Photo Editing for Bird Photography

hey everyone thanks for joining in I'm here with Scott a little and we're gonna be talking a little bit about photo editing and not so much teaching exactly how step by step to edit a photo but a little bit more just concepts and different ways we it's got real quick if you can turn your volume down I'm getting a lot of feedback okay thank you cool so let's see I think let's let's kick it off with Scott I know he had a really good set up to get started here let me just switch screen so we can give him I guess Scott you are live and ready to go okay yeah so a couple things ray and I have a little bit different style so we thought we'd just kind of focus on the styles that we use a lot ray is a little bit more environmental he likes to take a lot of I guess smaller in the frame images and I tend to go I tend to crop more and I tend to get a little bit closer on the birds so I'm gonna do a little bit more with portraits and how I edit portraits his focus will probably be a little bit more on kind of the environment and how he had it sat so that's basic overall but what I thought I'd do is kind of show you some images and how they come out of the camera I'm gonna take a Rand and this is actually the finished version but a lot of what we wanted to do was was show before and after and there's a lot of people that post images pretty much out of the camera I've heard things like well I'm a purist I don't want to I want to capture what I showed and we just wanted to show you that even quick edits 5 or 10 minutes we're gonna do a challenge at the end and try to edit a picture in like two or three minutes and see what we can do with it but even a quick edit makes a big difference so this ran out of the camera actually looked like this this is not the kind of picture I would post anywhere and be real proud of but when you shoot in RAW which both ray and I shoot in RAW the camera's not going to do a lot of adjustments for you when you set your camera to JPEG it is going to take and kind of add contrast or lighten it or make some adjustments to exposure but when you shoot in RAW it's not it's going to give you the flexibility to do that so what I thought I would do is just take this image and I'm actually going to open up the the actual image as it came out of the camera and I'm gonna edit it real quick to show you what that looked like hey Scott so ask you to pause one here's the image yep I just have something up on the screen here that says speakers muted and I wanted to see if I can just get rid of that because it's actually oops sorry about that it's actually showing on top of your screen through everything so I just wanted to see if I could get rid of that little indicator does not seem like it I can oops now I totally lost you are you still there Scott you're there okay yeah okay I just need to get your video back sorry this new Skype is really weird I'm not seeing a way to get rid of that it just constantly has this speakers muted thing up on the screen but alright it's not that big a deal so I guess we'll keep continuing on sorry about that so go ahead okay yeah so first thing I'm gonna do with this image is just kind of crop it down to something that I would use for for a closer portrait so we'll go something like this I'm also gonna rotate it a little bit I tend to try to get beaks horizontal so I'm never afraid to rotate an image I don't ever think that I get it exactly horizontal anyway might probably be somewhere in here I like always the bird to be looking into the frame so something like that I'm gonna quickly go through and you could probably see where I'm gonna dial now Lightroom I do it in Photoshop Adobe raw but Lightroom exact same basic premise with sliders correct I'll bring up the exposure a little bit contrast turn down highlights pull up shadows the big thing for me is whites I look at the histogram and I just I'm gonna pull up whites until they blow out and the indicator up there tells me when it blows and then I'm gonna pull it back down until it's kind of pleasing for me and then I do the same with relax I'm gonna pull those back down until I see black areas start to indicate 2/3 to black and then I want to pull them back a little bit of clarity and vibrance so I would probably say as a real quick edit and starting point this is pretty close and then I like to come up to the temperature and generally I warm a little bit and see what it looks like so I'll go from where it came out of the camera there are ways to adjust technically perfect white balance and sometimes I'll do that but overall I just I just eyeball it and so this is looking if I went up here it's too warm come right in there and that's what I would take over to photoshop so it would look something more similar to this and then from here I'm gonna pull this back a lot of people don't have or don't use Photoshop so I'm just gonna duplicate the layer real quick and I'm gonna use and I'm gonna send it back to to Lightroom or Camera Raw typically there's only one more step that I do on every photo and I dodging bird every photo that I touch almost without exception same here so if I take the pen it's the easiest tool to use in either Lightroom or Photoshop you could turn the exposure down and dial these highlights down basically you're gonna burn using this now I'm warning you I do not do this I'm just showing you a technique that if you wanted to do it I don't like the way it does it in either Lightroom or this Photoshop roll yeah I would agree with you completely I never like to do any highly selective edits in the raw editor switch I use Lightroom but I just find Photoshop much more precise and manageable to do those edits in yeah I know there are people who only do it so I'm just gonna show you but again I would never do it so I did a brush and I just darken the bottom edge so the typical thing you're gonna see with all my images I'm gonna darken the area behind the bird and I'm gonna lighten the area in front if it needs it now this one doesn't because there is already good light here I'm gonna then take the exposure up I created a new brush I'm gonna just dial in here to the eyeball area I'm gonna try to just lighten couple areas here hey Scott ray asks he says he doesn't see those sliders in his photo shop and I just want to answer the question why ray Scott has the photo open in the Camera Raw plugin in Photoshop so Scott doesn't use Lightroom he does all his raw photo editing in Photoshop which Photoshop has a separate window that opens up the Camera Raw plug-in and it gives you all those sliders so it's basically the same sliders and adjustments you would have in Lightroom just presented as a different way and it