This is the journal amd someone told me to post it as news soooo…

Firstly, I really put a lot of effort into this tutorial and this is may way of saying thank you to all my watchers( those who need this) for your loyal support!

Secondly, all the knowledge that I am about to share, I learned in the past 4 months from other deviants and internet tutorials, it is not THEE way, it’s my way…remember 3 things…..

1. Google always has the answer, you just have to find it.
2. No one can teach you as much about photography as the deviantart community.
3. And the best editing is that done behind the camera using the right filters, lenses and other accessories, besides getting all the settings right.

There are 2 things I recommend you should have to use my tutorial. A DSLR and photoshop cs3 (minor differences between cs2). Don’t be stupid and pay for cs3(of course I did, cough)…I don’t think any of my watchers did. If you’re a nerd like me and you know your computers, then you probably got it a few weeks after release through torrent, or a network or something. I did not get it on the Stellenbosch University LAN network, which is piracy heaven, I paid for it, because all students have $500 lying around. If you don’t have it and your not very good with pc’s, then ask a friend who is to get it for you. Pay him/her $10/euros/acorns/pebbles/golden turds, whatever. It’s still better than the $500 adobe wants for it.

RAW RAW RAW RAW.

ALWAYS SHOOT IN RAW. Why? A RAW image file is unprocessed image data, so you can adjust (amongst other things) the exposure slightly, change the highlights and shadows, and the thing I love most is vibrance. I don’t really know what’s the difference between saturation and vibrance, but it has almost the same effect, except vibrance doesn’t degrade the image quality as much as saturation does, so lets just say that vibrance kicks saturation’s ass! I only mentioned a few of the advantages of RAW here, but there are a LOT!

The other thing I find very useful is being able to set the exposure, sometimes that just a little bit darker or lighter makes all the difference…and I’m gonna try to explain how to blend different exposures of the same RAW file to use this function.

And as I said, the best editing is done behind the camera with the right equipment, the only thing keeping us from doing that is money

So….I’m gonna start with the basic stuff and elaborate on other subjects later.

Anyhing in photoshop that works with a slider(contrast, levels etc), don’t try to find a solid rule to go by, play around with it. nothing is right, there’s just what looks the best to you

Open your RAW file, photoshop should open it in the raw tool. There are 2 things you have to adjust and they’re the main things that I always do first. Vibrance and contrast. I always slide them about halfway to the right( in other words the bar is 75% full). Then you can adjust the exposure if necessary, that’s all I ever use with the first tab’s settings. Recovery darkens the highlights, and fill light lightens the shadows, useless in most cases because it degrades the image.

I rarely use the other, and that’s why they’re in the other tabs, they’re not that important.

The other tab’s have cool stuff like the selective hue sliders(for playing around with the colors), you can add vignetting to an image with lens corrections(useful for sunsets and waterscapes,just adds a nice touch!). Don’t use the noise reduction because photoshop’s normal noise reduction is much better( quote adobe). And as I said. The rest of the stuff is fun to play around with. But contrast, vibrance and exposure are the reasons why you shoot in RAW!

Click done and your image opens in the normal photoshop window.

Before doing anything else, Imageadjustmentslevels.

There are 3 sliders at the top and 2 at the bottom. Leave the bottom ones alone. They’ve never improved my images.
So slide the left slider inwards, you’ll see the overall image gets darker and much more contrasted. But it affects the shadows the most, so if detail in the shadows disappear that you really want there. Don’t worry, I’ll go into that a bit later on.

Right slider inwards. It does the Exact opposite of the left slider, brightens the image in general, but mostly the highlights, and gives more contrast. This sometimes creates a flare( white burned out light in the photo) but once again, I’ll go into that later.

The middle slider controls the midtones, play with it. left or right. Decide what looks the best to you. Click ok and your done with that. If you want to see the difference press ctrl+alt+z (windows). This is the general shortcut to reverse any step up to 20 steps( you can set the amount somewhere) To go forward again simply press ctrl+shift+z .

