I’ve been spending a lot of time setting up a new website where I will host a good deal of images. It will use Zenfolio as a back-end and have the ability to allow for buying downloads and ordering prints. Before that while going through my 1300 or so cruise images I setup a few standard processes for processing images so that they look how I feel they should.
When processing images the way I do, it takes a good deal of time. I always am trying to find ways to speed up the process, but on the other hand I always want to have each image tweaked to my eye.
Here are a few points to my (post) processing process:
- I shoot images in RAW (DNG) format with flat colors.
- I use my old license of Photoshop CS2 on Linux through Wine.
- I recently bought a copy of “Noise Ninja” plugin/standalone software.
Steps for post processing that result in finished full resolution pictures (meaning I don’t shrink these as they will be for my Zenfolio gallery):
- Open a block of images in Photoshop (say 50 at a time) so the RAW converter pops up.
- Go through each image and tweak the colors of the images I feel are worthy of public viewing.
- For some images, straighten the horizon line and/or crop the image a bit.
- Open all of the images in that set into photoshop.
- Apply the first of two actions that I setup on the image to see if it makes the image vibrant enough for my eye and how I felt the scene looked at the time of capture. This action performs Shadow/Highlight correction (say +X% to both), +XX contrast, auto contrast, -X brightness. This action set results in a image with nice virbrant details yet extracts out some shadow and highlight detail I feel should be visible.
- If the action results in a keeper, I continue on, otherwise I backtrack and do manual tweaking of the image from import.
- Examine the image and remove any dust spots or other anomalies using the spot healing brush, or the clone stamp tool if the spot brush has issues. I also make final modifications to overall look and feel with various tools.
- Action 2 consists of auto processing setting in Noise Ninja to remove unwanted sensor noise, conversion from 16-bit to 8-bit, and saving a jpeg in 12 (maximum) quality.
So lately I’ve been going through batches of images with that process in mind. It is time consuming, but I feel it results in the best image possible.