directly in photoshop so yep so if I was doing this all in Lightroom for example I wouldn't have made this step where I went out to photoshop and came back I would just do what I'm doing now with the Dodge and burn right in here but again I don't like it you're gonna if when I export this you're gonna see banding and stuff but I am gonna take it now and just bring it back over to photoshop and just show you the before and after with the Dodge and burn that I did so this is that's the original and then that's with the Dodge and burn now you're gonna see it looks much better the way I do it but I just wanted to show you that that is a general way to do it so I'm gonna I'm gonna go over to Ray I think he's gonna go fullscreen and he's gonna do a quick edit on something as well it sounds good so I have I'm just gonna show you guys a little bit of before and afters right now so let me switch over to my screen here you go here's a Canada Warbler I shot so this is the completely unretouched or unadjusted I should say file this is straight out of camera so a nice clean shot generally good color but I want to show you the next image here this is what I did this is just a Lightroom edit so cropping it a little bit of white balance warming a little bit of contrast and it looks definitely better so real minor adjustments but they're all just kind of global adjustments nothing selective there and then I'll show you the next final image this is the one that I actually displayed in or edited in Photoshop and this was the final image that was shared out so if you'll notice here so just from here's the Lightroom edit here's the Photoshop at it so I made the background a lot more green I definitely pop the eye just like Scott was talking about and I actually darkened that green background just a tiny bit so it kind of really makes the bird stand out so if we kind of step through the progression here and go from straight out of camera basic Lightroom edit and then to Photoshop each step isn't really that big but if I show you the complete before and after so straight out of the camera and then the final edit there's a pretty significant change there and that's something that I do often you know you kind of it's a little step here a little step there step there and then you will actually see a big difference from beginning to the end so just want to take a look over here and see if there's any questions nothing yet ray did ask how do you get the plugin and Wes actually answered that basically the plugin is built into photoshop ray the the roll plug-in you just if you were to do a file open and choose a raw file in Photoshop it would actually open up that role plug-in for you so I'm gonna hop onto one more image here and then we'll go back to Scott and let him his next image so here I have a greater Yellowlegs that I photographed pretty far away you can see he was right smack in the center it's definitely not a composition I would like to do but he was moving and at the time I was on the center focus point so that's how it was composed in the camera but you can also see the bird doesn't stand out that well right now so moving on to the next one here's the basic Lightroom edit so a crop to fix that composition straighten it out just like Scott mentioned earlier actually crooked all the time almost never have a photo that I don't need to straighten or that I don't need to crop so here's the crop that's the composition I ended up with and with the Lightroom adjustments the bird is standing out a little bit more now than it was before it's got a little bit better contrast but what I really wanted and what I really sold that day was a warm yellow Sun was really hitting the bird but everything else around it we had kind of a nice cool blue tone to it so the final edit and Photoshop really accentuates that so now you can see the bird is really standing out now the background went really blue and I used a color contrast here of the warm yellow tones and the cool blue tones to really make the bird stand out so again there's the Lightroom edit and here is photoshop's final image and if I do a complete before-and-after again for you you can see pretty significant change from the straight out of the camera and the final edited version and again both of those photos were probably less than five minute it's probably more like a two to three minute at it so you didn't have to go crazy there so I'll hand it back off to Scott here see what he wants to talk about all right so I'm gonna do this Ren again one more time but I'm gonna do it a different way and then I'm gonna get onto some some new images but again this was the before when I brought it in from either Lightroom or what I do with Photoshop or all its gonna look like this in general again I'm gonna darken the area behind the bird so in this case I created curves adjust later which is what I use almost every time to do this and there you can see it's darker if you have any questions with curve adjust layers I would encourage you to play around with it if you're at the stage where you're using Photoshop more to edit and you're doing Lightroom to do your basic adjustments but it curves adjust layer either darkens or lightens an area in this case I darken behind it I add a little pop on the front of the bird and now you can see the eye really shows better this is lit and then I'm gonna show you just a quick before-and-after and you can see before the eyes kind of dead and the focus there's some brighter areas around here and then the after it kind of mutes these back areas and takes your attention away and it brings your focus really on just the head and on portrait again I do a lot of portraits on songbirds I really feel like that's where you want all the attention to go so that's what I try to accentuate there I'll turn it back to Ray and then I've got a couple more different birds to show so we don't just keep looking at this rent knife alright so Wes asked here now switch back to my screen please try to yeah Wes was asking about cloning out sticks so yeah I know we both do it um it's ideal like in this ran there were no sticks to clone out so we were able I was able to get you know a pretty clean shot if there's anything that I find like I know Rayo talked about like anything that intersects the head regular crazy about it yeah I can't stand this so I am definitely in that regard I'm definitely not a purist as far as you know removing any distracting elements I have no problem doing that for me my goal with wildlife photography is to present a nice to look at photo I try my best and I don't think I ever really do completely altered the scene so I won't add anything to it or you know if there were let's say there