WILDLIFE PHOTOGRAPHY | My Workflow Post-Print

[Music] what is going on today guys it's been a long time since we've talked it's just been really busy on my end that I'm sure on your end as well but I wanted to take the opportunity today to do a video I did have a print order come in and I wanted to do that in conjunction with showing you guys some of my post-processing tips it's actually one of the most requested videos I get which blows my mind because I feel like I don't do anything too crazy or too unnatural editing wise but I do think there's a couple things I can show you that maybe will be beneficial to you as well so what I want to do is I want to jump in on the screen I want to explain the print what I'm doing who it's going to and we'll go through the whole process from when I import the photo and then well edit it up we'll export it and we'll take it downstairs and well print it I do want to talk a little bit about printing later I feel like it's a lost art and I feel like it's an entire third of the entire photography experience that's just normally removed from what we do you know you got the capturing of the photo you got the editing and then that's normally where it stops or it finds a home on a digital device somewhere and then that's the end of it for photography you really in my opinion you really got to put it into something tangible you got to make that photo photograph something tangible and for me that's print something about a big large print of a photograph I I take makes it just so much more powerful so let's jump in on the screen right now and we'll get after it okay so the photo you're looking at now is a of a juvenile bald eagle with its uh nick tating nicotine I can never pronounce it's the membrane that comes down over the eyes you'll see this a lot in predatory birds and Raptors and and things like that you also see something similar in a shark on impact you see that eyelid come down over the shark to protect their eyes this is the same concept it's to protect the Predators eyes normally on impact or things of that nature so I had a friend who ordered this print once at 24 by 36 which is a pretty decent sized print and I want to do that all in-house so let's jump into it now and we're gonna walk through my editing techniques so I got it open here in Lightroom just like I'm sure most of you guys start in Lightroom at least that's where I start Lightroom Photoshop and then if I need to ID noise it this case let's talk about settings real quick it was shot at 160 ISL at 600 millimeters and then f4 so I shot on the night core 600 millimeter f4 at 1:6 40th of a second I'm not gonna denoise this because the the ISO is so close to the native ISO of the camera that there's really gonna be no benefit the thing is not noisy at all I'll come in zoom in a hundred percent here and you can kind of see what I'm talking about there's really not a lot of digital noise let's jump into it alright so we've got the image in front of us stepping back out I feel like the exposure overall is good I'm not gonna adjust too much on the overall global exposure but I do want to up the contrast so every time I shoot raw on the nikon d80 at least it sucks the the contrast out of the photo when I put it back into Lightroom and it goes to its native setting it just looks really unconscious - that makes sense so I'm gonna stick around 25 that looks good it looks a little overkill right now to me but we'll do some other adjustments and it'll come around next we're gonna drop a little bit of a highlights I was exposing for the dark into the feathers so I don't want to lose any of that detail so the highlights are a little blown out nothing nothing too crazy but that's gonna be probably the biggest adjustment I make really want to keep all of those highlight details and the feathers and right there along the beak so that's what we got going there next I'm gonna look at the shadows I don't want to live the shadows too much like I said I'd expose for the the dark portions so the shadows are actually already pretty much there I'll bring them up a little bit so you can get some of the the shadow recovery here up in the darker feathers but then whites maybe a slight adjustment black will kind of bump up the contrast just a little bit more now here's a tip that I do I never use texture clarity I never do any sharpening in Lightroom I feel like Lightroom doesn't do a very good job Photoshop is so much more of a powerful program for that but I will DJ's just a little bit in the purpose of the da's is just to give there's a little bit more separation between the animal in this case the bird and the background kind of giving it that nice portrait blurred gray background vibrance I do a little bit of vibrance you could come down here and do it globally color by color on the HSL sliders I'm not doing any of that depending on if it's a dark photo sometimes I'll do the profile Corrections but on this case I feel like the vignette caused by the the profile correction not being selected kind of makes it more dramatic so that's it you just kind of saw how basic my my overall global adjustment is what I might do is take my my little paintbrush here and I'm going to lift the shadows in the membrane all those cool veins and everything that we were talking about a little bit earlier I want to be able to see that on the print so we get down to printing a little bit later I'll explain to you why I'm lifting the shadows there because you don't recover as many of the shadows and a print when it's not backlit screen so that's what I do here so that's it that's all I got for Lightroom I'm gonna take this and I'm gonna move it over to photoshop and that's where I'm gonna do the majority of my dodging and burning all of my sharpening you guys know me I like to put that little bit of a border around my photo I feel like it