Making a Before-and-After

Lately a whole bunch of people have asked me how I prepare my side-by-side before-and-after comparisons, such as the ones I post on my Facebook page.  Eg:

etc.  It's really easy, so here it is.

There are two stages to the process - firstly, getting the before and after on top of each other, and secondly, rearranging them side by side.

Cropping Tutorial

At face value, cropping a photo seems such a simple task that it shouldn't require a tutorial at all, let alone a two-part one.  Yet I'm asked more questions related to cropping than any other single issue.  It can be genuinely confusing for people.

PART ONE: HOW IT WORKS

We all know what cropping does.  It removes part of a photo.  If we had a physical photographic print in our hands, we'd crop it by cutting it with scissors or a scalpel, and throwing part of it away.  In digital terms, we remove some excess pixels from one or more sides of the file.

In all programs, the Crop Tool looks something like this:

Let's discuss cropping in various software ...

Cropping raw files

In Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom (and probably all the other raw programs too), it's really simple.  You have two options - crop to a specific rectangular ratio; or "freeform" crop to any rectangular shape you wish.

Must I calibrate?

I'm frequently asked "My prints already match my monitor.  Do I really need to calibrate?"

The answer is "No you don't, but yes you should."

Obviously, at this point in time, if your prints are turning out exactly as you expect, then there's no immediate problem.  Ultimately, the whole goal of colour-management is to get no nasty surprises when you open your packet of prints from the lab.

But one of the purposes of calibration is to standardise your screen's output from now to the end of its useful life.  This is the key issue here - screens change.  Let's face it, any electrical or electronic device changes over time.  Your toaster won't toast your bread as evenly after a couple of years as it did when you first bought it.  So it is with screens.

The important thing I want to make clear is this:  If your screen is already very good, calibrating it won't make much, if any, visible difference.  A large part of the process we call "calibration" is simply to record a description of the characteristics of your screen.

So we come back to the first point.  If calibrating your screen tomorrow won't change it, why bother?  Because calibrating will ensure that your screen looks the same in three years as it does tomorrow.  And that is peace of mind.

Don't double your editing!

A brief post today, but a very important one.  I need to make something VERY clear:

If you shoot  in Raw format, and edit in ACR or LR, you should never need to do any overall adjustments in Photoshop.  Your overall editing (the whole photo, I mean) can and should be done completely in your Raw program.  If you do any global adjustment in PS (even a small thing like a soft light layer, or a little curves bump), then you haven't used your Raw program efficiently, and you've wasted some of your valuable time.

Photoshop is for selective work - ie layers and masks.  Lightening somebody's face, or greening up some grass, or whatever.  Also, the pixel editing such as cloning, healing, skin smoothing.

If you find yourself having to make overall adjustments in PS, stop and slap yourself, and re-visit your Raw processing.  Time is money, and you should be working as quickly and efficiently as you can.  And that means harnessing the amazing batch-processing power of Raw programs.

There is, of course, one reason to make overall adjustments to your photos in Photoshop, and that's for artistic effects.  Only apply your creative stuff right at the end of your workflow, once the clean processing has been done.