was like a horrible stick going right through the center of the entire bird I wouldn't remove that that photo would just get deleted or I probably wouldn't have taken in the first place but if there are sticks off to the side or even a stick that a small stick that just goes over part of the bird and the photo itself is worth saving and I can remove that I definitely would and you'll see on the last photo I show today where I talk about I'll actually show you an example of something I removed that I thought made the photo better but real quick I'm just going to go through a couple more photos here basic American Robin photo this is straight out of camera here is the Lightroom edit so this was all done just in Lightroom so I actually cooled off the foreground a little bit you can see from the original it was a little bit more of a neutral green I actually went with even cooler green and then I warmed the background and then in the final Photoshop at it I really made those color differences stand out and I really made the eye and the Robin stand out a lot more so again going from complete beginning to end it's not like a night and day change here but it's pretty significant and the photo definitely stands out a little bit better and I'll go through just one more here is a Sanderling running on the beach colors are pretty muted in this in the original one the lighting was nice but it wasn't strong so the colors weren't really rich and so in Lightroom the Edit I did there sorry about that let's see so here was the original out of camera here's the edit and Lightroom so now the colors are popping a little bit more a little bit more saturated and then in Photoshop I really accentuated that blue and the warm tones and again so I do this a lot where I will try to introduce contrast between the subject and the background by using color differences and often it is the difference between like a warm tone so something that's like a yellow orange tone brownish and a cool tone so you know blues science those colors they definitely contrast well and when you have them you know one on the subject I'm one in the background you can definitely make your subject stand out so I'll show you guys real quick the total before and after on that and again not not a night and day change just minor edits as I went along in the process but a big difference in the end you ready to hit your next one Scott yeah okay I've got two lined up here okay cool let me get you alright you ready to go okay so this first one I'm gonna do a this is a black-throated green Warbler when I looked at this you know as I was kind of reviewing I knew this was gonna happen shil but it doesn't look good like if again a lot of people share right out of the camera just do a quick crop and throw it up online this is not something I would ever put my name on but I knew it was sharp I had a really nice pose and I thought it had potential so what I did is I brought it in with 2d with these adjustments so you can see it warmed it quite a bit I haven't done any editing on this this was just what came out with from Lightroom err or raw and I'm just gonna build the layers on this real quick so these are the layers I added you could see there's your clone West alright so I got rid of that one stick in the background good call I kind of changed I'd what was going on with that stick there but yeah the big thing was right here so this is the first layer of burning I got rid of some of these lighter areas and then you'll see a big difference here can you just hop back with that last burn Scott I would take off the burn yeah just click it on off I also wanted to point out how you actually use that burn to accentuate the darker areas on the birds ahead so you actually created a little bit more contrast and enhance the birds marking so those markings are there but you know that burn was it was really smart and well done it but it actually accentuates those marking so I just want to point that out I notice it and then I did another dodge layer and you'll see the eye pop right here so you'll see that I and you can even see these white feathers here it looks like I dodged those as well when you put that all together and you add a lot of little layers it's one action that I run that creates all those layers and then I just pick which ones I want to use but watch the before and after so that's what it came in as you could see the eyes kind of dead and the focus isn't necessarily on the head there's a bright stick over here in a bright area underneath and then afterwards that's all cleaned up and we have the focus just right on the head this is actually one of my favorite black-throated green portraits and I find it again that's when it came out of the camera not something I would share and then that was something I would put my name on yeah then I'm gonna do one more real quick gray yeah go for it this all I actually liked coming right out of the camera I thought I had a lot of potential so these are just very subtle changes to this one this is what I right out of the camera it looked like this from lightroom knife it looked more like this and not a whole lot was done to this one but I'm gonna show you the layers as I brought them on there's a burn layer just at the bottom I thought the bottom was a little brighter than I wanted it off remember go in another layer just to get rid of some of that highlight here's the first dodge layer knife looks like he did a couple dodge layers here I added a little bit more I added one more and then I actually looks like I dialed down the saturation because that bottom was really glowing yeah I'll show you the before and again subtle difference but I think it makes a difference in where I want the focus on this bird to be is always up top the nice thing about the Edit for example on this one and a lot of what Ray does is these dodge and burn edits if you ever wanted to enter something in a contest they always allow almost everyone I've ever seen allows for dodging and burning they don't always allow for cloning and over sharpening and stuff like that so Jerry actually just pointed that out in the comments that's uh he kind of does the same thing he'll remove sticks and stuff like that but if you ever plan on adding photos to most contests definitely read the rules just like Scott mentioned and Terry mentioned most of them don't allow for the addition or removal of objects and I would say with your dodging and burning to try and keep it to a minimum you certainly can you know modify the photo just to kind of lighten areas darken areas but as you'll see in my next example actually I went extreme with some dodging and burning in it I think it might be kind of pushing it a