Last Saturday I hosted a workshop where we processed images with Photoshop and Lightroom. Carey, Ron and Don attended. Each participant had different objectives that they wanted to achieve. I hope that the workshop was useful for them — perhaps they may supply feedback?

Carey had questions on Lightroom settings that we addressed. This fixed issues such as the display of image names and virtual copies in the filmstrip and grid views.

Ron is a newcomer to digital photography. We ran through a typical workflow based on Lightroom with Ron’s images:

• Strategies on how to organize images. We covered topics such as how to structure folders. A good reference book for this is “Digital Photographer’s Notebook” by Kevin Ames and “The DAM Book” by Peter Krogh. My images are loosely based on Kevin Ames scheme.
• Ingest images from compact flash cards to a directory on hard-drive.
• Create a Lightroom catalog and import images into catalog.
• Assign keywords on import. How to assign keywords after import.
• Use the develop module to process an image.

We took a break for lunch and returned to handle Don’s images. Don does not have Lightroom, so we used Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop. We copied images from Don’s computer to mine and gathered around the monitor. We started with an image that Don had made of an orchestra conductor. From Bridge, we opened this image in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Conductor Original

After discussing this image, we decided that the bottom of the image contained blown out highlights. Also, the image needed to be rotated slightly counter clockwise. Look at the flags, visible in the dark background. We used ACR to rotate and crop the image to address these shortcomings. Also, we performed some minor tonal adjustments to the image before opening the image in Photoshop. See the image below.

Conductor After ACR

This image is an excellent environmental portrait. However, it suffers from bright highlights at the bottom. We addressed this by applying a curve and burning in the highlights using a brush on the layer mask. Just behind the conductor is that rectangular highlight that is caused be a light entering through a window in the door.The layer stack at this point is shown below.

Layer Stack - Conductor No 1

We discussed several methods of cloning to remove the highlight. The result is the image below.

Conductor Crop 1

Here is the layer stack that we used to create this rendition.

Layer Stack - Conductor No 2

I felt that we could create a stronger image by using a stronger crop to remove all the distracting elements at the bottom.

Conductor Crop 2

We then took a second image that Don made of a French Horn player. The image below is the original image before processing in ACR.

Horn Player Original

We used the exposure and recovery sliders to tone down some of the specular reflections in the horn and to reduce the brightness of the music score on the right edge. After opening the image in Photoshop, we decided that the music score was still too hot.

We used a temporary threshold layer that was using to create a selection. After this, we added a curve adjustment layer with the selection (a mask). We could then throw away the threshold layer. By selecting an appropriate blending mode (multiply) and opacity, we brought down the brightness of the score.

While the image was an excellent image, I decided that we could do something different. So I applied a black and white adjustment layer. Examining the original image, you may notice that there are two distracting red highlights (bokeh) in the background flags. The red channel slider was using to reduce the contribution of the red in the background. This also removed the highlights nicely. The final image is shown below.

The layer stack is shown below.

Layer Stack - Horn Player

Finally, we spent some time discussing layers and image blending using layers on one of my images. We deconstructed the image layer by layer. I have not included the image here because of the number of steps and layers involved.

We also discussed various books. Some of these books may be found listed on this page. This page can be accessed by following this website’s navigation menu Suggestions | Books.