Thanks for reading, I hope this has been a useful tutorial.  Feel free to let me know your thoughts in the comments and let me know how the project has gone for you!

Leaving your own artistic decisions to the side, there are certain steps that most often need be taken when editing any RAW image.  In this post I'll be breaking down the steps that I normally take when editing photographs of birds.  I personally use Adobe Photoshop and CameraRaw to edit, however you can apply any methods over in Lightroom too.

The steps I'll be covering are:
1 - Image Corrections
2 - White Balance
3 - Exposure
4 - Shadow/Highlight
5 - Contrast and Colour Enhancement
​6 - Sharpening
7 - Noise Reduction

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Step 1 - Image Corrections 
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The first thing to do when opening any image is to head over to image corrections and make sure that you enable 'Profile Corrections' and 'Remove Chromatic Aberration'.  The profile corrections will acknowledge the lens you used, find the relevant information about the barrel distortion and correct this problem for you.  Usually when photographing birds you will be using a long lens and these corrections will be less obvious, however the problems are still there and need sorting.

Chromatic aberration is a little complicated to explain here, but it's vital to remove the effects - which you will see as a coloured halo on edges (usually edges of high contrast).  Modern lenses and their coatings are becoming more and more efficient at cancelling out this effect - it should be noted that it took me a while to find an image with enough chromatic aberration to get across my point as the Nikon 200-500mm F/5.6 that I frequently use is highly adapt to decreasing this problem. Anyway, here is an example of chromatic aberration and how effective the 'remove chromatic aberration' option is.

Step 2 - White Balance

Correcting your white balance is vital to achieving realistic colours in your work.  If you are shooting in RAW, then you really don't have to worry about white balance whilst you are shooting - you can use AUTO WB, one of the presets such as Cloudy or a set number on the Kelvin scale (I personally use 5560K, unless there is a real need to change, such as night photography).

There are many ways to correct white balance; but in CameraRaw my favourite way to adjust the white balance is to pick a preset from the drop down menu which matches the conditions of the shoot and then make small adjustments to find the point I like.  I do it this way because although white balance is extremely important, the look of your image should be down to what you find pleasing, if this is slightly warmer or colder than white then so be it.  Please bear in mind however, that I am using a colour accurate screen and so I can trust that the colours that I am seeing will come across in print, if you are not using a screen that is calibrated to a printer or has a bad representation of the RGB spectrum then it may be wise to use the preset and the preset alone.

Below I have placed three images; colder on the left, adjusted preset in the middle and warmer on the right.  You can expand these by clicking on them.

Step 3 - Exposure

Key to making any photograph look 'as it should' is exposure...  Exposure is once again down to your own idea of how the image should look. You may have heard that you should be trying to replicate the exact conditions that the subject was photographed in; I prefer to think that you should be trying to make the image look as appealing as you can without actually changing or faking the light that it was captured in.  What I find appealing leans towards the brighter end of the spectrum, I generally try to push the histogram as far to the right as I can before I either start clipping the highlights.

I can't stress enough that it is dependent on the scene that you are shooting and that if you were photographing foxes at night underneath street lights for example, then brightening the image would likely ruin it.  The two images below depend on their exposure as the main effect to reach the artistic aim. Firstly, by increasing the exposure, I could extend the work that was done in-camera to isolate the Mute Swans on a white background.  Secondly, by lowering the exposure on the Coot image, the morning colours were saturated and the highlights popped from the dark background.

 Step 4 - Shadow/Highlight

This often will not need touching, if you are shooting when it is cloudy then the light will be fairly soft anyway and so shadows will have soft transitions and not be too dark.  However there are times when these two options become extremely useful.  With dark subjects it's often hard to obtain detail in their feathers, this was the case with the Rook below that I used +75 shadows, along with an exposure increase to get some of the detail back into the feathers.

Below you can see the results of if I had not used the highlight slider altogether.  As you can see, to keep in the detail in the snow I had to lower the exposure and now the image is far too dark.

