I took this photo with my Canon G9 the other day. It was a very rainy day and I stepped out on our balcony and snapped a few close-up photos of a leaf on one of our plants that lives on the balcony.

It was my small dose of photographic activity for the day.

While post-processing the image I started venturing down different paths, away from the original, away from the truth. I was bored with the original image and I didn’t have a whole lot of other new material to work with, so I started pushing the boundaries a bit.

I converted from colour to black and white. I pushed the exposure. I pushed the blacks. I pushed contrast. I pushed clarity. I added local contrast by lightening the main veins in the leaf to create more of a ‘skeleton’ within the leaf.

Skeleton Leaf (before)

Skeleton Leaf (after)

I ventured a fair bit away from the so-called truth in photography.

But wait a minute, is there really such a thing as truth in photography? And if there is, is it then OK to deliberately leave the truth behind in pursuit of a more creative interpretation of a given subject?

In creative photography I think so, but not so in documentary photography.

In creative photography it’s really all about the image for me and the experience an image gives the viewer.

But how far can venture from the truth in photography? What are your thoughts?

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Today I set out to make some Lensbaby images as the little family headed into Manly to listen to some jazz at the Manly Jazz Festival. However it started drizzling just as we set foot outside, and later the drizzle turned into steady rain throughout the entire day. Typical.

Before we left the house I had quickly grabbed The Amazing Polaroid SX-70 just in case. Usually I like to keep it simple and not confuse myself by bringing too much gear, let alone two different cameras. But I’m still learning to see with ‘Polaroid eyes’ so I thought it would be nice to have it in the bag. And as it happened I did stumble across a subject which I found better suited to the SX-70 than the Lensbaby, and this was the one and only picture I took the entire day. Not a particularly productive day photographically.

The image from the Polaroid SX-70 came out somewhat overexposed, so contrary to my test shots here and here I chose to make some basic Photoshop adjustments to this image.

I thought, therefore, I would use the image for a quick little Before and After tutorial post, showing you the basic Photoshop adjustments I made to this image.

Let’s start with the final image above. As you can see it’s really just an image of texture and to some extent also colour, but the image also displays some subtle curves and movement.

OK, so let’s look at what the image looked like straight after it was ejected from the Polaroid SX-70 and had had a few minutes to magically develop into an image.

Hmm, the original Polaroid is too bright in the brightest areas of the grasses and – to my eyes – these areas of high brightness become a distraction. My eyes are simply not relaxed looking at the image.

The first adjustment I made was a Levels adjustment. I simply moved the black point slider on the left towards the right where the data begins in the histogram. I levelled out the image data which resulted in a slightly more even exposure and increased contrast. Effectively the darkest areas in the original image becomes darker with this adjustment.

Levels adjustment

After applying the Levels adjustment I decided that I didn’t want the adjustment to affect the entire image, so I created a Layer mask and masked off some of the adjustment in the top left and bottom right corners of the image. The darker areas below show where I have masked off the effect of the Levels adjustment.

Levels layer mask

At this stage I still felt that the grasses in the left part of the image were too bright, so I proceeded with a Curves adjustment to lower the brightness of those grasses.

Curves adjustment #01

I used the first Curves adjustment to darken the image overall. However since I only really wanted to darken the the brighter grasses I applied a Layer mask to control the adjustment so it only affected local areas of the image.

I filled the entire Layer mask with black (initially masking off the entire Curves adjustment to the image) and then painted with the Brush Tool using white paint to apply the adjustment locally.

I use a Wacom Intuos tablet to paint in local adjustments like this by hand.

The brighter areas below show where I have applied the Curves adjustment to the image.

Curves layer mask #01

The above Curves adjustment brought me pretty close to where I wanted to be in tems of exposure, brightness and contrast.

However I still felt I needed to tone back some of the brighter areas just a touch more. Instead of messing around with the first Curves adjustment I simply went ahead with a second Curves adjustment.