little far for a contest so I'll hop over to anything you want to show more on that one Scott sorry no I'll try to find somebody that's a picture question about high-pass filters so um I was gonna try to show it on this one it's not a good example so I'll try to find another one but I do not care who asked the question that's what I use for sharpening so but I only do it selectively and I only normally do it around the eye in the the bill so I'll try to find an example if I can I'm one of the oddball editors I have a default Lightroom sharpen setting that I use when I import it it's really minimal and doesn't really do much and that's the only sharpening I ever do on any of my images I don't ever do any other selective sharpening in Photoshop or anything like that it's just a real basic sharpen and then there's also a basic sharpen that gets applied when the photo is exported at the proper size so alright I'll switch over to my screen here and show you a nicely overexposed image of a black crown night heron so this Heron came out of nowhere I wasn't really expecting him and then he started stalking in the shallows really close to me I was using let's see here so yeah I was actually in full manual settings on this one but obviously I misread this scene when I set the camera and completely overexposed I shouldn't say completely I over expose it by a good stop or so but the beauty of role is the basic Lightroom edit here and you can see the details come right back in so I did a little bit of a crop and I also darken the image brought the detail back in those highlights so from the original out of the camera edit in Lightroom and you can see all those details came back now the next step I did here and this is where you'll see where I got a little bit more extreme I saw this image as the Heron really kind of coming out of the dark the shadows and I wanted to really accentuate that so in Photoshop I really darken that background and I'll actually open this one up in Photoshop to show you guys the layers kind of like Scott has been doing sorry I got away from my Photoshop to open my fault all right here we go so here we are in Photoshop and I'll turn all the layers off I notice Scott was doing this for anyone that isn't aware if you hold the option key or Alt key and click the layer visibility eyeball it will toggle everything on and off so whatever layer you click will be the only one visible so the first clone layer I did here was to actually remove a couple distracting elements I actually fixed a little bit of something odd on the bill there as well and then the next thing is the strong burn then I added another burn layer to kind of darken specific areas then I really went darker with the curves adjustment layer dodged certain areas so I actually made the second eyeball show up a little bit more and the plumes off the back of the head there and then added a contrast layer that let's see where this affected it right in the eyeball there so I actually enhanced the contrast and I'll zoom in here to show you so there's before and after it's subtle but I kind of increased the detail in that eyeball there and then the last one actually warms up the tone on the burr because I thought it was a little bit too kind of bluish and too cool so all those things add up to a change from original straight out of the camera to a much more dramatic photo for the final image there so hopefully you can see and again that was probably a I may be spent unless I spent less than 10 minutes on that I can tell you for sure so nothing too crazy there I'm just gonna check the questions real quick nothing yet so I'm gonna move on to the next image here we're just trying to keep this going along American oyster catcher chick on the beach backlit with the sand so I'm not sure if you can see in the original here I'll zoom in a little bit but there is sand blowing and that was really a big part of the image for me so I wanted to accentuate that so the Lightroom edit I warmed it up significantly so it looked a little bit more like it did to my eye when I shot it that day the Sun was really low in the sky so everything was kind of glowing and now you can really start to see the sand stink standing out a little bit more and then the final Photoshop edit actually takes that sand blowing to an extreme I actually show a lot more detail on the bird I added a slight bit of catch light to the eye I should say I enhanced it was kind of there but not very much and then I just kind of written up that background there and then I'll just do one more and then hand it back to Scott ring build gall another backlit image again the camera completely chose the wrong white balance on this because we shoot raw I think most of us at least myself shoot in auto white balance all the time I never worry about picking a white balance because I can set it after the fact is that how you handle it Scott oh yeah okay cool so it's just one less setting you have to worry about because it's super easy to edit that after the fact in any case the camera shows a completely wrong white balance so first edit in Lightroom is to straighten it crop it and bring the white balance a little bit more back to what I thought it should be and then I remember the goal standing out like kind of glowing a lot more against a darker background and basically what happened was the Sun was shining into my lens here so I kind of got a little bit of flare on the lens which gave us it gives it that kind of weak contrast II or not contrast a look and it makes the background almost kind of a grayish tone so when we get into Photoshop I actually brought it back a lot more to what I see and I will pop this one open in Photoshop just to show you what I did there were some questions so let me just check those real quick yeah Josh I play with that black point slider all the time that's like almost always a default in my edits I bring shadows up a lot and bring the blacks back down to maintain the contrast level and then Wes asked Flickr or Instagram I share everywhere I share Flickr Instagram 500 pixels Facebook and what else know I'm missing one maybe that's it now Scott you fear in a couple places - right yeah pretty much I think Flickr and Instagram and 500 I'm not real active on Flickr and Instagram I use Flickr to import to Instagram a lot so I use it now yeah and then Josh says girls are simply look beautiful that's awesome yeah so here's the layers on this so the first thing I want to point out is I actually made a very detailed selection of just the birds so here's that layer mask that I did I hand painted this so it did this by hand so this edit took a little bit longer so the first layer actually brings the contrast down on