Step 5 - Contrast and colour enhancement

Contrast, for me is a final step.  I complete all the previous steps, by which point I have achieved a detailed image; by this I mean that I have the exposure correct, whilst simultaneously keeping detail in the dark and bright parts of the image.  The final stage before cropping, sharpening, resizing, etc... is to add a small amount of contrast.  Too much contrast and you'll find that you start to lose too much detail, not enough and you'll find that the image has no impact, no punch.  Usually an increase of contrast between +5 and +15 is enough for me.

Colour enhancement is another that you really have to be careful with.  Too much and it can be off putting, simply because it doesn't look real, but you can use a small amount to make a big difference.  In CameraRaw, there is a useful panel called 'HSL' or 'Hue, Saturation, Luminance', which you can see next to this text.  

I don't think I have ever touched the 'hue' option, but if you are interested it allows you to change certain colours, you could push your oranges closer to being red for example. I would say that I use 'saturation' to some degree on about 80% of my wildlife images and 'luminance' (brightness) on maybe 25%.  On the example image below, I used the saturation panel to enhance the oranges and reds, this made the roof of the house in the background, the legs and the beak more pronounced than before and help them to stand out from the fairly muted background.  And don't forget that you don't only have to take them up; in my landscape work I will often chase a muted 'pastel' type colour pallet and the HSL panel comes in handy when decreasing certain colours rather than affecting the whole image with the basic global 'saturation slider'.

Step 6 - Sharpening

Sharpening is another part of the process that seemingly has a thousand techniques, however for my wildlife work I will only tend to use one, and that is selectively using the 'unsharp mask' filter.  For this part you'll need to come out of CameraRaw and into Photoshop.  If you are completely done with your editing of the colours, contrast, exposure and so on, then duplicate the background layer (Command/CTRL J).  Now head up to the top of the Photoshop frame and go to filter > sharpen > unsharp mask.

A box will appear in front of your image that look like the image below:

Inside the pop-up box you will get a preview of the sharpening affect.  You can move this around by either dragging around inside the small preview box, or clicking on the actual image where you would like the preview to be (I would recommend the eye).  Now, as you can see there are three options; amount, radius and threshold. I'll start by saying that you don't need to touch 'threshold', because we'll be selecting where we want to be sharp in the next stage.  'Amount' is fairly literal, in that the further you push the slider the more the sharpening effect is applied. 'Radius' tells Photoshop how 'blurred' the mask that it is applying is, this is a crude way of explaining and if you don't quite understand how it works then you can follow this link to read about it: www.myphotocentral.com/tutorials/unsharp-mask-explained/. 

In reality, with bird photography, you don't want to stray too far from the 1.0 value with radius.  I tend to go below 1.0, to about 0.8 and then have an amount of around 85-95%.  The handy thing about 'unsharp mask' is that by clicking and holding inside the small preview box you can see what the image used to look like, when you release your click, it will show you the effect that you will be applying - you can then play with the sliders until you are happy with how sharp the image is. Remember though, if you're image was soft at the start, you cannot save it and end up with an acceptable image by sharpening!

You'll remember that I said my preferred method was 'selectively' using the unsharp mask filter - now comes the selective part (don't worry it's not too long or difficult).  Once you've applied the filter to your duplicated layer (likely called 'layer 1'), you need to apply a mask - do this by clicking the small box with a circle inside of it on the panel below the layers. A white box will appear next to your layer.

The next step is to make sure that you have clicked on the layer mask (white square) and to use a black brush at roughly 40% hardness (you'll need to asses the hardness of the brush for your own needs) and 100% opacity to paint any area that you don't want to be sharpened. This is typically any area that isn't your subject.  


​Here are the results:

​Step 7 - Noise Reduction

​There is little need to repeat everything I just said in the sharpening step, because it is extremely similar in method  for noise reduction. However, firstly, make sure that you are happy with your sharpening and then hit 'CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + E', this will merge the layers you have created and make that state a new layer on top of the old ones.  Now go to filter > noise > reduce noise.  There is once again a certain level of personal choice, but if your background is as soft as in the examples throughout this post, then put the strength to +10 and everything else to 0 (unless you need to reduce colour noise, in which case increase it until the colour noise is gone).  

