http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...photoshop.shtml
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...workflow1.shtml
The first link is "quicker". And as for the monitor calibration constantly mentioned in there. It's not AS needed as he makes it sound. If you have the time and money go for it. Otherwise you can work with your photolab to get the image like you want and they'll save the file with the specified settings.
I myself have NO flow, which I should by now. I just tinker so much I never took the time to set up some set of steps. After a while you just see the image and know you don't need every step. Curves is really really nice, but most images won't need it. Then again, if we are talking sky and foregrounds, many WILL need curves. I've been using the burn tool to balance the sky down with the foreground, but that tool has some unwanted effects, like offing the color and burning darker mid-tones(or whatever) too much(but that burn tool is GREAT on a blue sky). Curves so far is sort of touchy, but I see it being the most usefull tool on there(as far as I know photoshop elements does NOT have curves). Always sharpen LAST. Use unsharp mask. Radius I think depends on your resolution. When I go to 300dpi I usually up the radius to 3.0 or more and then adjust the percent as you like(there is no certain percent). DSLRs I guess leave the image soft on purpose to give more control, so expect to sharpen, especially if you shoot wide open and/or don't have a great lense. And nothing makes an image suck quicker then it being oversharpened to where you can see the white outline/halo. I'd rather see a soft image then any of that. Yet I catch myself going too far many times.
RAW is a whole bunch of fun too.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/...pture-one.shtml
The canon ap that comes with the camera for converting really sucks. I don't use it at all except for just converting them to TIFF. I don't adjust them with it at all, which probably ain't the best thing to do, but it's steps are LEAPS and that is all you have...little control. Apparently capture one is good, but reading on there it's $500 just for converting RAW files..lol. Biggest thing to do if you find yourself not happy and ready to spend money is get a better lense if you don't have one already.
I constantly find myself having to adjust selected colors from the kit lense just sucking some serious ass. This is especially true with storms as the cloud you are pointing your cam at is likely in the "low light" department, often rather backlit. A cheap lense will just give you back what it thought was there(this is with center point meetering before anyone comments). So, since I'm down this road. Here is what I do to try and fix any colors you can see in your cloud that you know are off. Go to Enhance/adjust color/hue and saturation. Where it says Edit: Master, go down and pick any ol color and then slide the saturation to 100%. Now look down below in your control box there is a horizontal slider. You can skinny up your selection area. Now you can move that bar around and find exactly what colors are off in your pick....you just focus where the color just looks off and move it till that 100% increase "lights her up". Now you have your bad color, go back to saturation and move the bar as low as you like. Bad lenses will throw lots of fun colors at you and that is one way to tame them back down or remove them all together. One many of my images I have to do that step over and over trying to grab that exact color while leaving near colors alone. Grass is one fun one and the sun. You can grab a selection if something like grass or the orange in the sky is the same as your off color in your clouds(or whatever).
A camera shoots one exposure. Something in every image will be 'off', photoshop allows us to get the images closer to reality moreso then it lets us create fiction. I hate those people who say, "this was shot and nothing at all was done to it"....often film people. It WAS developed though??? With digital we ARE the developers, especially in RAW. And....shoot in RAW, you'll thank yourself later.
Read about the red tables down on this page....
Understanding Histogram in Photography (in Plain Language)
BTW if you are new, everything you could ever want to know is on that site somewhere.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorial...nd_primer.shtml
You know you have gotten good at photoshop when you can bring out an impossible photo, but find yourself not being able to do it again...lol. I'll find I have over sharpened an image or something and saved it, so I'll want to do it over. Then when I go to do it over, I can't. Nothing more satisfying then that....cept being able to do it more then once of course...grrrrrr.
Mike
