Windmill Post Processing

Hello, everybody! Yanik Chauvin here once again. And this is a continuation of the tutorial that I've put down on my blog few days back on the SP800. If you haven’t read it I invite you to click on the link just above this video so that you can go through the steps that I took to take that photo.

Now in sort of like a part two, we’re going to be looking at the flight post processing I did to get the final image. Not much has been done as you can see on the screen right now. This is the final image straight out of the camera and it’s perfect that way as well. But, I just like to boost it up a little bit and bring out some detail so that’s what we’re going to be doing.

Alright, so the first thing we’re going to do is crop the image because we don’t want the flashes in the image itself. So we will select our crop tool which is right here. And we’re going to crop out the flashes. Alright now, I'm going to be looking for square-ish type of composition and we want the windmill to be kind in the middle for this one and that looks about right. So I will do double click and we have our cropped image, so that’s part one.

Now double click on the hand to get the image a bit bigger. Now the next thing I did was to bring out some detail in the foreground here and also here in the shadow areas over the windmill. So to do that, I selected my dodge tool. I made sure that I have a nice big soft brush. You can check it here. Make sure your hardness is at zero and select the size here. And next thing I did was make sure that it was at mid tones and my exposure between 10% and 20%. So 15% is good, so just by clicking and going in here, getting some details in here as well and that looks good and let’s look at the before and after, before and after brings out some detail perfect, so that simple.

Next thing we’re going to do is burn. So at the same place where the dodge tool is, just hold down your mouse button and select the burn tool. Now what we’ll be burning is the sky and why am I burning the sky? That’s a really good question, of course it’s a question of personal taste but also I want some focus to be on the windmill. Now if you vignette in a way the image so vignetting means darkening around the edges. It focuses your eye to the center of the image. So that’s what I'm going to be doing, but doing it naturally by burning the clouds. So as you can see here, the clouds are already dark and just a go through the things again, again it’s a soft brush mid tones and I bring down my exposure between 5% and 10% because burning can be quite aggressive sometimes. So we want to do it in steps, alright.

And we go all the way around, try to follow the contour of the clouds going in and not just a straight line down you can do that a little bit too but try to focus on the lines of the clouds like so. And going in, up here too, going down and you can make this as dramatic as dark as you want or as light as you want. Now of course you can also use the dodging and burning technique that I showed in my previous tutorial on non-destructive dodging and burning and you can do that as well.

But I'm doing it the traditional way here, and that looks about right. And that’s what I did. Let’s look at before and after. So it brings up the drama in the sky and I like that.

Alright, now the last thing that I did was to reduce the warmth here on the windmill. I thought it was just a little too orange for my taste. So all I did was I went into image adjustments, hue and saturation. Now of course, you don’t want to use the master because it will desaturate all the colors in your image and that’s not what we want to do.

It could be nice but that’s not what I want to do. What I want to do is go into the reds or the yellows, it doesn’t matter because we’re working on orange and here you have the scale here. We’re just going to move this slider down to make sure that it does get all the orange in. You see the range here, that’s what we want. Now we can desaturate and as you can see only the orange gets desaturated. Now looking at this, it looks about right. So I'm in minus thirteen saturation I can look at before and after and I still want to keep the warmth there because I want the contrast with the cool sky. But it was just a little too orange for my taste, and click okay.

And there you have it. Just save your image after that and you're done, hope you enjoyed this and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye, bye.