Now comes the masking, but you just created a mask for the sharpening which should be an outline of your subject.  If this is not the case, then you will need to use a black brush to paint the mask where you would like the noise reduction to not affect. However, if you do have the layer mask from the sharpening, then hold down SHIFT and click and drag the layer mask up to the top layer (probably called 'layer 2') and release.  The final step is to invert this new layer mask, because currently the noise reduction is affecting the subject and nothing else. To do this you simply click on the layer mask and press CTRL + i - you can now touch up the mask if needed. Remember to paint black where you want the effect to not be and white where you would like it to show up!

Here are the results:

I've included the filters so that you can see how the masks should look.  I have also exaggerated the effects for the sake of this tip, I would not recommend sharpening to this amount!

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This turned out to be quite a long post, but I hope it can be of help!  Thank you for any likes, shares and comments, and feel free to start a conversation in the comments if you have any issues or ideas.

 After returning from the Cairngorms I've started editing some of the panoramas that I shot and after finalising the one above, I realised that it would be a great example of how to achieve the effect that you might have pictured in your head whilst standing behind the camera on location, by using layer masks.  When I was there, a brief window of light cast some warmth to the tops of the trees closest to the water, however I was facing the other way and so I missed the opportunity for the sake of a different image.  Once I was ready to shoot this scene the light was still brightest on the tops of the trees and so when it came to post processing, the effect I wanted was to make the tops of the trees glow a little more than the rest of the image - to do this I played with layer masks and selecting specific colour ranges.  

This blog will cover the whole edit of the image so if you have never used masks before, then don't worry I will cover everything as though the reader hasn't used masks before.  However, if you are used to masking and just want to see the part about selecting specific colours then you can scroll to the bottom and read the last section.

So, how did I get from the panorama below to the shot above?

Well, I'll start with how I shot it, because that makes the biggest difference (there's only so much Photoshop can do).  The nine image panorama was photographed underexposed as I was shooting on a D800e and knew that I could shoot for the highlights and capture some detail in the mountain that you can see on the far right of the image.  In the end I didn't use that part of the photograph, but with the D800e's ability to capture such a large dynamic range I was able to brighten the image and start to see the results that you see above.  If you are shooting on a crop sensor, then it may be worth (if you were in the same situation) shooting the scene slightly brighter and getting less noise in the shadows.

As I said before, you can't (or I personally don't want to) capture a scene and then completely change the 'light' to achieve a new look - I would say that is starting to branch a more 'digital art' type of picture.  So I start by opening the panorama in CameraRaw and using the basic adjustments to get as close to the final result as possible.

After quite a lot of deliberating I found that the three small trees at the water's edge made a nice focal point and so I cropped down to make them central (shown below).  Usually central is where you may not want the focal point of an image to be, but with this picture being based on symmetry I felt that it worked well!

This is how it was imported in Photoshop and now comes the part when  you chose which bits of the image you want brighter/darker, which colours you want more/less saturated and make the final global adjustments like brightness/contrast.

So, I'll start from the bottom and cover the important layers.  But in case you have never used masks before, each time you apply an adjustment from the panel that (by default) should show above the layers panel, it comes with a mask attached - if you can't see the box then make sure the drop down box at the top right of Photoshop is set to 'photography' and not anything else.  The box looks like the image I have posted on the right.  The masks allow you to paint the areas that you want to be adjusted and leave the rest untouched.

this did to the already bright grasses and rocks at the edge of the water.  One of the most simple way to mask is with a brush, which is what I used for this layer.  I used a brush that was slightly larger than the area I wanted to affect and set it 100% opacity, 0% hardness and the colour to black, then by clicking on the left of the screen and dragging the brush across the grasses all the way to the right of the frame, I had removed the effect of the curves from the bright grasses.  The next layer was the same type of adjustment, I used a brightness/contrast layer to darken the grasses and rocks even further and it was masked using the same technique.

