This Short Tutorial Teaches You How To Process Macro Photos
Macro photography is an amazing field of nature photography. However, not everyone is capable of shooting awesome macro photos. It requires patience and practice.
This young macro photographer from India is a clever one who is really passionate about macro photography. What he is going to show you here is a short tutorial on how to process macro photos.
Read through the article, check out the beautiful photos and let us know what you think!
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Introduction
Hello, my name is Siddhant Sahu, a 16-year old hobbyist photographer from India. I take photos because I love doing it… and life is too short to do things that you don’t love. Life is like ice cream, enjoy it before it melts!
In this small article I would like to demonstrate how I processes most of my macro photos.
I firmly believe that post-processing is as important an aspect as shooting the photo itself. Although it is definitely worth spending as much time as you can spend on taking the original photograph, it’s often the quality of your editing that takes your photos to the next level.
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Post-Processing
Overview
Most of my processing is just simple editing done mostly in Camera Raw or Lightroom. Both are the same and work great for me. The final step is to render my image in Photoshop and give it some final retouch if needed.
Import and Convert if Necessary
After you’ve transferred your photos from the camera to your computer, the next step it to import your desired photo into Photoshop. Since you listened to me and shot a RAW file, it’s possible that the files are not be supported by the version of Camera Raw installed in your computer, so we can covert the raw file to .DNG which is the file format Adobe can understand no matter which version of Camera Raw you use.
If you need to do this, an Adobe DNG Converter is available free on the Adobe website.
Now that you have your desired photo, which you want to edit converted to DNG format, just import it into Photoshop. Camera Raw will automatically read your DNG files and now you are good to go for your real editing.
Color Profile
The Camera RAW window will automatically pop up. At this point you will be able to see the color profile in which you are processing your image below the window. Make sure that it is sRGB, which is the color profile all the web browsers support and accept across the Web.
If you are on other color profiles like the Adobe RGB, after you render it and upload to the Web, you will see color mismatch in some places. Adobe RGB has greater color depth than sRGB, but it’s not accepted everywhere, so unless you are not printing your image it is recommended to edit in sRGB.
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Let’s Get Editing – How I Handle Each Slider
1. My images are generally a bit underexposed out of the camera, so first I need to increase the exposure a bit while making sure that I don’t overexposed it.
2. Then I also do some subtle changes in “White Balance” (Temp), making the specific changes that work best for each individual image.
3. I usually don’t mess with the “Highlights” slider.
4. I tend to increase the “Shadows” slider so I can pull more details out of the shadows, giving the image a flatter look.
5. Then, while pressing and holding the Alt or Option key, I increase the “Whites” slider until I see some white spots on the image, indicating that the region is overexposed.
6. I do the same with the “Blacks” slider, holding the Alt or Option key and moving it in the opposite direction, stopping when I see some color patches.
7. Then I increase the “Contrast” slider a bit.
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Article Source: Tutorial: How to Process Macro Photos