Curves adjustment #02

I used another Layer mask to control the adjustment locally. Again I filled the mask with black and painted in the adjustment with my Wacom Intuos tablet.

Curves layer mask #02

I’m now happy with the overall exposure, brightness and contrast in the image. This is when I will typically start looking at colour. So in this case I decided to bump up the Vibrance and Saturation of the colour in the image.

Vibrance and Saturation adjustment

While I quite like the colour in the image I can’t help but feel it’s a bit too saturated and has lost some the original appeal of the colour that the Polaroid 600 film produces. 

In some ways I go backwards the way I decide to deal with the colour in the next step. I applied a Black & White adjustment layer effectively draining the image of all colour, but then I used the Opacity slider to only partially apply the Black & White adjustment.

After playing around with the Opacity slider for a little white I settled at around 33% which resulted in the final image you see above. You could also say that I only applied the Black & White adjustment layer at 33% strength, or since I reduced the Opacity of the Black & White adjustment, you could say I injected about 67% colour back into the image. Hmm, I hope this makes sense.

Black & White adjustment

The slightly more subdued colours that resulted from this adjustment were more true to the original image and I was happy with the outcome, so I saved the layered file as a.PSD file (my master file) so that I can always come back to it if I wish to change any of the adjustments.

If you are new to Photoshop you will often find yourself going back to older images as your Photoshop skills increases.

All of the above adjustments were made to a high resolution scanned TIFF file of the original Polaroid image, and I used Adobe Photoshop CS4 to make the adjustments.

There are no doubt that there are lots of other – possibly easier – ways of arriving at a similar result, but the above describes the approach I took to this image. I hope you enjoyed this little Before and After tutorial.

If you liked this article, you may also like these:

• Unique Digital Photography Tutorials
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During my recent August Snaps project I carried my Canon G9 with me everywhere throughout the month of August in an effort to make creative photos every day. However on a couple of occassions I did indeed also make some ‘normal’ snapshots.

So today I thought I would share an image of my daughter, Laura, at one of the local playgrounds and how I transformed a very ordinary snapshot into a much more visually interesting image in just a few mouse clicks. What I’m showing you here doesn’t require any special Photoshop skills and it can be done in less than a couple of minutes.

Laura - Before (original RAW file)

As you can see this is a very ordinary snapshot which is even a bit underexposed as a result of the bright sunlit background and it’s also not quite sharp where it should be. Nevermind. I converted the image to black and white using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 and then I opened it in Adobe Photoshop CS4 for further processing using the onOne Software Plug-In Suite 4.5 for Photoshop.

Don’t forget you can get 20% off any of onOne Software’s products by using the 24SEVEN coupon code when you make a purchase at onOne Software.

Laura - a simple conversion to B&W

Lightroom Settings

As you can see on the left I have simply hit ‘Grayscale’ to convert the original image to black and white and then I increased the Exposure setting by +1.16, the Recovery setting by +61, added some Fill Light at +11 and deepened the blacks a little bit by increasing Blacks by +13.

I could have easily experimented further by visiting the Grayscale Mix panel, but I was after a quick and easy result here, so I settled for the above look as I knew I would be experimenting further in the onOne Software Plug-In Suite 4.5.

I used the FocalPoint and PhotoTools plug-ins from the Plug-In Suite 4.5 to create the effects you see in the final image image below.

The FocalPoint Plug-in helped me to create all the blur you see around Laura in the final image. It is a very user-friendly program which does all the heavy lifting for you. It gives you a focal point which can place anywhere in your image along with several handles around the focalpoint which you can manipulate to control the placement and amount of blur in your image.

I have circled my focalpoint in red in the screen shot below, indicating the approximate placement and size of my chosen focalpoint.

The FocalPoint Interface

Finally I threw the PhotoTools Pro Plug-in at the image and applied the B&W KPZ II Grainy Film A1 setting and toned it back a little to give the image a film look.