I should quickly explain how the colour of your brush effects the mask.  Basically, black means that it won't show up and white means that you will see the changes you've made.  In this first case, I left the layer as white and painted black because I wanted that small area to not be affected by the adjustment.  If I only wanted a small portion to show through, then it would make sense to make the mask black and paint the area that I wanted in white.  You can make the mask black by inverting it, this is done by using 'CTRL i' or 'command' on a mac.

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Now comes the part when I used selective masking by picking certain colours.  I don't need to cover each layer from now on, because you'll understand the concept if I just explain the mask I used to make the trees 'pop'.

I started by making a vibrance adjustment and making the effect quite strong - I overdid the effect so that I could easily tell the areas that I had changed and then I went back and lowered the adjustment after completing the mask.  Once you have done the adjustment, double click on the mask (white box) and another box will appear that looks like the one below.

 By using your little eyedropper tool, you can click on  any colour in your image and the mask will change to be white anywhere that the same colour is present.  As you can see from my masking, I selected a bright green and so only the tops of the trees are white.  Your mask is now done and you can go back to your adjustment and change it to how you want it to look, because right now it'll be very strong. 

I used exactly the same technique to brighten the trunks of the trees.  If I didn't know about selecting colours I would have increased the brightness and made a mask on which I would have to paint each trunk that I wanted to be brighter.  That technique would have taken a long time, but by using the colour range tool, you can just click on one of the trunks and the adjustment will instantly apply to all the trunks and only the trunks!

By using layer masks you should  see a big improvement in your images, mostly because you will find them looking very close to how you pictured the image at the time you took the shot.  The changes will seem minimal, like all of the ones that I made on this example, but overall it adds another level to your picture.  That extra something might not be noticeable to other viewers, but I personally am much happier with my images since I learnt about this method of masking!

Thanks for reading and I hope that it helps you somehow!

After shooting a time-lapse of the sun rising over St. Ives a couple of days ago, I realised that I had an opportunity to experiment with a new blending mode.  This blending mode is called 'lighten' and as you may expect from the name, it takes the lightest parts of one image and overlays it onto the other.  I'll take you through how I made the image you can see above.

The two images that I chose to use were; one as the sun rose (to get the most colour in the sky) and one whilst the sun had not risen (meaning that all of the street and house lights were on).  Usually when editing two images to be blended together I concentrate one image on the sky and the other on the foreground.  However this time, the second image was only being used for the lights and so for that one I pushed the highlights to +100 and bought the shadows up a little.  The image taken at sunrise was edited as though it was just the one exposure that was going to be the final image.  The two starting images can be seen below:

The next stage is to layer the two files.  I did this by selecting the whole canvas (ctrl-A) of the darker image (bottom right) and copying then pasting it onto the other file.  You will now have a second layer on the first image, click on this layer in the layer panel and then change the blending mode to 'lighten' (shown below):

Photoshop will now take all the parts of 'layer 1' that are lighter than the background layer and place them on top.  When I did this with these files, other parts other than the lights shone through (as you can see below) and so I had to do some clearing up. 

Thanks for any likes, shares and comments!

Back in June I shot a vertical panorama of Bassett's Cove (Portreath, Cornwall).  The edit was a little tricky and so I've decided to make a post on how I completed the final picture.

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First off, you must make sure that when you are shooting a panorama, you use manual exposure settings and in the first stages of editing (which I will cover soon), the edit on each picture in the same.  If you don't follow these 'rules', it can be very hard, if not impossible to stitch the final image together.

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First Edit of Raw Files

When creating a panorama you are going to be working with quite a lot of files and so, you will want to stay organised.  I personally use Photoshop and Camera RAW for post processing, and to stay organised I give each photograph a star rating.  I was working with two sets of images and so I gave one set (seen below) as 5-star, these were the sky exposures.  I then also gave the other set of images a 3-star rating, these were the foreground exposures.

After organising, you will be starting the primary edit.  I tend to edit the sky images first, I have taken a screenshot of the settings which I have used for this particular shoot.  You can by all means use this as a basis, but make the different sliders work for your own images.  In case you don't know what they do, I will go through them and explain why they are at those amounts. 

