May people are overwhelmed with the choice of processing features offered by a complex tool like Photoshop. Vijay Kumar Pattakkall comes with a rich experience of post-processing pictures for some veterans in the wildlife photography genre. He however walked the participants through a simplified post-processing workflow that can be practiced by everyone.
Simplified Workflow
The first step in post-processing is to produce a base image from the RAW file after making all basic corrections. After performing basic corrections, the technical quality of the picture will increase and the RAW image would be turned into a Photograph.
Subsequently, people can perform selective enhancements to the picture to make them convey the story they had in mind.
Basic corrections to pictures are performed at two stages:
- One while loading a RAW image using the RAW Converter and
- Two after the picture is loaded in Photoshop
RAW Converter
Adobe Camera RAW Converter is a versatile tool with many processing features. He explained the many controls on the RAW Converter like,
- Exposure
- Contrast
- Black Level
- White Level
- Shadows and Highlights
- Clarity Vs. Sharpening
- Saturation Vs. Vibrance
Once the picture is loaded into Photoshop, the following features are very useful:
- Levels – Adjusting the levels so that the histogram shows picture spread end-to-end completes most of the basic processing required
- Sharpening using Unsharp Mask will finish basic processing
After, effective introduction of various tools available in Adobe Photoshop, Shri.Vijay also displayed some of his pictures, which were amazing and liked by one and all. Shri.Vijay who runs a printing lab offered his services to the members to get their pictures printed. He also displayed some prints done on different kinds of paper and explained the advantages of the same.
To sum up, it was a total learning experience to all of them present and the session was well received by the members. YPS on behalf of all members appreciate Shri.Vijay for taking his time out of his professional commitments and giving a wonderful presentation for YPS members, and we are sure to see the result in the coming days.