Before & After: South Fork Quantico Creek - Downstream - October 2021 / March 14, 2023 by Todd Henson

It feels like time for another before & after post where I share a little about my process using one photo as an example, stepping you from straight out of the camera to the finished product. This photo is of South Fork Quantico Creek, facing downstream, in October of 2021. It’s an example of an image that didn’t require any drastic editing but instead benefited from a series of small adjustments. All of the processing was performed in Adobe Lightroom.

Straight Out of the Camera

Step 1: Global Adjustments & Lens Correction

Step 1 - Global adjustment and lens corrections — Global adjustments & lens corrections

I most often tend to perform any global adjustments first. These apply to the entire image and included lowering the highlights and whites and raising the shadows. This provided a little more detail, letting us better see in some dark areas and keeping some light areas from getting too light. I also increased the vibrance a bit to help the colors pop.

Step 2: Post-Crop Vignette

I very often apply vignettes to my photos to help draw the eye into the frame. Sometimes I’ll do this manually but in this case I used Lightroom’s Post-Crop Vignette setting to darken the corners and edges just a bit.

Step 3: Masking - Selectively Applying Texture

At this point it was time to start selectively editing specific areas of the image. I wanted the rocks to stand out nicely so I added a little texture, which is a type of contrast adjustment. I didn’t want that applied to softer areas like the water, or to the trees, so I painted it just onto the rocks. You’ll see a pinkish overlay on the areas where I applied texture.

Step 4: Masking - Selectively Increasing Exposure

I loved the greenery under the water and wanted that to stand out so I created another brush mask and painted over those areas, increasing exposure to lighten them up.

Step 5: Masking - Selectively Decreasing Exposure

There were other areas I thought would look better a little darker, so I created a brush mask and lowered the exposure of these areas. This was mostly the rocks but also some areas in the trees.

Step 6: Masking - Another Round of Increased Exposure

I decided that distant rock face was a little too dark so I created another brush mask and increased exposure just a touch.

Step 7: Masking - Selectively Increasing Whites

Finally, I wanted the whites on the surface of the water to stand out to show the motion of the water. I created a final brush mask and increased the whites in those areas. This was more focused than increasing exposure, just increasing the whites instead of brightening the entire area.

Final Image

And that was it. At this point I was happy with the look of the photograph. I’d started with an image I liked and by applying some small adjustments here and there I was able to enhance it into an image I liked even more, that better showed what I saw and how I felt on that day.

Click on the photo below to cycle between the before and after images to better see the results of all these small edits. Any one of them by themselves might not do much for the photo, but taken together they help shape the final image.

BEFORE

AFTER

I hope you’ve enjoyed this small look into my process.

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Before & After: South Fork Quantico Creek - Downstream - October 2021

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Before & After: Foggy Morning on Casco Bay / January 11, 2022 by Todd Henson

It’s been a while since I put together a before & after post where I compare the image straight out of the camera with the final processed image and show some of the steps I used to get from one to the other. Today we’re looking at a photo of a foggy morning on Casco Bay in Maine. It was such an incredibly foggy day many folks might think there was no point in even having a camera out. In fact, one person who saw me photographing this scene asked if I had a special filter on my camera that cut through the fog. 😀 Needless to say, the fog was very much a part of the image, helping to give it a particular mood.

I used Adobe Lightroom to process this image and I’ll show some of the settings I used in the steps below.

Straight Out of the Camera

Here is how the image looked straight out of the camera. Everything is a hazy shade of blue.

Step 1: Convert to Black & White

The first step for this image was converting to black & white. I knew when holding the camera that I’d likely process some of the images as black & white. There just wasn’t enough color in the scene to make much of a difference to me and I was picturing a particular look with bold and dark shades of grey transitioning to the lighter tones at the center of the image. I adjusted the various color channels to shift the shades of gray, though there wasn’t a lot of color in the scene to begin with.

Step 2: Basic Exposure Adjustments

The next step and one I usually do first was that of basic exposure adjustments. I increased the exposure a bit to lighten the overall scene, and increased contrast a touch. I push up the highlights and whites quite a bit and pushed down the shadows and blacks. This is the exact opposite that we might typically do when trying to bring out as many details as possible, such as when processing high dynamic range (HDR) images. In this case I wanted to add to the punchy-ness of the image, essentially lessening the effects of the fog just a bit. I still wanted the fog, but I wanted to assure the boat really stood out. To go along with this I used the dehaze setting to cut through the fog just a bit (there’s the magic anti-fog filter the person asked me about).

