Bigger posted version is located here.

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People ask me why do I use camera raw. I tell them because it saves me when the camera is stupid or am I stupid. I did this up as an example to show what can happen. I would not been able to do 90% of this if I didn’t have raw to start with.
For those that don’t know what Raw is – camera raw is a format that contains all the information the camera WOULD use to process the picture unaltered, unmodified, uncompressed. By using the raw file I can do some change exposure and color without much loss of quality. With more radical changes I still can do some techniques to recover.

Okay lets start looking at the process
1) Okay the original picture was taken after 10 minutes I got up literally. Wandered downstairs at 9 AM in the morning all groggy and Duncan was there.

He was a willing subject but I had 3 problems.
The first is my shoe mount on my Canon XSI was finicky it would randomly fail a lot. So flash takes a pain in the ass to get working.
Second for every 500 pictures I take 1 is a flash. You can figure out how much I practice flash.
Third it was 9 AM in the morning

He was patient to a point and I appreciate that and I thought I got something useful little did I know how wrong of a thought THAT was.

Then I looked at it yeah - very very poorly taken. But I felt real bad that Duncan spent a few minutes with me to take the picture in that morning so I figure I would do something with it.


The big problem is the light behind the subject. Not only does that do a nuclear explosion and distraction from the subject but it is also what the camera was using as the light 0. Even with a drop in EV it really was a bad bad bad light. If I was was thinking I would of used a fill light (aka the flash on the camera) or really got my light work.

Step 2 - So I bring the picture into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.5. There are a lot of Camera Raw workflow programs my two favorite for overall use is Aperture and Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. I consider now Lightroom as my primary one - I do not use Aperture unless it's to look at an old old picture.

Why use Lightroom over photoshop and bridge – they both use the same engine (ACR 5.5 in this case). Long story short - Full non destructive editing in Lightroom with a history of every action you take. As long as you edit always in Lightroom it will not make the changes to the picture but keep those changes separate until you export out of Lightroom. This is huge since you can see what you did and come back later to fix/redo a picture if you figure another way to work with it. There are other reasons but that is not something I want wander about today ;)

In Lightroom I built a whole series of presets that simulates the camera white balance and it's camera photostyle like standard, portrait, neutral and stuff. By doing that I can mouse over it and it shows me a preview of what it would look like with those settings. This in most pictures get me 90% done. In this one I am looking for the one that gets closer to what I original wanted which was my camera faithful settings with an auto white balance.

Step 2 Wrong Direction - I quickly did some changes and moved around a few sliders and if I continued with those settings I would of got that as my output. Not exactly what I liked. The colors are just wrong for me – to much reds and pinks. I personally consider it the wrong way. In Lightroom I have an infinite history so i went back to the point where I liked it the most and restarted my editing.

Step 3 – Now I just started to putzs with it. The major things I did in my mind are. Up the exposure a lot more than what Lightroom wanted me to do. Then once the base was where I wanted I upped the fill light of the whole scene. Fill light can really destroy dark spots and shadows in this case that is a good thing. Changed the white balance by hand – making it pleasing to MY eye. I think took an “exposure” brush over the window and killed the exposure taking away it’s nuclear look it got . I also pushed up the contrast and bumped up the sharpness on Duncan himself.

And tada we got a very noisey picture but almost worth something to post. I am very sure that Duncan WOULD NOT appreciate that noisey of balloons ;). So after playing with a few options I outputted that version of the pic.

Step 4 –
95% of my pictures are done in Lightroom. 5% is when I can’t do it I will drop out. This is one of those 5%. Again Lightroom has some decent noise algorithms but not as good as other packages. From experimenting with Lightroom 3 beta I probably would been able to get the effect I wanted from there easily but I couldn’t with 2.5 so I am using a package called Noise Ninja. It’s a stand alone app/plug that help produce some excellent noise damping results. In this case I push up it’s default settings I know it’s going to make things look more “plasticy” but I rather not have noise that is colorful than plastic look. If Duncan looks more like a toy so be it ;)

Step 5 –
Out of Noise Ninja I bring it back into Lightroom. Again I ask myself is this a picture that I like. The answer was ALMOST. At this point I broke the raw workflow. But the next steps I wanted to do after the noise was taken out. So I stack these two images together to and meta tag mark they are the same pictures. Duncan still was stuck in the picture, he’s not the focus of the shot yet. So I did a quick brush stroke on him upping his sharpness, exposure, clarity and contrast any of these 4 would caused some extreme noise patterns. I also dropped his saturation of color – taking out that gashly tints and making him pop out of the picture. Now one last thing - this is Duncan – Duncan has balloons – it’s his trademark. He would be sad if his balloons didn’t pop out as much as him. So I cranked up the exposure, saturation, and a few other things.

And I was finally happy enough with the picture to post it. This process took about 30 minutes. During this time I really just was sitting on IM talking to people while doing this. I personally would of preferred to have taken a good picture first but hey ;)

I hope you found this useful. I prefer to do verbal/demonstrations for helping out and teaching as you can see writing is not my strength here.

Thanks for reading and any questions or comments please ask.

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Update

I had a friend ask about why did I not straighten it out. I had multi reasons but it boils down to it. I tried straightening out and I thought it ruin the crop and also got in the way of the balloons and we all know Duncan == balloons.

Also it drove me up the wall I touched up his ear if you notice in 6 and the final version it's different the final is more dark. I just use a simple "burn" brush to darken it back to make it look much more well dark.

Also tweaked the bow to make it look a lot less plastic to me.

Anyways again hope it's helpful

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I forgot one thing - there is a glow around Duncan that is partly intentional and partly not. With all the algorithms going on it pushed out an edge and distortion are in a few places. If I was doing this as a print or something I would want to take it out. I personally like it in this picture because it helps separate duncan from the rest of the picture. If I was taken it out I would paint with a brush or a clone tool to get some texture. But again I like it for the web like that.

Hope this helps

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Moving out of scraps since people are finding it useful