kind of frames it a little bit better so we'll jump into all that and we'll see how it turns out all right guys so it looks like it's a reading camera RAW format right now so the transfer is almost completely there we go so we have a coming up here in Photoshop right now give it one more second to think there we go so we have our full image after our Camera Raw adjustments that we did in Lightroom edited opened up into a Photoshop like I mentioned earlier that I wanted to print it 24 by 36 so before I do any adjustments the first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually change the image size of it now we slide this over here where you guys can see what I'm doing so here's what I want to do this is the original size at 240 PPI or let's PPI I do need to make this 36 by 24 now the issue is is the resolutions only at 229 PPI normally the standard when I print is 300 I just don't necessarily have that much resolution in this photo it's not cropped at all it's just that's all the camera put out there are some programs I'm not familiar with them that allow you to resize the photo you can actually make the photo larger since I don't have any experience with that and I don't necessarily want to screw it up I'm just gonna make the DPI suffer a little bit the dots per inch just a little bit less than 300 um but you're looking at what 80 200 by 5500 pixels that's a full non cropped image from the d8 50 so that should be more than enough information to go print at 24 by 36 so you're not gonna see any adjustment there but the actual image size is now 24 by 36 first thing I always do is you got to go ahead and make a new copy so just slide that down there and you're just recreating the same image twice I told you guys I don't ever do any sharpening in Lightroom because I feel like Photoshop does just such a better job and I'll show you guys how I always sharpen all of my photos I grab the lasso tool make sure you got your whole image right there in front of you and just select your subject whatever that is when you're doing this it doesn't have to be incredibly precise just kind of the general outline of whatever it is that you're trying to sharpen is gonna be more than sufficient sometimes I get like really in the weeds with this trying to make it perfect but I've realized after some comparisons that it really doesn't make that much of a difference so there we go I've selected just the outline of the bird of the head that a little nick in the beak really isn't gonna make much of a difference so let's wait for that to go and give me the marching ants right there next you're gonna hit command or control J and all that's gonna do is take your selected area and it's gonna throw it on to a new layer and it's gonna be its own individual layer in your Photoshop so let's give it a second and there we go so right now you're not gonna see anything different but if you look at layer one it's what we just did it's the cut out of that now here's the tip here's the trick here's how I sharpen all of my images come down to filter other High Pass now what this is is it's just micro contrast between the lights and the darks when the camera takes a photo when you got all those tiny pixels that make out a straight line the contrast between the light and the dark is what this filter is sharpening so if you look at this we bring this on here cut my high pass to point one is pretty much the most I'm ever gonna do you can make it start to look like lightroom does where it's over sharpened and it looks fake two point one is where I normally leave it and if you look right now I'm just sliding this little view box around the eagle and you can kind of see how it's taking that micro contrast to the feathers in this case the veins in the eye and I'm gonna hit okay and it's gonna throw that overlay on now you're looking at this like what and the heck so all you got to do now is you got to just change the overlay or I'm sorry you gotta change the layer from normal to overlay and what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna step in so you guys can see what I'm talking about here with the sharpness so this is with the layer mask on or with the sharpening mask on off I really want you to focus in here and some of the details or look at some of the finer feather details along the eyelashes and then on so what you're seeing is it's not inducing a whole lot of artificial noise and it's not over sharpening in my opinion it's just kind of breaking down that micro contrast so this is how I sharpen all of my images so we'll step back out it doesn't look in my opinion over sharpened or unrealistic or fake or anything like that it looks exactly how I want it to look now in this case since the focus of this image is gonna be this membrane I'm going to select the eyeball one more time command J throw that on a brand new layer as well and then I'm gonna overlay it again just not to the same extent I really want those veins in the eye to be as sharp as I can make them when I print now granted you do lose a little bit of sharpness when you print obviously especially when it's not 300 feet 300 dpi it's 240 I think it was something like that so what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna bring this down to point 8 so it's a almost a third of what we did on the overall image I'm just double tap in that eyelid and then come back down here normal to overlay step on in one more time and you guys can really get an idea of just how sharp that little overlay mask is so that's all I do for sharpening now what you're gonna do what I do next just select the top hold shift come down and then command E or ctrl E and that's just gonna compress the all the layers in the one so they're my sharpening is done my resizing is done what do I do next um you're gonna come over here you're gonna grab your background layer one