the entire image and makes it more rich the next layer actually brightens up just the bird and the reflection a little bit there the next one actually enhances the the beak the eye and it actually lightens up some of the splash a little bit there so if you see this selection there that's those are the part of the images that are being affected by this curves adjustment layer and then the next one is a little bit more richness in the background and again I'll show you that mask so this is more of a gradient mask that I applied but then I made sure it didn't affect the bird itself so I wasn't darkening the bird anymore just the background around it and that's it so all those changes add up to a significant change in the image so whereas this one the bird is almost kind of the same tone as the background now it's lighter against the dark background and really stands out and if we look at the total before and after on this this one's kind of one of those night and day images where it's a pretty significant difference there from the original out of the camera so what it wasn't the end but when I took that photo and salt in the back of the camera I knew I could get it there just because I kind of have an idea of what I can do in Photoshop so back to Scott all right I'm gonna do two quick ones so got a scarlet tanager in northern Pennsylvania was real close this is uncropped out of the camera and again good detail so I knew I had something to work with and real clean background just a couple sticks here but I think I left those in the final edit after I imported it this is what I came in with this one has no Photoshop adjustments I may have cloned out a stick over here I can tell it looked like there was a stick there before but I left this one in I didn't think it hurt anything nah so nice portrait adding in the layers this actually forget it I'll try to see if I can zoom in this is a high-pass filter so if you guys can see that that was kind of sharpening I but it also sharpens the whole image so if I do that I typically put a noise reduction everywhere else so I don't to get too complicated but I do a little noise reduction and a little sharpening if needed but what I do on every image is dark in that area behind the bird light in that area in front of the bird and this one I added some saturation in front too and I think this one pops the eye a little bit more so when you go back you know that's where we started with I think this is one I would have posted out of the camera I felt it was strong enough but I think that to me it's just a little more dramatic and for portraits to me you want to add some some pop to the eyes I'll make sure that head stands out so that was one and then I actually wanted to show this is what this is my favorite golden kinglet golden crowned kinglet ever this is what it looked like out of the camera it was very close this was probably shot at about 7 feet it brought that in from Lightroom or Photoshop raw into this again that that's actually my final edit let me force it yeah that would yeah I was gonna say this one didn't need a whole lot of way it doesn't really need a whole lot of work this is another one that I would have just cropped and done some color adjustment and Lightroom had been fine with posting but and I want to point out I think a lot of bit of burn down on the bottom yeah I think a lot of people would leave it yeah a little-little edit on the on the curve adjustment to lighten the head a little pop on the eye and then I added some saturation I don't I hope you could see that but at immunity this was right at dawn like very very early everything was still glowing and I wanted to make sure that that came through in the picture so not a ton of edits on this one but I felt it added a little pop on around the head and again I'm always trying to on portraits I'm always trying to get the eyes and get the lighter part to show around the head and it also really changes where your eye goes in that image so in the original if you could turn those layers off real quick Scott I'll turn see so the lightest area is almost the background especially bottom left top left but then when we when Scott those all those edits now your eye is drawn a lot more to the head of that bird and that's a great use of just somewhat subtle dodging and burning to kind of force the IRAs view the viewers eye where you want it to go so nice job there yeah and that's a great point ray I actually picked these pictures because in most of them I felt like the lighter parts were the areas behind the bird and below the bird and so I just wanted to show that you can alter where your eye goes just by and dodging and burning once you learn how to do it it's a very very quick process a couple minutes and you're done yep yeah and Denise just commented that the before and afters really helped so much she definitely wants to get more of a handle an understanding on post-processing and that was our pretty much our goal with this is we wanted to show how most of these edits aren't anything too crazy so we wanted to show how these somewhat basic you know five to ten minute edits can really make a good image go to a great image and I think a lot of people would do just their basic global edits and kind of leave it at that point and there's certainly nothing wrong with that please don't feel like there is but we just want to show you how you can kind of take your image to the next level with some basic editing yeah and Haley says like she wouldn't even know how to attempt that but it's okay sister yeah there are easy edits out there and I would start with like the dodging and the burning are easy ones to just figure out where to start when you start getting into detailed selections and stuff it can be a little bit tougher but there are easy edits that make a difference that's true yep do you have another one lined up Scott if not I do what's that did you have another one you're ready to go - if not I do I get I can go to I can go to my I have one more left I can go to it if you want I'm on my last one - so why don't you hit yours I'll hit mine then we'll do our okay so this is a lot of people know in Ocean City there's a pretty popular little rookery so ray and I were poking around and the juveniles were just hatching so we went down this one was real cooperative what I liked about this it's not a great image again this is not something I would post out of the camera but we tried to get these foreground elements it was a lot of stuff in front of the birds so we're actually trying to frame him in that so you could see there's this foreground Vee and he happened to kind of position himself here I moved around I was able to get him right in the middle