White balance

When you're shooting, you can leave your camera on Auto White Balance, or you can choose one of the WB presets in your camera, or you can do a Custom WB using a grey card. In each case, it may or may not be necessary to make further WB adjustments to your Raw files once you get back to your computer. I have no opinion about your white balance method - do whatever suits you. All I wanted to mention is that there is no difference to the quality of your Raw data, no matter which method you choose. Whether you use CWB and get it exactly right, or AWB and get it wildly wrong, and have to correct it later, the end result is exactly the same. Your camera captures a finite amount of data on its red, green and blue sensors; and that data is set in stone. The white balance setting is merely an additional piece of information which is used to interpret the Raw data. So choose the white balance method which suits your own workflow, and be happy in the knowledge that you aren't making any difference to the quality of your Raw files.

The non-destructive workflow

The layer-based non-destructive workflow is seen to be the goal of the skilled Photoshop operator. In truth, it is sometimes difficult to achieve for every image, but a lot of the time a non-destructive workflow is possible, and powerful. I would like to explain it in very broad terms here. (Wiser folk than me have written wiser words than mine, so I would encourage you to search for further information if this overview sparks your interest.) I'll begin by saying I don't like the term "non-destructive workflow". To speak of "destruction" makes it sound like something catastrophic is going to happen to our image! Of course that's not so. And I simply think that it is not an apt description for the intent of the workflow, which is to allow us to infinitely re-edit our image as we see fit. The power to change our minds about any of our previous adjustments, without having to start all over. I would prefer the tag "reversible workflow" or "flexible editing" or something like that. However, for the sake of simplicity, I'll persevere with the title of "non-destructive editing" for this post.

A tip for watermarking

This article has been removed, because it has been superseded by this: http://www.damiensymonds.com.au/act_web.html

Screen and Soft Light blend modes

A friend wrote to me and asked my opinion on the use of Screen and Soft Light layer blend modes for editing. Not surprisingly, I have an opinion, and a firm one. Screen mode is habitually used to lighten an image (or part thereof), and Soft Light mode to add midtone contrast. I don't consider them terrible. Neither one introduces channel clipping, so they're certainly not dangerous; so if you like using them, I can't rightly stop you. However, I find them very clumsy and arbitrary, and they don't provide as much control as alternative methods.

Softening hard shadows - Method 1

Many thanks to the lovely Merisa Coertze for allowing me to use her photo for this demonstration. Here we have a cute photo of boys being boys. And bright sun being bright sun, there are some very hard shadows on various parts of the photo. Photoshop gives us dozens of ways to perform any task, of course, so here is just one method for softening these shadows a little.

Using Noiseware Community Edition

Noiseware Community Edition is a handy free noise removal program from Imagenomic. It's available for download on this page (the very last link). Unfortunately it only works on PC, which is disappointing for Mac users, but Imagenomic's other products are cross-platform.
The Community Edition is a standalone program, which means a bit of fiddling in your workflow, because you have to leave Photoshop, run the noise removal, then return to Photoshop. If you do a lot of noise removal, you'll probably find it worthwhile to pay for one of the Photoshop plug-in versions (available on the same page).
Noise removal can be done at any (chronological) point in a non-destructive workflow - you can do it first, or last, or in between. What's important is that it's done on a layer immediately above the Background layer, underneath all of your adjustment layers.
For this tutorial, I will discuss using Noiseware as the very first step in the Photoshop workflow.
Of course, this tutorial only applies for jpeg files.  If you shoot raw (and you SHOULD) use the noise removal sliders in your raw program.

Damn you, Dynamic Contrast!

Today I was calibrating a Samsung monitor for a lovely lady here in Brisbane. I ran the calibration/profiling, and was immensely satisfied with the result graphs that the i1 provides at the end of the process. Thinking all was well, we proceeded with some Photoshop work. I was appalled to see the first black-and-white image that we opened - it looked strangely pink! And the next one was, too. And some colour images had a less-than-perfect hue to them as well.

Calibration "before-and-after" confusion

At the end of a monitor calibration, most calibrators allow you to see "before and after". The two states are often very different - eg very cool vs quite warm, or whatever.

Some people mistakenly think that this is comparing the previous calibration with the new one. Because the difference is so great, it makes people say "Gee, I should have calibrated sooner! It was way off!!"

Relax. What that before-and-after is showing you is the new monitor profile vs the completely unprofiled state. It's not comparing last month's calibration with this month's calibration.

The truth is, modern monitors don't drift much, and there will be very little (if any) visible difference between monitor profiles from month to month. If you accidentally let your calibration go for two or three months, you shouldn't be doing your images much damage, if any. In the old days of CRTs, it was a different story - those things drifted like rafts.

However, I hasten to add - if you're doing work that requires a critical level of colour accuracy, you'd be careless not to calibrate quite frequently, just to be sure.

A bit about soft-proofing

What is soft-proofing?

It's how we can see what our prints will look like, before we print them, by simulating the print colours in Photoshop. (I'm not sure if Elements can soft-proof, and I don't know about other software either. I'll just be talking about Photoshop here.)

How accurate is it?

If it's done well, it should be very accurate. There are a few factors which can cause variance (not least of all the ambient lighting in which you work), but as long as you have a little tolerance, it will serve you well.

When should you soft-proof?

I guess, strictly speaking, you should do it every time we prepare an image for print. But in reality, it's only important when an image has bright colours that you suspect might be too bright to print ("out of gamut"). After you've used your monitor and your lab for a while, you'll get an instinct for the "endangered" colours.

Great little disk cataloguer for PC

Eventually, all my files end up archived on DVDs. A few years ago I was laboriously typing summaries of each disk into an Excel document, so that I could find files again if I needed them. What a hassle! Then I came across a terrific little app called "Cathy". It's a free download from the developer's site here (towards the bottom of the page). It's simple, fast disk cataloging software. Immediately you burn a disk, you just run it through Cathy, and she takes a comprehensive record of all the files on the disk, and adds it to her library. Then, it's super-simple to search the catalogue for keywords, or dates, or whatever, and Cathy shows you which disk/s contain your files. If you don't have a system like this to track your archives, I strongly recommend one.