Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Camera Raw Detail > Input Sharpening

I hope you all had a terrific Thanksgiving and you are ready for Photoshop for Photographers! on Saturday Morning

Camera Raw, the Detail Panel >  Input Sharpening

Camera Raw Sharpening applies some "input sharpening" even if you make no adjustments.
This sharpening ONLY applies to Raw images. ACR will ignore .jpg's and .tiff's

Sharpening has been greatly improved in Camera Raw V 6+ (V6.5 as I write this…)
As a result you should now do the majority of your sharpening in Camera Raw.

The Default ACR sharpening settings are:

Detaildefaultsharp

 

Amount: 25

Radius: 1.0

Detail: 25

Masking: 0

Remember, it's a starting point for most images.

 

 

 

 

Always evaluate your sharpening at 100%

Amount and Radius

The Amount and Radius should be adjusted together.
The Amount determines how much sharpening is applied.
The Radius lets you decide how wide you want the white edges (the halo contrast on the edges) to be.

A radius of 1.0 works for most edges.

Suggestions for Landscapes and Portraits

Fine detailed subjects will benefit from a small Radius setting <  (Less than)1 (about .8)

Soft detailed portraits can use a radius  > (Greater than) 1   (1.1–1.3)

Sharpening Suppression

The Detail slider
is a “halo avoidance slider,” Suppresses the sharpening effect so you don’t get sharpening artifacts and other unwanted effects from over sharpening.

You can "see" the effect detail has on the image by holding down the ALT or Option key, the sharpening is occurring in the grayscale, hence the gray display.
The larger the value the more the sharpening effect is passed through (100 % allows the total sharpening effect to happen.)

Mask
creates a grayscale mask that works exactly like a layer mask in Photoshop.

0 is no masking, and 100% is a full mask protecting as much of the photos as possible.

Set the mask high for skin and sky, lower values if you want to sharpen details. Again the ALT or Option key reveals the masking effect showing you what's being protected.

Making a Portait and Landscape presets for ACR!

Lightroom comes with presets built-in: They are in the Develop module, preset panel:

PRESETS

 

Remember, this is always a starting point…

you can make additional  adjustments and save them as your own presets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Camera Raw

Here are some "standard" input sharpening settings...

ACR Presets
Portraits:

Amount 40

Set radius at 1.3

Detail 15

Mask 60

 

ACR Presets
Landscape:

Amount 40

Set radius at .8

Detail 35

Mask 0

You can save these settings as a preset.

 

Saving Preset Settings

Choose from the drop down Menu:  > Save Settings...

Presetsavesettings

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This requester will pop-up,

Choose Subset :  Details

Savesettingssharpening

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then click on the save button, name the file…

Landscape sharpening

Portrait sharpening...

or what ever you wish.

Free Presets

OnOne software has some prepared presets that they are giving away for free.

You can download and install them, (They will want you to register first)

I discovered that when I added Set #2, In Camera Raw I could not access the sharpening presets… (There too many of presets!)

You can get the presets here

http://www.ononesoftware.com/free/

OnOne has presets for Camera Raw and Lightroom, for PC's and Macs!

Remember, as always these presets are good places to start… or experiment.

 

Creative Sharpening in ACR/Lightroom

For when you need to have two or more levels of sharpening in an image.

This method uses an Adjustment Brush, As you paint on the image you create a mask and apply the settings you have chosen.

In this case we are just applying sharpening. First set your sharpening using the detail panel then invoke the Adjustment brush as shown below.

 

Adjustmentbrush

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smart Object Sharpening

Using Photoshop  to edit your image as a smart object processed for two levels of Sharpening.

Definitely a subject for the classroom!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saturday, November 19, 2011

Week 5 Outline --Sharpening your Image... What you need to do to output to a printer.

Objectives

Things you need to do before you print

Sharpening Your Image

Soft Proofing: How to save time and money (ink and paper) setting up the best print possible...

Materials

On the class server, in the folder PS4P you'll find a folder labeled "week5 Copy "week5" to YOUR folder/flash drive/laptop!

