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High Quality Manipulation Techniques with Photoshop CS-4 Raw

The Video runs for 40 minutes

This tutorial follows the manipulation carried out to the image below, which is presented here straight from the camera without any work being done at all. The image has a lot going for it, but it is weak. The sunset wasn't one of those that developed into the glorious colour we had hoped for, but then you win some and you lose some. However, we shot this image on a high resolution camera, so we had lost of pixels to work with and we also show the image at the Raw setting.

So what did we need to do to achieve the image below? Opening the image in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), we used all the skills we had learned about how to add the impact and appeal back into this image. This also had to include the colour too and we used many different tools in ACR to achieve this. Although we are often told Raw is a lossless way of manipulating our digital images, there are still limits. When we try to change an image and go a bit too far with the ACR slider controls all can look well at first glance on our PC monitor. However, look at the image much larger and some of the negative sides of such an extreme manipulation start to show. Excessive pixels showing in the sky is one example.

Here we also use Smart Objects, layers and many of the tools in ACR to get our basic image right. This includes dealing with a Chromatic Aberration problems where we can either get rid of it on the left of the tower or the right, but not both sides together. Well, we cannot accept that and use layers techniques to deal with both.

Then we take a look at those things we can get right in the main Photoshop Screen. People sitting on the wall spoil the image and need to be removed and the people walking back from the tower make a much stronger image if they were walking towards it, so we need the skills to do that too. It is not always easy to get a perfect result and one that would stand the test of a large print to a size around 24*18 inches. What we mean by a large print test is that, what we can get away with on screen, we will often not get away with on a large print. So, all of our Photoshop work should be done to large print standards, whether it is our intention to print the image or not. For example, if you wish to submit work to an image library, they will be extremely fussy about image quality and would not accept anything less than a perfect image. Besides that, it is just good practice to achieve the best result you can every time, as you never know when that image does need to be printed large. In our detailed video we take you through our manipulation start to finish.

Download our readme file HERE