and I wanted them to look head-on so I could get both the eyes so this was out of the camera but to me it's a very cool image there's not a lot of warmth here so when I brought it over I cropped it differently to get that other bird out and already it made a big difference just warming the image overall changing the temperature of the picture again that's just a slider adjustment I think most people know how to do that in Lightroom it's pretty quick and easy when I add the layers on I wanted to get rid of all these distractions without cloning them out so I just burned the crap out of them so we got them real dark in that process I also wanted it to make it look like light was kind of hitting the head that I and that stare was pretty fierce so I put one dodge burn layer there's a saturation layer that increased the saturation in there I'm looking at it now maybe I overdid it but anyway okay and then look at the before and after so when you're doing it layer by layer you don't always see correctly the difference but there's the before again that's not an image that's horrible but to me that's you know a much different image and very dramatic so on some of these portraits I'll go for dramatic so when you look at where we started you know we started with that a lot of people and not really great yeah and with that at least it's something that's dramatic and a little bit different and so once you learn these tools and you have them in your toolbox and you kind of know the different things that you can do in the image it starts to become so there's there's a progression that happens so it turns into when you start looking at the image on the computer you think all right I can take this image from here to there and then even further down the road it becomes if I shoot this this way I know I can edit it this way and present it this way so there are times where I'll shoot an image and specifically under or over expose it or crop it a certain way or just do something when I'm shooting with already having the decision in my head that I'm going to edit that photo a certain way because I have these tools that I know how to use a certain way so I think that really kind of starts to change how you approach wildlife photography once you get more proficient at post-processing and before I go into my image there's a couple of questions jamón says he hasn't tried any of that stuff but he wants to get better that's good he asks have we ever used topaz Labs products Scott had do you ever use any of those filters yeah same here I am again I think when one of the oddballs that I never use any plugins of any sort I learned Photoshop back on version four and I don't mean cs4 I mean version four that came out in 1999 and so I kind of learned Photoshop before it had any of these extra plugins and filters and became very proficient at it back then so I still kind of use those same techniques and just never got into the plugins and add-ons but I do know some people that swear by them and love them yeah I know Marc uses a noise reduction that I've seen his before-and-afters are pretty good if you guys want to end comments if anybody I know we've got some people that use Photoshop quite a bit they're probably pretty good at it so if you want to just put what you use and while you use it in the comments that's great yeah then somebody did also ask about the crop ratio I think ray and I both crop to whatever we think works best I'm gonna try to find I'll pull up like this black-throated green I probably 50% of the time I crop to 5 by 7 I just think those dimensions work for me but if it suits it better to more of a pan oh I'll go a little bit wider if I go to a portrait so for example on this Heron that we just looked at my guesses that's four by five so most of my portraits are four by five and most of my landscapes are five by seven so I actually don't crop that way probably ninety percent maybe even ninety five percent of my photos I keep original camera proportions and I have a different reason for that I do a lot of stock photography sales and I do try to sell all of my photos on an online print gallery nobody actually buys them but I try to sell them and in any case to just keep things consistent across the board I do stick with the same proportion almost all the time other than the occasional panorama but I think Scott's method of cropping it's certainly probably better for photos because you can just have a little bit more freedom there so let's say there was one last question Rosemarie asked how do you how did you become so proficient in Photoshop well I'll answer and then I'll let Scott answer I actually like I said I learned in version 4 I got a book called the Photoshop Bible it was like a thousand-page book on Photoshop I read it cover-to-cover and somehow at that time I was able to just retain it all other than that the jobs I've had I basically used Photoshop 40 hours a week for probably 15 years straight alright so I just became very proficient editor yeah I just I will tell you the one great thing about the Internet is YouTube gives you every technique so if you if you just see something you pick somebody's brain or you hear something in conversation you're standing around some other photographers and you hear something and you just make a mental note and then you go home and you pull up YouTube and you there's a video for it so every technique that I learned I I think I learned from YouTube and just watched a lot of videos there are people that do every week they'll put out something and there's one by phlearn I don't know if anybody follows that that was a guy that I thought was really helpful and I liked his his style so I was just attracted to him there's nobody that's really better or worse if you're gonna try to follow people but you'll find topics out there and then I was lucky enough that I almost walked into Rey the first day at Barnegat and I almost Don him because he was hidden in between some rocks and that was like three years ago so I'd already dabbled in Photoshop and started to learn and you know I've certainly picked his brain and we do a lot of similar things now because I've learned from him so yeah I make friends make good friends you know we've talked about this in the past just for you know finding photography locations and and just making a good connection with other people in the in this hobby and I think part of that even goes into this post-processing thing you know Scott has shown me some methods most recently one to remove banding that I think is really cool that I never would have learned on my own so you know it's definitely like a give-and-take so just a couple more questions came through Pete asked what do we