Photo Printers

HP Designjets

Canon Photo Inkjet printers

Epson Photo InkJets

Epson Professional Printers

 

Imaging Resource Printer Reviews

ShutterBug Reviews

Printer info .com Rankings

 

I'd love to hear about your printing experiences! And printing services that you have used!

 

Saving jpegs, the saga continues...

Sam Siciliano asked the following question...

Gary, I tried using the alternate 'save for web' rather than 'save as', but I ran into many memory issues.  I'm not exactly sure what is going on.  I'm running Windows XP, and I have about as much usable memory as possible with that OS.  I have 4G, of which about 3.2G is addressable.  Photoshop Preferences shows that it can get up to around 1.6G, and I set the level up to 1.2G, which it seems to recommend.  However, I keep getting warning messages pop up when I try to view jpegs in 'save for web' 2-up.  Forget 4-up!  If I lower the percentage (of which I'm not sure) and start shrinking what is displayed in the windows, I have better luck.

I wondered if the sheer size of my files is creating a problem.  My Sony full-frame has one of the biggest sensors available, and my raw files are around 33M.  When I save a psd file in CS5 in 16-bit mode with that Prophoto RGB color profile and with even a couple layers, I get files of about 350M!  This does seem rather huge to me.  When I was using Photoshop Elements, 8 bit, and default sRGB, my files were only around 150M.  However, I had memory issues with 'save for web' there as well.  Anyway, I'll try to bring in a file to try on the class PCs, but let me know if you have any ideas or suggestions!

 

You actually are asking a real good question here…

 

and It finally dawned on me what the "size" requester is useful for in Camera Raw.
At some point when you send photos to Photoshop you need to decide what size you require for final output. What you see in this requester depends on the camera that you are using.

Workflowoptions

You need to be careful here, as you need to choose a size that is going to give you the best print at the ppi (Pixels Per inch) that you are sending to the printer.
The larger the print the more resolution (Total megapixels needed)
Save for Web will issue a warning about size as it creates cache space for each display window…
Most .jpg files are used for display on the web. Or for Computer slideshows with images formatted for the resolution of the screen. And as a result are have a "Low" Resolution...
Saveforweb
One of the places where you can make a resolution (size) commitment is with
Image > Image Size…
Imagesize
How large a resolution do you need for a "perfect" print?

Divide the width of a picture in pixels by the # of pixels per inch (PPI) --the value you told the printer to print per inch

EG from the data in the above requester

Width:
3456 pixels / 300 pixels per inch
= 11.52 inches

Height:
2304 Pixels / 300 
Pixels per inch
=7.68 inches
You can of course turn that around and calculate the # of pixels needed for say a 12 x 18 print @300 PPI
12 inches x 300 Pixels/inch  = 3600 Pixels
18 inches x 300 Pixels/inch =  5400 Pixels
To print a bigger picture you'd need either more resolution (More Mega-pixels) or print with less ppi
and, you can always change the PPI without affecting the Resolution of the image
decisions, decisions, decisions
got more questions?
as usual 'holler!

 

Transferring/Syncing metadata from Bridge to Lightroom

 

Roger Pace wrote: and asked the following question
Where do I find the notes on how to set up and save a metadata profile & can I transfer that into Lightroom as well?
In order for Lightroom to read the Metadata (IPTC + EXIF) you attached to your photos in Bridge, you need to
save the data to the sidecar file using the Camera Raw Preferences setting in Bridge. That will happen automatically if you set the following you'll be compatible with Lightroom:
Menu
Edit > Camera Raw Preferences
on the Mac it's
Bridge CS5 > Camera Raw Preferences

Xmpsidecar

To set up the IPTC data in the Bridge  use the  Menu:
Tools > Create Metadata Template…
After you create and save the metadata file,  with the following menu,  you can find the file you saved and copy the file…
Iptcdata
and paste it into Lightroom's Metadata folder
Mac
Username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/XMP/Metadata Templates/

PC
local disk (C:)\Username\Application Data\Adobe\XMP\Metadata Templates\

However, if a Photograph already has IPTC metadata embedded in it's xmp file you can import and export that data (synchronize it) to other files directly in Lightroom
(Use the metadata menu) or use the "sync" button to apply the metadata to selected files...
Note that Lightroom cannot display ALL the Metadata that the Bridge can… It hasn't disappeared it's still in the file,  just not accessible.
Back In Bridge if you select multiple files and right click on one of the highlighted photos choose the Menu

Info

You get this "Wizard"
Xmpeditor
and you can apply the metadata to all the files you have selected.

