The first step in learning is making a mistake. Fortunately in the digital world, mistakes are generally correctable. I want to show some mistakes I have made in the past so we can all learn from them. This mistake is particular is about lighting and post-processing direction. I will show how important post-processing is and how it can go wrong.

This crane was shot recently in a Bird Sanctuary nearby. At the time of the shot, I didn’t consider back lighting, hence the crane was under-exposed.

I liked the composition, so I tried to fix the exposure in Photoshop. To fix the under-exposed crane, I increased the Fill Light. Now that the crane is nicely exposed, I leveled it.

Original	Fill Light	Leveled Fill Light

It looks way better now. But there is a problem. This image is boring. It is just a photo of a crane. There’s nothing special about it. This occurs at times during post-processing, you realize its all wrong.

That’s when you need to start all over again. I actually like how the crane is dark in the original image. So instead of brightening the crane, I darken it using Blacks. This turns the water a nice dark blue. A nice surprise. After leveling, this image now has a lot of kick to it. But there are still some issues. The water is littered with specks of garbage. This is where the Heal brush (or Clone) comes in handy.

Blacks	Leveled Blacks	Healed Leveled Blacks

The image is much cleaner now. The water is silky smooth. There’s still one thing bothering me. The crane isn’t completely dark. There’s still a small edge to it. A quick session with a soft black brush fixes that.

Filled healed Leveled Blacks

This dark crane is a much better image than bright one. It goes to show the direction of post-processing affects the end result heavily. Its also interesting that removing the garbage from the from the water greatly improved the image. It makes one realize how misleading the final image is. There probably does not exist a body of water that clean with a crane standing in it. Post-processing is lying, but how so beautiful it is.

Looking at the original image, I would have never guessed it would turn out as it did. You only really need two things in an image: focus and composition. Everything else is more or less fixable with some post-processing.

Hello world!

I’ve been using this inter-web thing for a while now, and when I came across this post by Jeff Atwood, I just knew I had to create my own blog. Now you know who to blame.

I am a Software Engineer by day, Gamer at night, and Photographer all the other times in between.