Laura - After (final image)

Oh, I almost forgot, of course the edge effect around the final image was also made using the PhotoFrame Pro Plug-in.

If all of this sounds like a lot, it really was a walk-in-the-park to achieve this effect. It has taken me ten times longer to prepare this post, than it did to create the final image.

However if you don’t want to be playing around with software plug-ins you can of course also achieve this effect in-camera by using one of the excellent Lensbaby series lenses. My preferred Lensbaby is the Composer which looks like this:

For more information and the latest price on the Lensbaby Composer series visit the Lensbaby website.

I hope you enjoyed this second Before and After tutorial which I plan as a regular feature here at Photography 24/7.

Thanks for stopping by!

If you liked this article, you may also like these:

• How to do Advanced Toning in Photoshop CS4 – Part Four
• Before and After: Polaroid Grasses
• How to do Advanced Toning in Photoshop CS4 – Part Three

‘Before and After’ will be a regular column here at Photography24seven.com and this is the first post showing an example of an image before processing and the same image after processing.

Manly Dam - Before (original RAW file)

Manly Dam - After (finished image)

The truth is that almost any image which has been shot in RAW mode (and if you want maximum flexibility when it comes to post-processing you want to shoot in RAW mode if your camera provides it) has been manipulated to some extent. The word ‘manipulation’ has a somewhat negative ring to it, but essentially that is what we do to our images when we start processing them. The point is, though, that when we manipulate our images in Lightroom, Aperture or Photoshop (or whichever software solution we use) many of the ‘tools’ we use are inherited from the traditional darkroom. Perhaps, therefore, we could as well say ‘develop’ instead of ‘manipulate’.

The image ‘Manly Dam’ shown above is an example of an image that has been ‘developed’ in terms of tones, contrast and colours as well as ‘manipulated’ in terms of removing some smaller unwanted elements in the image.

Let’s have a look at each of the adjustment layers applied in Photoshop (shown on the left):

The first layer is simply the original RAW file.

The second layer uses the Spot Healing Brush Tool to remove a little bit of sensor dust using the which was apparent in the sky and the water.

The third layer is the ‘manipulative’ layer as it alters reality. For this image I chose to clone out some signs along the shoreline i the background as well as some white buoys in the water by using the Clone Stamp Tool. Furthermore I cloned out a couple of small bright high contrast spots on the rock in the foreground.

The fourth layer is a Curves adjustment layer which adds contrast in the foreground and in the sky, but I have used a Layer Mask to withhold the adjustment from the darker land mass.

In the fifth layer I use another Curves adjustment layer with a Layer Mask. This layer tones down a brighter area in the water in the left-hand side of the image.

The sixth layer darkens the bright area in the left-hand side  a little bit more.

The seventh layer is a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer which increases the saturation of the reds (near the rock in the foreground).

The eighth  layer is a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer which increases the saturation of the blues (sky and water)

The nineth layer is a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer which increases the saturation of the greens (the bush on the landmass).

In the final tenth layer I use a Curves adjustment layer to darken down the water a little bit.

Everyone develops their images differently. One of the ways that I have found useful is to ‘listen to the image’ and correct the ‘issues’ that come to me first and then just work my way through the image until I am happy with the appearance.

Image manipulation is a highly personal and subjective process, but I think the idea of ‘listening to the image’ is a great concept to get the process started and by using adjustment layers (which are non-destructive) you can always go back and fine-tune things here and tweak things there.

I cannot lay claim to the idea of ‘listening to the image’, I just happened to come across it in a great book titled The Creative Digital Darkroom by Katrin Eisman and Sean Duggan. I was very intrigued by this idea though and I personally find this ‘organic’ approach to image processing much more appealing than the ‘cookie-cutter’ approach often promoted in the more average Photoshop books.

So next time you sit in front of an un-processed image just try to ‘listen to the image’ and see where it takes you.

Have fun!

If you liked this article, you may also like these:

• Before and After: Laura
• August Snaps 25 August
• The RAW Power of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2