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.

Facebook image quality

Last month, as we all know, Facebook made some changes to their image handling.

I wrote my initial observations in this post.  In it, I mentioned that my test images were turning out smoother than before, and I thought this was a good thing.

Since then, however, I've seen waves and waves of complaints about how "horrible" the new image quality is.  People keep saying their new uploads are "noisy", "grainy", "oversharpened", etc.  So I had to investigate.

It turns out that Facebook's new compression method is insanely touchy about noise.

If I may quote the great Jerry Seinfeld, from a stand up routine:

I don't want to be in other people's showers.  I don't know how to operate them.  You can never get the ratios right on the dials.  Sometimes a 16th of an inch is a thousand degrees.

Well, Facebook's compression is to noise what that shower tap is to water temperature.  As long as you upload a completely noise-free image to Facebook, the resultant quality is good - remarkably good, in fact.  But if there's even a little bit of noise, it goes CRAZY!  It gets exaggerated out of all proportion.

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.

Update: X-Rite i1Display Pro review

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a less-than-satisfied review of the new i1Display Pro monitor calibrator.

I'm pleased to say that X-Rite's product manager found my review, and gave me a call to discuss it (an international call from the USA to Australia, for which he stole a piece of his family time in the evening, so I'm very grateful.)

I'm even more pleased to say that he gave me the answers I wanted to hear. In my inital review, I said:

Presumably, X-Rite will eventually issue updates to the software which will address all these problems. I hope they don't take too long.

They will, and they won't, it seems.  They will update the software, and they won't drag their feet about it.

I was assured that plenty of other people had expressed my concerns about the software; and that the extra functions are all on the drawing board.  Apparently, they were under a bit of time pressure to get the new product in the marketplace, so they didn't have time to include everything before they launched it.  New updates will be released before too long to include more features.

This is great news.  I'll keep an eye out for the updates, and report on them when they appear.