more time and you're gonna add another copy I'm gonna show you guys how I dodge and burn so there we got our background copy on our new layer come over here to edit and then slide it down to fill so what I'm doing now is I'm actually bring this over here I'm adding another layer almost a paint layer if that makes sense I'm it's a gray 50% gray layer over the background it's an identical copy of the background what that's going to allow me to do is dodge and burn on a on a paint layer essentially so let's go ahead and throw that on there same thing as before you're gonna think you screw something up because your whole image is gonna go great it'll hurry up filling right now and there we go so what you got come on there we go so what you got is this gray layer and you're like oh man with my pictures gone just come down here to normal overlay BAM if you look down here on the right you're gonna see that we had this background copy now when I turn it on and off you're not gonna see any difference and that's perfect that's what you want now my next step is make sure you have your background copy with a 50% gray fill selected and come over here and grab your your little fine brush tool and this is where you can get tedious I'm gonna do a little bit of it with you and then I'll probably fast forward the video so you guys can just see how I'm doing it and then the overall ending of the dodging and burning so let's start with a dark so you always want to make sure you're using a black come up here opacity I stick it around 9% 8 9% anything above that and it you can kind of tell it's painted and it doesn't look so dodged and burned so there we go eight flow is 100% that's fine let's bring this brush size down because I really want to get into the details of this so let's come into the eyeball let me show you how this works so all I'm doing right now whether you can notice it or not is I'm just darkening some of the features what I like to do is I like to darken what's dark and light what's light there's nothing nothing overkill about what I'm doing I'm just adding a little bit of micro contrast in but I'm doing it in a way that is very in particular to each individual image so what you're seeing right now as it's happening is I'm just darkening up some of the shadows and I'm gonna do the same thing with the highlights after I get done with this like I said this is tedious but when we get done and I back out and I show you guys the overall dodged and burnt image it's gonna look like night and day so I'm gonna go ahead and fast-forward through this so you guys don't have to suffer through it and then look at the final image mmm all right so now that I'm pretty happy with the black it's gonna do one more thing where I'm gonna increase the brush size and I'm just gonna do large sweeping movements on the black foot or on the darker parts portions of the feathers so I'm just gonna take my brush right now darken up the dark parts of the feathers and this is kind of just like I said broad brushstrokes I'm not looking to get too intricate with something like feathers just because you're really not gonna be able to tell too much of a difference just trying to highlight actually the opposite I'm trying to just add contrast to the dark portions of these feathers so that's good now what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna swap over to the white so I'm gonna come over here that little beach ball goes away and there we go we've got our white come up here and I'm gonna do the exact same thing I just did with black but with the the lighter portions of the image so stay tuned and then we'll see the final image all right so it doesn't look like I did much but let's go ahead and do the before and after so there's before and we hit it one more time and there's after so I know it doesn't look like much but I promise you it's the it's the tiny adjustments that you make that will just set your images apart you don't have to do some crazy edit to where it looks super natural or it looks completely unreal you just want to go ahead and you want to emphasize some of the details of the photos that you're taking like I said my personal style is just to keep it natural looking but just lift some of those accentuating features so that's all that's literally all I do for the dodging and burning then what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna shift II I'm gonna go ahead and smush those layers together flatten the image and now I'll take my image I'll go to canvas size and come over here to inches % 105 so this is just a something I do I just like to add a border to my images when I post them on social media or when I print them I know you can do this when you do the print settings you can make it to where it's borderless or not borderless I just always like to add it it's just kind of something that I've always done so then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this and I'm going to file export export as this is where you can add your watermark if that's something you're into I don't watermark but if you do add it here I'm gonna export this slide this over here I'll show you how I export it um the width and the height the pixels are a little bit bigger because I added that 105 percent white border it's not gonna screw up the quality of the image at all because it's literally a non detailed white border so the image the part that is the bird is still the exact same pixel density it's just I've expanded that white border on the outside of it so everything here looks good scale is still 1 percent I would do an export of JPEG and quality is obviously a hundred percent that looks good to me let's hit export and then while that's doing its thing exporting what we're gonna do now is I'm gonna go ahead and unplug this laptop and I will head downstairs to the printer and then we'll print this