I know there are a few guides out there for home processing, some of which were instrumental in helping me get over my fears. All of these other guides seemed to be a little incomplete and that lack of detail made me wait longer than I should have before taking the plunge. In reality, it’s easy to do your film at home. Let me show you!
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When Space Shuttle Endeavour was making low level flyovers of famous landmarks across the United States a couple of months ago, Adobe Lightroom Quality Engineer Ben Warde was able to photograph it flying by the Golden Gate Bridge. The 10-minute video above shows how Warde post-processed one of his best shots from that day using basic Lightroom adjustments. While the information may be basic for many of you, it should be helpful for people who are just starting out with programs like Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, or Aperture.
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Wolfram Alpha has added a new in-app purchase option to its knowledge engine app that brings advanced image analysis and manipulation to iOS devices. The $0.99 add-on allows users to use photos taken on the fly or from their Camera Roll as input. They can then use the app to do things such as analysis, sharpening, edge detection, and apply various effects. You can find a list of available commands here.

(via Wolfram Alpha via Engadget)

I was over at Lake Tahoe attending my brother’s soccer tournament this past weekend, and took this photograph from behind the opponent’s goal:

I corrected a few things in Adobe Camera RAW, and this is the resulting image (hover over it to compare):

The difference isn’t too big. I just corrected a few things, and addressed a tiny bit of clipping in certain areas.

At this point, I wanted the sky to be a little darker and for the clouds to be more dramatic. This is where the luminance tab comes in. All you need to do to instantly make the sky more interesting is drop the slider for aquas and blues. In this case, I decided to drop them both to -50 (I like simple numbers):

Here is what this simple edit does to the final photograph (hover over it to compare):

Pretty neat, huh? Play around with the luminance slider, and you can do pretty interesting things with skies.

Here’s a photograph I randomly snapped on a tennis court a few days ago:

It was taken with my Sony DSC-P200, a 7.2 megapixel point-and-shoot camera released back in 2005. Compared to my Canon 40D, the image quality is much less contrasty, and much duller. One of the things I like to do to quickly and easily improve photos from the P200 is to process the JPEGs in Adobe Camera Raw as though they were RAW files (though it’s less flexible compared to if you shot a RAW file).

In Adobe Bridge, you can right click the photograph and click “Open in Camera Raw…”, or press Ctrl+R.

This allows you to use the sliders and tools provided by ACR rather than processing the JPEG in Photoshop.

For this particular photograph, I made the following edits:

White Balance and Exposure : Unchanged. I liked the warm look of the photo, and the exposure looked fine.
Recovery: +50. Certain areas of the photograph were clipped due to the harsh sunlight. By sliding recovery upwards I can get some of the detail back in those areas (like the glow on the side of the tennis ball).
Fill Light: +20. I wanted to boost some of the shadow areas to make the difference between shadow and highlight less pronounced. Moving recovery and fill light up helps to even out this difference. Careful though… too much of either will make your photograph look either murky or strange.
Blacks: +10. Look at the photograph. There doesn’t seem to be any black, and everything’s gray. Increase the black point to where the darkest of those gray pixels become black.
Contrast: +70. We lost a lot of contrast when evening out the shadows and highlights via the recovery and fill light sliders. Get this contrast back with the contrast slider (or the tone curve section for more control).
Clarity: +30. For photographs with a murkiness due to near-direct sunlight, I’ve found that increasing clarity helps to improve the look of certain areas, like the hairs of the tennis ball.
Vibrance and Saturation: Unchanged. I could have dropped one of them to make the colors more natural, but I liked how it looks a little over-saturated.

Here’s the final condition of these main sliders:

I also did sharpening amount +80 and lens vignetting -50.

Here’s the final result of fiddling with 7 sliders total in ACR (hover over it to compare it to the untouched image):

Using Adobe Camera Raw (or Lightroom/Aperture) to post-process your JPGs is a really quick and easy way to give them an extra boost.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, please leave a comment!

See you all next Monday, when we post an interview with Otto Kitchens.

Happy shooting!