Step 3: Graduated Filter at the Top

Graduated filter at the top of the image

I was looking for something dynamic and contrasty. This led me to apply a graduated filter to the sky and use it to darken the exposure, as well as dropping the shadows and blacks to darken it even further. I was using Michael Kenna as an inspiration with this image.

The circle and lines on the image show where I’ve applied the filter. The circle is on the center line and you can see a line above and below. These allow me to control how quickly the exposure moves from darker to lighter with darker at the top and lighter towards the bottom.

Step 4: Graduated Filter at the Bottom

Graduated filter at the bottom of the image

I wanted to really direct your eyes to the center of the frame with the boat and the foggy island in the distance. So I added another graduated filter, this time to the water at the bottom of the frame. Similar to the sky I turned it into a graduated neutral density filter that would darken the water, darker towards the bottom and lighter towards the top. Again, you can see the lines that control how quickly the exposure changes.

Step 5: Spot Removal

I don’t know if you’re able to see in these smaller screenshots, but during the entire process I kept noticing spots on the image. Some of these were sensor dust, something that happens with cameras with removable lenses where dust can get into the camera and settle on the sensor. It appears as little fuzzy spots and can be quite annoying. Thankfully, Lightroom has a handy spot removal tool and all those circles show where I removed a spot. Not all the spots are necessarily sensor dust. Some are other spots I noticed in the scene and found distracting. They might have been debris floating in the water or birds in the sky.

Step 6: Another Graduated Filter on the Sky

Another graduated filter to further darken the sky

When I first started working the image I was really going for extremely bold blacks, so I applied another graduated filter to the sky and further reduced exposure and dropped highlights, shadows, whites and blacks, so the sky went from lighter gray all the way to black.

Step 7: Brush Strokes on the Boat and Island

I wanted to assure the boat and island stood out. These were my subjects. So I used the brush tool to roughly select them and increased contrast in that area by adjusting various settings, like contrast, highlights, shadows, blacks, and clarity.

Step 8: Brush Strokes to Central Region

Similar to step 7, but this time I selected almost the entire central region. I wanted to keep it much lighter than the top and bottom, so I boosted the whites and highlights and lifted the shadows and blacks.

Step 9: More Brush Strokes to the Boat

I decided to bring a little more attention to the boat so I applied another brush stroke, this time lightening the selected area by raising highlights and whites.

Step 10: Going Crazy with Graduated Filters

I kept thinking I wanted very bold blacks so I applied yet another graduated filter to just the top portion of the sky and seriously lowered highlights, shadows, whites and black, further darkening this region.

Step 11: Final Steps for Version 1

Final steps for the first version of the image

Then I applied the final steps for what would become the first version of this image. I adjusted the tone curve, further increasing contrast. I applied profile corrections that correct for any issues with the specific lens I used. And I applied a rather strong vignette, darkening the corners and pushing the upper corners and bottom to absolute black. At the time I though this was the final image.

Step 12: Graduated Filter Tweaks

After letting the image sit for a while I realized I’d pushed the contrast much further than I was comfortable with. So I tweaked the various graduated filters, lessening the contrast by lightening the sky and water so nothing went to complete black, instead maintaining degrees of gray.

Step 13: Another Round of Spot Removal and Final Cleanup

Another round of spot removal and some final cleanup

Finally, I went crazy with cleaning up any remaining spots. I used Lightroom’s features to help visualize spots and I zoomed in to 100% so I could closely inspect every part of the image. You can see I removed a larger number of additional spots of various sizes. I was looking for smooth transitions and found any dark or light specks distracting so I removed them.

Final Image

All of this led to the final image you see above. Click on the image further below to cycle between the before and after versions to better see the full range of changes. As you saw in the steps above, I sometimes go too far with something before changing my mind and toning it back down. Sometimes I do that in a single editing session and other times it’s days later after I’ve let the image sit a while.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at the roads we sometimes travel when crafting our images. There are times we’re almost completely happy with an image just as it is, with only the minimal set of adjustments almost every raw file requires. But other times we have a vision of the scene and have to do a bit more work to realize that vision, crafting the raw image to reflect what we imagine. It can be a very fun process.