To start, you want to just pick one image from the panorama, this means you should find one image that covers most of the aspects of your final shot.  As you can see from the screenshot above-left, the image I chose to edit first included the sky (clouds and sun) and the foreground).  

You may notice that I have circled one of the tabs, this is 'lens correction' and is vital to any image.  It will remove chromatic aberration, lens distortion (important with landscapes and wide-angle shots) and vignetting.  

- The temperature for this image is set to 'cloudy' because, although technically the true white balance of the scene would be somewhere between that and 'daylight', I wanted to accentuate the sunset colours by warming the image.

- Exposure is purely a choice of yours and how bright you want your image to be, at this stage in the edit, I use the exposure slider to balance out the histogram and make sure I have detail over the whole dynamic range which I can then exploit in a later edit of the full panorama.

- To directly affect one part of the histogram (i.e. dark and light parts of the image) use the highlights and shadows sliders.  Usually in a landscape shoot, the sky will be brighter than the foreground and you may not have the right filter to even out the exposure, this is when the highlight slider is useful.  In this shot I have it at -100 to make the area of the sun smaller.  It is hard to explain, but if you try this out with your own images will  you know what I mean.  I have set the shadows to +100, simply to make the blending later easier, this will again become apparent later.

- Next is the whites and blacks sliders, I don't like to play with contrast sliders until right at the end of my edit, but I will use these two sliders to get the best 'looking' histogram before proceeding to the next stage.  Sliding the whites up will stretch the right side of the histogram toward the right edge and you want to stop just before the histogram touches the side, and vice-versa for the blacks.  This basically means that your whites are white and your blacks are black, which is an important part of the edit if you have played with the highlights and shadow sliders (which will flatten your image).  

After you have played with these edits and have the image looking how you would like, you need to sync the other image in the panorama to the exact same edit.  To do this, you need to hold CTRL and select the other images that you have marked as the same star rating (this is why you rated them earlier).  Then click the 'synchronize' button (circled in the image to the left).

Now you want to apply the same techniques to the second set of images.  After this is complete you will have a set of images exposed and edited for the sky and another set of images exposed and edited for the foreground.

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Stitching

Now it is time to stitch, and I although there are a few different ways to get to the final point this is a breakdown of how I do it. 

Open the first set of images (sky or foreground) and go to    File >> Automate >> Photomerge

Click the 'Add Open Files' button.  The settings that you can see in the following screenshot, is how yours should be set up.  The vignetting and distortion control have already been done in Camera RAW, inside the lens correction tab.  Then click okay and wait for a couple of minutes for the stitch.

For the sake of keeping this blog at a bearable length, I have a link to a video which taught me how to deal with wide angle distortion control (click here --> YouTube)

Repeat the process once more and you should have two panoramic images, like shown below:

At this point you may be able to see the final image coming together, and whilst not wanting to put you off, you've just completed the easy part and now comes the blending...

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Blending

This part of the edit is very long and so I thought that I would create a timelapse of the edit from this point onwards.  I could have easily written twice as much as I already have on the next section alone - because of this I will be making a future blog about blending specifically!  

Thanks to anybody who read this (and any other of my blogs), I hope that they are helping in some ways.  I am not great at Photoshop, but am learning more and more - so I'll be updating my blog along with the shoots I do to practice new Photoshop techniques.

Feel free to comment with anything that could help both myself and any other readers.
Thank you!

We heard that it was the perfect time of year to photograph the poppies above Polly Joke beach.  When we parked up there was a field of poppies in front of the car park, but there were already a lot of photographers there and so we carried on walking towards the beach.  I wanted a view over the sea that I had seen from other photographers work.  As soon as we got there I found this spot and got ready to shoot a panorama once the sky was just how I wanted it.  As the sunset was quite strong I knew that one exposure wouldn't be enough, especially with my DX frame D7100.  Therefore I shot one panorama slightly underexposing the foreground and another one exposed for the sky.  Below, I will now go through the process of making the final image.

