one dark a raw file pulled the highlights all the way down to brush them back to this point and then I clone in some more feathers to make it nice and even and on the beak just having the darker raw file was enough to bring all the details back into the beak so from they have done the things that I usually do to my images levels adjustment I've added a fair bit of saturation overall to the image because I felt like I really wanted to enhance those nice fall colors in this shot after that I removed all the color from the white and also from the reflection of the white because you don't want to have this white and then that really yellow so I did that with just a simple hue/saturation adjustment where I simply pulled up the lightness in the hue/saturation layer to bring that up and then I also thought that there's a few areas on the bird that are a little bit distracting that are too bright some reflections that the camera didn't capture very well so I removed some of these two bright areas that really distracted from the bird simply with a clone tool and like a 50% opacity from there I ran the color fix pro detail extractor and edit a little bit more detailed through the white areas here and the reflection as well and after that I made a selection off the background so that I could work on the background and the bird independently because I wanted to bring a bit more dark color throughout the bird and then it's difficult to all do that without a selection so make a selection and then actually to Ockham down going a little bit surprised surprised I don't do that very often but I think in this case darkening the backgrounds down a bit more broad a bit more drama to just shop and really make the duck stand out nicely so after that I used my selection and then brushed in some of these dark details on the bird making the back darker because I really felt like having that back to bride doesn't really add to our image and having the back of their head in the back darker really helped us in this case to make the duck stand out so after that I just darkened down the area of the head a bit more and remove that one bright bit on the birds face then I ran my pro contrasts and my white neutralizer removing a bit of that yellow color cast that was over the whole image and lastly I thought there was a few areas on the birds back that are still super bright so taunt them down a little bit but just cloning over them in a low opacity so if we compare this image to the raw fall it's not dramatically different what I basically just Donna added a little bit more drama to this shot by adding saturation and darkening the background a little bit and then adding nice colour to the bird's head by selectively working on that and brightening certain areas and darkening certain areas like the back and of course I dealt with the blown out whites on the bird belly making it really nice to look at and if we look at simon's edit here now it's pretty similar to the raw file it's lacking the detail in the white nothing overall it's just a little bit flat maybe wow that was some great images I got to edit today I linked all the for photographers down there in the description so you can check out the Instagram accounts and their cool work if you want me to edit one of your images place head over to my Instagram account and send me a private message with one of the images that you want me to edit I will then put it on my list of images to be edited in one of the future episodes you might ask yourself how long does it typically take to edit one of these images I'd say between 10 and 25 minutes depending on how difficult in images some images are just pretty straightforward kind of like that roller shot where some images are big more involved like that Alber had to balance a lot of colors and get rid of the color cast in the owl and then add more contrast to the El without really adding too much more contrast to the background so there was just a bit more balancing going on to get it right if you want to master image editing I would highly recommend that you check out my masterclass on image editing down there in the description it will really help you to take your images to the next level also please let me know in the comments what did you think of today's edits would you do something differently have you learned something new let me know I will try to answer all your comments other than that please give me a thumbs up for this video subscribe to my channel somewhere down there check out some of the other content that I've prepared for you and I will see you in one of my next videos bye

Channel: Jan Wegener

Views: 17,198

Keywords: bird photography, vogelfotografie, jan wegener, birding, photography, birds, tutorial, exposure, aperture, wildlife photography, nature photography, photoshop, image editing, editing, cloning, image enhancement, RAW File, RAW conversion, Adobe Camera RAW, ACR, workflow, masterclass, bird image editing, I edit your images, bird, post processing, canon, great grey owl, tufted duck, baltimore oriole, indian roller, Faststone image viewer, manual mode, nik collection, bird photo editing

Id: FiYcufjO0jw

Length: 25min 31sec (1531 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 21 2020