 

 

Friday, November 11, 2011

A Mystery for You...

Here's the question posed by class member Sam Siciliano
I am working with 16-bit files now.  However, there's one minor oddity I can't figure out.  I'm saving files as PSD files, but I will then often save a jpg copy as well.  I flattent the file, then change to jpg.  The jpg option pops up, and I have the preview box checked.  However, I'm never getting the size to show up like it does in elements.  As you change the resolution by sliding the bar or modifying the number, you should see the file size in megabytes.  I do see that in Elements, but in CS5, a number never shows up, only the '--' where a number should be.  Any idea why I'm not getting a preview of the size?
I checked this out on my Win XP Laptop with Photoshop CS5 … and my Mac with OS X Lion with Photoshop CS3, Choose
File > Save As… and select the file Format: JPEG
Format


Jpgoptions xp




Jpgoptions Mac









Please check this out on your computer, note the OS and the version of Photoshop… And, leave a comment! Let us know if that feature is working or not with your setup.









In the mean time, if you want to see how big your Jpegged file will be, and how it looks compressed you can use the menu item
File > Save for Web & Devices...
not only can you see what the Jpegged file will look like, you can see several jpeg settings at one time… (4 up) at the left of each image you can see the size, and the amount of compression...

Jpeggedflower



















By the way, you don't have to flatten your layers to save a jpeg file, Photoshop will flatten all the visible layers for you when yoiu choose to "Save As…" Jpeg or use the menu item
File > Save for Web & Devices...
Remember Jpeg is a lossy format, it will degrade the image.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Non-Destructive Editing in Photoshop

The Goal:

Edit an image in Photoshop, to enhance, to improve it... and be able to easily "tweak" or undo/redo the "fixes" at a later date.

In Photoshop you are editing pixels, as a result you should always work on a "copy" of the image, not the original.
1. In Photoshop after loading an image, use the File > Save As menu and save the files as a copy, or rename the file as... I usually just use a numbering system like imagename-001.psd.
This ensures you have an "original" RGB copy, even if you have the original raw image.

2. In your editing process you always want to use the Adjustment panel and the Adjustment layer tools.
Adjustment Panel
list of adjustment layers… from the layers menu
NewImage




ChooseAdj

An Example of using Adjustment layers...
Adjlayers











































3. Use Smart Objects for elements you are merging
in the photo, especially if you are using the Menu item: Edit > Transform > Scale (etc).
Transform  Edits changes and "throws away pixels" especially if there is a scaling down in size… By transforming your layer contents to a smart object, the original data is available to re-size the new element without pixilation or having to start over again.  In this example both Logos were scaled smaller, then resized upwards… The Logo on the right was converted to a smart Object.
Smartlayertransformed










4. Use smart Objects for applying  Filters
SmartfiltertransformedUsing "Smart Filters" let's you
adjust the effects of the filter
later…









5. Create a Blank Layer
When using any of the tools like the Clone or Healing Tools  to edit pixels, create a Blank Layer and use the Tool Bar to toggle on "Edit layers below"
PS Layers

Here's a short tutorial that uses "Edit Layers Below"











6.  If you can only edit pixels directly
make a Flattened copy of the visible layers .

This is useful if you want to use the Menu Image > Adjustments > Shadow/Highlight…
or another "Adjustment" that does not have an "Adjustment layer"
Mac (Command + Option + Shift + E)
PC (Control + Alt + Shift + E)
and apply the Adjustment to the flattened copy of the all the layers...

To re-edit the Shadow/Highlights… you'll need to delete the layer and repeat the process...

Enjoy! As Always 'holler if you have a question or comment