bad boy out and see what you guys think so I'll see you guys down there awesome we got the laptop unplugged now we're just gonna head downstairs to the basement where I keep the big printer and we'll get this bad boy print it off and you will have the final result bottom story of this house is so creepy but here we go head down the hallway and I will show you guys the print room all right it's a whole bunch of nothing in here a couple of other orders I'm working on but this is this is it right here all right so I got my gloves cuz I never do any printing without gloves you don't wanna be handling a lot of the paper get your fingers oil grease crap all over it so little print gloves I got to change the paper out right now I'm pretty sure the last thing I did was matte so we'll get the glossy paper in there and then yeah well print this bad boy out by the way yes yes I am that petty where I put a Nikon sticker I apply the Canon logo although I'd be a liar if I said Canon didn't make phenomenal things I'm just jealous at him lately so ya went full petty put my Nikon sticker there we'll walk you through how to necessarily change the paper right here it's not really I really don't want to ruin ruin any of the paper so for like I think it's like 3 or 4 bucks you can pick these up on online Amazon or bah or one of those other big photo photo super sellers and get yourself a pair of printing love huh she slides right off oh he's gotta make sure I remember how to put this darn thing in correctly all right so they've got the paper changed I'm just gonna feed it and all I'm doing right now is I'm just lining up the paper with the printer so it prints straight just to get that little dot lined up and now we're gonna close the top cover and let her do her thing I got to make sure I select it is glossy waited 170 so we will select that papers gonna load in there it's gonna come out its gonna come back it's gonna do its thing hopefully you guys are learning something like I said I really just want to stress how important it is to print your photos really really gotta print your photos to kind of tie the knot around the entire process this bad boy locked in there it doesn't have to obviously doesn't have to be something as ridiculous as a 36 by 24 in home but just if you get like an 8 by 10 or you get any sort of at-home photo printer for like less than a hundred bucks I promise you just having a tangible printout of your photo is going to uh it's gonna make you a better photographer once you start printing things they look totally different on print than they do with a backlit LCD screen so papers ready she's a 42 inch roll ready to go it's good this laptop set up and printer out all right so we got the laptop super professional set up you see here you know that's what they they do in all the professional print shops they lay on the floor and do it no it's just um what I'm gonna do now is I'm just gonna make sure everything is hooked up as it should be do one more quality assurance check and then let's print some print some pictures all right so wow this does its thing talk recommendations I think that it's really imperative that all photographers sit you down here all photographers actually have a portfolio and not a portfolio online so I do most of my sales if you are one of them to get into print sales I do most of those in person whether that's like a gallery set up or in a restaurant we have something called a first Friday where you go and you put your stuff up inside a small business and then it sells that way but a very rarely do I sell anything based off of something someone sees online I don't have a website and I know that's a failure so far on my part I just haven't seen a return on it but having an actual printed portfolio something that you can show people and they can turn and they can get that texture that tactile experience with your your art really helps sell stuff so if your goal is to print your stuff and sell it out I'd highly recommend it investing into a printer and like I said it doesn't have to be something as asinine as I can 8,400 but just getting something that can print like I know can make someone that prints like what is it 13 by 19 it's it's a couple hundred bucks I will always recommend printing prints your artwork even if it's only for you if it's something you keep you keep a portfolio I think it's really gonna help you become a better photographer this is almost done we're gonna lay it out I'm gonna show you the the printed version of it and then I'll show you the final image up here on the screen and hopefully you guys took something away from today let's see let's go was that membrane that we were trying to get so sure really see all those vein details in there well I think we gotta bond and this print is gonna be pretty stoked with it I know I'm stoked with the outcome hopefully he is - yeah this one's almost done so we'll get it laid out for you oh yeah this looks looks really good guys so all the details there you can see kind of why we brought up the shadows and we brought up that extra just because of how actual uh how much darker it is when it's printed but that's really all I have today guys throwing up the last image right now hopefully you guys enjoyed it learn something and I'll see you guys in the next one stay tuned next week or so we're going on a really big trip we're gonna do some some pretty cool photography so I look forward to seeing you guys then and be safe hope you're doing well and Cheers you

Channel: Cameron Roxberry

Views: 13,332

Keywords: wildlife photography, nature photography, alaskan photography, Nikon, at home printing, photography, eagle photography, editing tutorial, lightroom tutorial, photoshop tutorial, wildlife, canon ipf 8400

Id: QGC40bQgMJU

Length: 23min 24sec (1404 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020