Now, imageadjustmentscurves

You’ll see a a diagonal line on 16 squares, running through 3 crossing points(the corners of the grid squares) .separately click each corner and a small square appears that you can drag.

The bottom/left one goes down, once again, darkens the shadows and creates contrast.
The top right/slider goes up. Brightens the highlights and creates contrast. The middle one controls midtones and is personal opinion and depends on the photo so play around with it! you should end up with an ‘S’ shaped curve(see my scraps for an example).

So if you’ve finished all this then your image should be perfectly saturated without ever touching the saturation slider!

That’s pretty much all! Just check imadgeadjustmentsbrightness/contrast. Increase the contrast and see if t improves the image.

I there’s a lot of noise. Filternoisenoise reduction. Just play with those 4 sliders and until the preview result looks right.
Other things you might want to check simply for the fun of it are imageadjustmentshoto filters, black and white, color balance. Playing around with everything is the best way to learn, and practice makes perfect. If you get stuck, use photoshop’s help or go to google.

So very quickly, in the RAW tool,

1. vibrance
2. contrast
then open the image
3. levels
4. curves
5. always check for noise
6. play around if you want to

Now, when you lose detail due to levels, curves, contrast, whatever. There’s a very easy way to fix this. This is also the method of blending differently exposed photos(excellent substitution for hdr where possible)

I tried to do a tutorial for blending by myself but its horrible so I’m gonna give you links to a lot of decent ones! Remember, photoshop is like maths…there are a lot of ways too get to the same result. Of course photography is much more entertaining than maths! So the more time you spend in photoshop, the better you’ll get to know it and all it’s methods!

[link]

this is the best tut I could find after an hour of searching.

Then for panoramas….very simple, open the RAW, increase the vibrance and contrast, save them as psd files(when you save as a jpg the image file gets compressed and you lose quality). Now automatehotomerge, select the psd files and open them.

The different ways of merging the photos into a panorama(auto, perspective, reposition, cylindrical and interactive layout) depend on your photo. I’ve found that cylindrical works the best, but it curves the horizon, and sometimes too much. With perspective you lose a lot of the image when cropping it into a rectangle. And auto and reposition usually has flaws. Interactive layout also works good but that takes more effort.

When taking the shots, I usually do it with the cam in my hand, except in poor light. Use vertical shots only when you want to get more in the frame from bottom to top. Horizontal is easy and fast, usually only taking 2 or 3 photos. Vertical usually uses 5 or 6 photos.

So if you checked the tutorial at the link I provided and you’ve tried it, you can now do it with multiple images and merge them into panoramas!

I think a lot of my watchers, and the people that I watch have a lot of brilliant material for HDRi (bracketed images), but you don’t know how to blend them naturally as the tutorial shows. So get to know the method and go back to previous images! When blending them, open both RAW files, contrast and vibrance, blend them and the adjust levels and curves after the mask has been applied( you have to select the image you want to adjust in the layers palette)

This just shows how to blend using gradient masks….until I can find the tutorial that showed me how to reveal select parts of layers, this is all…I hope this has helped.

For those who don’t need the step by step baby tutorial, and learn quickly, this is how selective blending works, drag the differently exposed images over each other, select the part you want to reveal with a lasso tool,press q,filterblurgaussian blur, adjust the radius as necessary and click okay, press q again,layerlayer mask reveal selection

And pleeeeaaaase, this isn’t the correct way, this is my way! There are a lot of people that are gonna read this who have probably got better ways to do these things because they do graphic design, or have done it. if you do have a better way, please add it in a comment, all additions, and corrections are welcome!

And just learn this, RAWcontrast and vibrancelevels and curves

LOOOOOOONG journal I know…

My images have been boring the past week, I’m focusing a lot on stock( so I can earn the money for a 10-20mm)

Enjoy your week watchers and happy shooting. If I manage to get it right, you can download this as a zip file from my scraps