ABA Creation

Sounds so Simple?

Every thing seems to be very simple, yes I know any photograph needs a finishing touch but here I am talking about the photograph with a bad exposure and making it extraordinary image, on our editing table with some tricks.

You’d think why I should bother about editing rather I’ll make sure, my camera exposure setting is right. Yes you are right, I also thought like you, until I clicked this image and edit it on my computer. Just think, we take loads of photographs and at the end of the day we have thousand of photographs looking nice on our camera screen, but when we go to the editing table, we delete 100s photographs after every photo shoot, because they are not reaching our expectation. In photography it is said that we have to be as lucky as skilled.

So luckily you have some good photographs but exposure is extremely bad, almost black as you can see in the given image, what you’d do? Yes this is very frustrating. But here is your second opportunity. I think we should not delete the photos blindly, may be there is some photographs which can be edited and who knows it could be your photo of the day. So picking that photo, from your all thousand photographs, is obviously not simple.

Playing with editing tools:

When I was on assignment to cover Indian festival ‘Holi’ I just clicked this image accidentally while traveling, without bother about exposure and almost forgot about this image and after finished my assignment, I started post production process, this was looking horrible when saw this photo on my computer screen  and the first word came into my mind was ‘waste’, but at the same time I liked the composition very much, the way train moving in the image and I noticed there was no disturbing element like electric wires and poles present there, I felt like this was the man made marvel in between the beautiful god made nature. But the lighting was as poor as you can see in the original image. Normally I delete the bad images immediately but that day I decided to repair this image and started paying with tools. After some experiment and adjustment, got this result you can see in second edited photo.

So when I completed my work it was a great feeling to see this image in large view on my computer.

How I edited this image:

When I was editing this image, one thing that I was clear about was, I don’t have to aggravate with the originality of the image. I was just trying to enhance the image, not only this time but I always do the same.

Which software is used? I love both, the Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom equally. For this image, I used  Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Photoshop as well.

First I tried to fill light with the fill light tool and increased it until it looks clear. You can see in the image it is about 85, I also increase little bit exposure up to +0.80. I used some negative tint to enhance sky color.

Then I adjust the Hue, luminance and saturation (HLS) until it looks good as you can see the given reference image. These are the basic tools I played with and give this ordinary damaged photograph a Wao factor.
If you think any another photo editing software like Photoshop can more enhance your photograph, don't hesitate to use it.

Quick Note:

High ISO values allow you to shoot with fast shutter speed to achieve optimal exposure with given aperture. High ISO also allows you to shoot under low light, but at the same time it also produce grainy image and reduces the quality of your image. Low ISO setting produces high quality images but limit the use of higher shutter speed. Choosing ISO value is all depends on under which circumstances you are photographing and how much you can compromise with the quality of your image. 

In the above Image, you can see clear grains  photograph at high ISO setting i,e. ISO 6400 while the another image ISO 100 have no grains and have better quality. The shutter speed for the Image ISO 100 and ISO 6400 was 1/160 and 1/25 respectively.

the light enters and vice versa. If you want to see how it works just stand in the front of the mirror with a torch in your hand, light the torch direct in your eyes, now slowly get the torch off your eyes and towards your eyes. What happens? The pupil of your eye shrinks small to control the amount of light enters into your eye, when you get torchlight directly into your eyes and when you remove torch off your eyes the pupil shrink large to allow more light to enter. The same thing happens with your camera and when you use manual mode you control this yourself.

Actually, the question is how you want it to? everything depends on the type of photograph you want to capture. If you are photographing landscapes(pic-1), you need to set larger f-stop number(smaller aperture opening) and while taking closeups you may need to set smaller f-stop number(larger aperture opening). This is called depth of field(we'll discuss this topic in our later post). If you want your subject to be in focus and everything out of focus(pic-2), then you must set smaller f-stop number(larger aperture opening), and if you want to make everything in focus then set larger f-stop number(smaller aperture opening).

Pic-1 Shutter 1/125,APERTURE f/11 ISO-100

In pic-1 I need short depth of field and want everything the background and foreground in focus, so I set the aperture f/11, actually when taking a landscape photo, it good to be above f/11, though f/11 worked for me here. You can set the aperture at f/14 and above.

Pic-2   Shutter 1/250,APERTURE f/5.6 ISO-100

In Pic-2 you can see the foreground and background are out of focus and extra depth of field is used.You can achieve this result with smaller f-stop number (larger aperture opening). I use f/5.6 but don't hesitate to go with more smaller f-stop number(larger aperture),f/1.4 or f/2.8 can also create magic.
There is no hard and fast rule, just believe in yourself and do what suits you. All will comes with practice, the best way to learn anything.