think about Square crops I think when they fit the image I think they're fine I know some people kind of have like a bit of a problem with them or they don't they really don't like them I don't have any issue with them I don't tend to do them myself or often or at all but I think when it works it works you know I don't know what your thoughts are on that Scott no I was actually reading the question so I was trying to do the math on that somebody asked about cropping to five by seven so yeah I see that yes I think Square crops are fine did you have any other questions you need to answer if not I'll move on to the next image no just in terms of like cropping to five by seven if if I print larger if I print anything so I format or crop to what my eye wants to compose it to if I print something which I don't print a whole lot but if I did or if somebody called and said hey I'd like this I actually go through and re-edit the picture and I'll crop it to whatever dimensions I think I'm going to go so if I can take what I did already and just read crop and trim al off the sides that's fine but five by seven is kind of in between and so it gives you a little bit of flexibility if you want to it's closed along the ends you're still normally fine if you want to go the other way you can normally go the other way and you're still it's it's a little bit of a and in between crops so I would agree works and if not I just read it the whole thing there you go all right last image I have here this is another day Scott and I were shooting together one the most amazing experiences we had with this clapper rail you know these are generally really secretive birds and we were both just amazed when the sucker came walking right out into the open for us and like some of the best morning light ever so in any case this is an image I wanted to edit so you know straight out of the camera here again you'll notice a very centered crop just because I was using the center focus point on the camera and Gaucher in the background that I don't really like he's had a focus he adds nothing to the image so first up something gonna do here in Lightroom is to straighten it I warmed it up a significant amount and I cropped it so I went with my normal kind of offset crop gave it a little bit of space in front of the bird here and then from here well I'll show you right into the final edit and I changed it a lot so the Dowager came out there was a big clump of stuff here there was a big clump of stuff in between his legs that came out and then I had actually this is where it helped to have a group of friends so I shared this image let me pop this open in Photoshop I shared this image with a group of friends that I talked to Scott is one of them and asked the guys what they thought of this image with these Reed's on the Left included in it so I have these nice two standalone Reed's here and then this one clump on the left so I had originally edit it like this and they all kind of agreed and pointed out that they were a bit distracting on the left so I took them out and this is kind of where I have no problem doing that because I think it makes for a better image and I'll show you the edits the layers on this from beginning to end so first layer is to remove just a couple of oddball things here and that bird and the clump underneath of it and then like I said I removed the entire clump on the left this was all done with just clone stamp next curves layer introduces some contrast and a little bit darker background then I burn the foreground which was a little bit too light and a little bit up at the top there there was a light spot up there next thing adds a little bit of blue into the background there again talking about that color contrast that I like to introduce the next layer actually warms up the bird a little bit so those two layers if I turn them on and off you can start to notice they add some contrast to the image make the bird stand out a little bit more then we do a dodge layer here this is probably just for the eye yep so if i zoom in that's too far and I'll turn that there's before after I just kind of lightened up all the color in the eye there and then a little bit of contrast on the bird again and the last layer up here is just a selection that I had to cut out the bird there so all those layers together make for a pretty significant before and after and compared to the original capture again this is a big change there so that was all I had any other images you want to show Scott no the only image I have up is the same clapper rail I know it's funny because I almost chose a clapper rail for this night today but I realized I was lucky that I got this one so clean I put up on the screen I didn't have to edit it I almost didn't care so there wasn't really a before-and-after her I just lighten the eyeball I think hair and that was it so yeah that was a great day nice all right cool you ready to do this at it yeah all right I gotta remember where the thing is okay you let me know when you're ready so here's what we're gonna do guys we're gonna I'm gonna set a timer for myself here for the both of us for two minutes and we're both going to just see if we can how much we can do with the Edit here in two minutes so I'm gonna be editing in Lightroom Scott is gonna be editing in Camera Raw plugin in Photoshop I'm not gonna lie I'm actually nervous right now yeah nice so you have your image open yeah I just opened it okay cool all right this is a suite we did we wanted one that nobody yes that's right or so we had no we basically just glanced at and I'm opening it really for the first time yeah this is compliments of Tyler Reber yeah one of our good friends yes yeah great photographer as well definitely look him up and follow him if you already don't and are you ready to go Scott yeah we're not really gonna talk much we're just gonna go and if you follow along at the end you ask questions about what we did yeah please um I think we set a two or three minute timer you got three minute timer let's go three minutes yeah we'll do three minute all right all right and go for it I ready yep raise computers faster-- it probably is I messed up already two minutes left Scott all right I mean I'm on a roll over here I don't know what you're doing but yeah my computer is little really freezing up because I think I have like 48 windows open right now yeah I do but my computers are with that yeah actually it's running a little bit slower than normal minute 30 left Scott just a heads up all right I'm not gonna have time to pull this blue channel down that's gonna bother me and if anyone's asking questions now we'll get to them at the Ameren right in the middle of a-- and edit off here so I'm