Before

After

Foggy Morning on Casco Bay is available for purchase as wall art or on a variety of products at my online store.

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I appreciate your support!

More to Explore

Before & After: South Fork Quantico Creek - Downstream - October 2021

Before & After: Foggy Morning on Casco Bay

Before & After: Portrait of a Green Frog

Before & After: F-22 Raptor Flyby

Before & After: Dawn Reflections of the Washington Monument

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Before & After: Portrait of a Green Frog / February 16, 2021 by Todd Henson

It’s time for another before & after session, where we look at an image as it came out of the camera and see what I did in post-production to arrive at the final image. When thinking about which photograph to use I realized I’ve yet to show a before & after for any form of wildlife, a subject I’m very fond of. So I picked an older photograph I’ve always liked, both for the image itself and for the experience I had creating it which you can read about in another post: Green Frog - The Story Behind the Image.

All of the post-production work for this photograph was done in Adobe Lightroom. And before we get into the processing steps, below is a capture of the image out of the camera showing the baseline settings, including white balance, before they were adjusted.

Step 1: Basic Global Adjustments

I usually work in the Basic tab first. These are global adjustments that affect the entire image. These days I tend to avoid some of the settings in the Basic tab, such as Texture and Clarity, and instead apply them using other tools such as an adjustment brush so they only apply to certain areas of the image. But when I processed this image I was still largely using the Basic tab.

You can see which settings I adjusted, tweaking the white balance just a touch, and increasing exposure and contrast just a bit. I adjust highlights, shadows, whites and blacks in most images (though sometimes only locally), and I adjusted all but highlights here. These settings help affect the contrast within the image, but also control how much detail we can see in darker or lighter areas. I also bumped up clarity a bit to increase contrast, something I still sometimes do, but these day I find myself using texture more often. And I bumped up the vibrance just a bit, which increases color saturation but only to the less saturated areas so it doesn’t go overboard.

Step 2: Adjustment Brush on the Eye

Adjustment brush on the gold ring of the eye

I wanted the viewer to be drawn to the frog’s eye, so here I used an adjustment brush to select the lighter golden ring of the eye and increased both the exposure to brighten it and the saturation to add a little bit of richness to that beautiful metallic gold. The image shows the selected area with a light red mask, which extends around the gold band of the eye.

Step 3: Graduated Filter at the Top

One way to help guide the viewer’s eye toward a subject is to adjust the exposure in different areas causing some areas to get darker and others lighter. Here, if I lighten the background and then darken the top and bottom edges the eye will tend to move toward the darker subject at the center. Above, in the Basic tab, I’d increased the overall exposure a bit, so in this step I created a graduated filter at the top of the image, dropping the exposure to darken the top edge. Because it’s graduated it will begin darker at the very top and gradually lighten further below. You can see this in the red, which shows the masked area, how the red lightens as it approaches the frog.

Step 4: Graduated Filter at the Bottom

And here we add a matching graduated filter at the bottom. Now we have a darker top and bottom and a lighter background that the frog stands out nicely against.

Step 5: Spot Removal on the Neck

This may seem a subtle thing, but the frog had a dark spot on its yellow neck, perhaps something stuck to the neck. It wasn’t a big deal but I kept getting distracted by it, so I decided to use the spot removal tool to remove that spot, or at least lighten it significantly such that my eye didn’t keep returning to it.

Step 6: Post-crop Vignette

Post-crop vignette to dry the eye inward

The last step was adding a post-crop vignette, something I often do to help keep the eye in the frame. This darkens the edges of the image. I’d already darkened the top and bottom, so this will darken those a big more but will also darken the sides and corners.

Final Image

And that’s all there was to this image. Most of my wildlife images are fairly simple when it comes to editing. I want to show the wildlife as close as I can to how it really looked, but I’m also trying to create an aesthetically pleasing image. So there’s a balance I consider when processing. Raw files straight out of the camera tend to be a little dull, lacking in contrast and saturation, so they require a little processing to make the image look real. If you set your camera to create JPEG images you may not have to do these steps as the camera will make those decisions for you, but you’ll lose control over how it’s done. And after that there are also small things we can do to help bring attention to the subject and coax the viewer’s eye where we want it, such as the vignetting, graduated filters and exposure adjustments.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look behind the scenes at how I processed this particular photo. Click on the image below to see a comparison of the before and after images. This will make it easier to see the changes.