hello I'm Robin Whalley welcome to Lenscraft today we're
starting something completely different I'm going to be publishing a miniseries
about how I edit some of my photos and this miniseries is going to be slightly
shorter videos published a little bit more frequently the reason I'm doing
this is I've been getting a lot of questions about my workflow on the lens
craft Channel I tend to demonstrate lots of different tools and techniques for
editing photos and the frequent question I get asked is do I use all these tools
and the answer to that is yes I do I only demonstrate the tools that I
actually use but what I don't do is use every tool for every image instead I
pick the best tool that suits the job at hand so the idea of this workflow series
is to demonstrate typical editing I might go through with an image so the
image you can see on screen is the one that we're going to build up over the
next few videos but this is the finished image and it didn't start life looking
like this let's have a look at what the starting raw image looked like as you
can see it's quite different I shot this on the 12th of August 2019 depending on
when you've watching this video that sign for two days ago or a lot longer it
was taken about 10 minutes after sunset the reason I waited that long was
because the Sun was quite intensive as you can see it's over this side of the
frame and I was shooting towards it even with several neutral density graduated
filters on there I couldn't actually expose properly for the ground and the
hills when the Sun was above the horizon so I needed to wait the other thing is
when you're shooting after sunset when the Sun has didn't below had the horizon
it actually reduces the contrast level in the foreground so you can actually
open up and show a nicer image now before we get on to looking at the
camera details and a few facts about the image I want to make a point good image
editing starts before you take the shot you need to visualize how you
want the finished image to look before you start to take the shot if you don't
do that you can't select things like the camera settings the accessories to use
and you don't capture the right image that you can then refine and build
through the photo editing so it's critical when you're lining up to take
your shot stop and think for five minutes about how you want that shot to
look at the end once you've done that you'll find you can set the camera much
more easily so let's look at the camera details if I go into the file info in
Photoshop you'll be able to see information about the camera and you can
see here that it's a fuji film camera it was the xt3 model which is a fairly
recent release and I had a Fuji lens on there which was the 16 255 F 2.8 lens
this lens suffers from being too sharp it can actually make the images look a
little bit unreal and if you look at the heather here it just seems that little
bit too sharp so I'm going to want to soften that later in the post-processing
in terms of the shutter speed aperture and so forth I had f-14 to make sure
that I got a good depth of field and possibly f-14s a little bit more than I
needed but I was just making sure that I did have the full depth of field on this
image now I also have the ISO set to 160 which is the lowest ISO that this camera
produces unless you go to one of the extended ISOs now I don't tend to do
that I usually shoot at the lowest ISO which is the base ISO and I do that
trying to minimize noise and maximize dynamic range in the image capture as
you can see that produced an exposure of not 0.9 seconds so I had to use a tripod
and I had that mounted fairly low so that I would say it was around waist
height to get this shot because I was using the tripod I also
used the cable release to release the shutter now if I'd use my finger to
release the shutter I would definitely have produced some sort of camera shake
and the image wouldn't have been quite as sharp as it is and I also risk
ruining the image just by shaking it so a cable release is an absolute essential
if you're going to be shooting landscapes on a tripod the other thing I
did was use a neutral density graduated filter so I placed the top half of the
filter over here on the sky and I lined it up as best I could on the horizon now
the filter I was using was a case glass filter and it was the soft nd gratz now
those tend to be quite soft so the sky here is just a little bit blown out but
we'll fix that because there's no detail in there and we'll reduce that down
later you can see here that the sky hasn't exposed quite as much because
we're using a wide-angle lens and it's around 90 degrees away from where the
Sun actually is so we need to somehow even out the exposure in the sky here
we've also got a dark patch here whether it's the soft grad was cutting over the
horizon so it probably came down to around here on the image so I need to
lighten these hills here in terms of point of focus I was focusing just here
in the foreground and that together with the f-14 gave me enough depth of field
to get this foreground Heather in sharp focus and the distant hills if I just
zoom this to 100% magnification you can i josu me to 200 you can see what I mean
I've got just enough depth of field there and I've also got a nice sharp
foreground as well with everything in focus
now the camera was set to shoot in RAW format and I do that because it gives me
the greatest flexibility when they come to editing the image the other thing is
I had become Recep to use auto white balance so what it's done is he's made
the image rather blue though I'm not worried about that because I can correct
it in post-processing the other thing I want to do though is make sure that I
have a lot of magenta in the image in terms of assessing the other problems in
the image although the contrast is reduced because I'm shooting after
sunset it's still quite a high contrast image in the foreground areas here so I
want to address that and we'll need to open up the shadows just a little bit I
also want to darken the Heather very slightly just to bring out that perkily
tone in there and as I said earlier it's suffering just a little bit from being
ever so slightly too sharp so I want to create a glowing effect using something
called the Orton effect now I'm not going to use the artifact and globally
you'll see how we do that when I get to that stage of the editing so that's it
for this video in the next video which are published shortly we're going to be
looking at the raw conversion using capture 1 the only question I want to
leave you with do you like the idea of a miniseries if you do let me know in the
comments below I'm really interested to find out what you think and whether or
not this is the sort of thing you'd like to see in the future thanks for watching
Lenscraft and Robin Whalley I'll see you in the next video