trying for something big here see if I can squeeze it in and the amount of time here not sure I'll make it happen or not I don't think I'm gonna clone this duck out in time oh you're going for duck removal Aria I was trying to get it but I don't think I would have time to do it oh my my computer's crawling out so I think we might have been able to get rid of the duck it's like a four-minute odo it's got to be getting close I did such a bad job on this clone I tried to do too much with it I told you I'm literally sweating right now ah timer all right we'll stop where we're at and I was gonna talk about where we're gonna head anyway all right so hold on so I went for a duck removal and so did you but we went for a different duck removal yeah no you left the one behind the duck in I took that one out there's no way you had time to take that duck out yeah it's gone right now can't you see all right so I would have actually so I'll talk about mine first so I actually did a couple things I got a clone layer here that got rid of the duck behind the the main subject there I didn't get to completely finish it but I was pretty close give me one more minute I would have had it completely gone in a little bit better the next retouch layer actually got rid of this odd stick coming in on the right given no time restraints I would have also removed the the duck in the background that Scott was going for I would have I would have isolated this to make it just a single pintail then I did a burn in the bottom and the top I also did there's another one a little bit more extreme then I did a dodge on the bird's face and then a dodge on that I to really make the eyes stand out I would have completed this with a little bit of enhancement on the purple tone that's showing on the Drake there and then I probably would have increased some contrast across the body to really make that stand out and I may or may not have removed this branch I'm pointing tilling up on the back left there so Scott I'll give you full screen now you can tell them what you did and what you would have done with more time yep so hold on so this was what I started with oh my god I think my computer just locked up but anyway I'll talk through um yeah I'm telling you I had so much open yeah you're getting things turning on off now all right so anyway I just took and like gray I burned the top and bottom a little bit no the only thing I dodged was the eyeball so I dodged just a hair there I probably would have played around with that more if we had more time there's the original I was able to really poorly clone out the one yeah if you zoom in on my clone job it's pretty it's pretty Gretchen my cut out is not on but I didn't get rid of that one clump over on the right as well what else did I do I didn't do anything with color or saturation or anything like a little bit yeah yeah I think I did that when I brought it in on the raw power yeah pulled up the shadows and decrease the highlights and move the whites up I probably would have gotten rid of some blue tones on the bill I don't know if I would have done that or not they generally happy tyler's he said he was going to drop him from the Tyler if you put it into our group we might be able to we might be able to do something with it I don't know yeah but yeah it was that was fun that was fun yeah I think everyone enjoyed that as well maybe we'll give ourselves an extra minute next time yeah three minutes didn't sound like much I thought we could do a little bit more but you know maybe we had a little bit of an ambitious image there so questions in the comments you guys have any questions you guys want to throw at us I'm not sure if I'm seeing up-to-date comments Scott do you see any questions in there it was funny Tyler Ebert puts a link for his week Tyler will probably win the edit off because he had much more time or else we would have slate yeah exactly and if you guys have any suggestions I think ray and I figured we would do this every couple weeks and I know that some of the other guys will probably jump in at some point where you'll have some other people do this he does a great job with it I like having fun with themself yeah I never mind sitting in on his stuff but if you have any topics for ray put them in comments or send him an email if there's anything you'd like to see or anything you like us to do again yeah please certainly do feel free to message me with any of that stuff if you have any questions that you think of after the fact drop them in the comments we do try to revisit that and let's say there's some more comments coming in right now Susan says she loves the editing tool that's great market here your computer nice Tracey yes the full video will be posted and it'll actually be higher quality so I actually record the video and a higher quality to my computer and then I will post that later mark you're my computer chugging you thank you yes exactly love the support Denise says when she cloned she gets a muddy look how do you avoid that practice practice practice practice practice cloning is actually so to understand it isn't too difficult but to become efficient and skilled at it definitely takes a lot of work so I would just say you know keep keep cloning do it as much as you possibly can I use the clone tool for almost all of my remove hold these days but like I said I've been using that clone tool for eight hours a day five days a week for probably it just honestly over 17 years now straight just using that those tools every single day so the amount of hours I've racked up using that are just astronomical but it's simply like most things practice practice practice cool Haley says covered a lot she enjoyed it perfect cool this looks like a really good one oh wait one quick question can you guys go over what you would want to see for these images as a final product I guess he's talking about the edits we just did I think we kind of did talk about that a little bit you know we would have just done a little bit more dodging and burning a little bit more color enhancement and that sort of thing so that's that's kind of all only place I was going with that so anything else you want to add Scott for we're appellate that's it all right cool thank you everyone for joining in we really appreciate it and I'll have this video to share in the future and a little bit higher quality and we'll let you know the next time we're going to do this thanks a lot all right have a good night

Channel: Wildlife Inspired w/ Scott Keys

Views: 7,543

Keywords: teaching, tutorial, post processing, photography, birds, wildlife, photoshop

Id: bzBop0Rf71A

Length: 56min 33sec (3393 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 02 2018