First Edits:
All of the raw files that go into one panorama need to have the same edit in order for the stitch to look consistent.  With a single row panorama like this, I select the 'centre' (focal centre) of the image and start with a basic middle exposure, in which the ground and sky look okay.  I then use a graduated filter edit for the ground and another for the sky.  This is only thing that changes between pictures, and the only thing I change about them is the position of the gradient (to make sure they both meet at the horizon). For example, below you can see two images in which the horizon is in a different place, therefore I had to move the position of the filters, but not any of the settings.
The two white dots with a line between show the distance over which the filter effects fall off (i.e. graduation).

Stitching:
To stitch the images together open all of them required ones in Photoshop.  Go to: file > automate > photomerge.  Then select 'add open files' and personally, I like to keep it on auto mode and select 'blend images together'.  Then start it and photoshop should give you a very well stitched panorama.  Anything past CS3 seems to stitch very accurately, before that version and you could be pushing it.


Exposure 1:
Metadata:      F/16 - 1/10th - ISO100

Photoshop had some trouble stitching the panorama together and so I had to make two and then combine those two into one final, full length panorama. 

I was very happy with how this came out from just one single exposure, but one thing was annoying me.  On the right hand panorama the clouds leading away from the sun is blown out - you can see that the left hand side of that cloud is just a white stripe.  This is why I took two panoramas with two different exposures. 

Exposure 2:
Metadata: F/16 - 1/60th - ISO100

Here is that lower exposure.  I didn't need to make this panorama the full length, as it was only the area around the sun that needed correcting.  There isn't much to say about this part of the edit. 

Blending:
Now comes the trickiest part, and that is to match the two exposure together.  I have broken it down into a couple of steps. 

 First of all I copied the darker image onto the lighter one and added a layer mask.  I gradient tools to blend the sky down to the horizon, however I must have jogged the camera slightly as the two didn't quite line up.  This meant that where the two images overlapped on the field to the top right of the image, it looked fuzzy.  This took some time to get around but using a paint brush and my graphics tablet I eventually got it to look natural.  As this darker panorama wasn't as wide as the lighter one I had to blend the left hand edge in.  This took another gradient. 

This brought up another problem in that the skies from the two images had a slightly different colour balance. To get past this I duplicated the background and added a layer mask.  I then painted in the area that I wanted to affect (as you can see below) and played with the colours until they looked right.

The last step now was to make global adjustments (for the whole image) in regards to contrast/brightness/saturation.  This is the part in which you get the image to look exactly how you imagined it.  

Here is the final image!  I hoped that you like this blog post and I would love to know if you think I should carry on with this type of blogging (i.e. more tutorial based).  I have another image which I would like to make a post about, it is of the North Cliffs and you can see it in the landscapes gallery.

Thanks for any likes, comments and shares, it's much appreciated!

People often ask me how I made this image:

So I thought that I would break it down it to the several parts which make up the final image.  The inspiration for the image came from a photo I saw a while ago with a water splash coming out of a cup, I then worked around the splash idea.  Without knowing what I was doing it took a long time to complete this project, as I kept noticing small mistakes, mainly the reflections.  So, there are four parts to this image; the splash, the main orange, the small top piece of orange and the orange with the knife in.  The background is then comprised of 2 strips (shown in the bottom image).

There are a few faults in the image, I'm not sure whether you can notice these but I have, after quite a while of looking at it I have.  One way to make the image look more 'realistic' you need to take care with the lighting.  I closed all the blind in my kitchen, turned the lights off from the rooms surrounding and had one line of lights directly above the scene.  I then placed two flashes either side and slightly above.  My mistake here was not using umbrellas instead of bare flashes.  

A lot of the time I get stuck for ideas and realise that I haven't taken any images in a while.  If you find yourself in this position then feel free to take my photo as a basis for your own image project.  It is not wrong to get ideas from others, however do not directly copy the work - and if you do then do not release it, keep the project as a personal piece.  

Like, share and feel free to leave a comment with any questions.  Thanks for reading.