For starters, Al made me do it!
He suggested I start a thread about how I take an image from the field to the final product. I PP in LR and use NIK plug-ins. I am PS illiterate, so those of you that know the PS equivalent steps as we go along feel free to chime in.
Most of you know I shoot mainly nature subjects. Often times there is no setting up a shot but rather fast action with hopes that there is something worthwhile on the card when I'm done. So I thought what might be useful would be to work with images I took at the end of the year in Washington on a shoot primarily for Eagles. This was a challenging trip because it rained most of the time; as I call it, a high ISO trip. Most of the shots were taken from a boat, slowly drifting to get as close to the birds as possible. We were shooting hand held long lenses, in my case a 500mm f4 (81/2 lbs). The challenge was to maximize Shutter Speed while keeping the ISO as low as possible to avoid noise in the image. I shoot in manual to get the most control and will, in my camera, sometimes use Auto ISO. Even if the bird is not in flight, because the boat is moving, a SS of 1/1000 is often needed. One thing I learned, thanks to the pro I was with, shooting low light situations is helped by really pushing the Histogram to the right, that is overexposing the image by 1 stop or more. The image on the camera histogram is of the LCD JPEG file. The RAW image that you will work at home has much more information and if you look at the histogram in LR the RAW image will not be overexposed (or only slightly). Why is that important? If you have an underexposed bird and try to lighten it or bring out the shadows, you will accentuate the noise in the image, more than if you take a bright bird and simply reduce the exposure. But we can get into that more later.
Since it came up in Pat's last post I thought this first part could be on cropping. I used to never crop! But I am way past that now. In fact I will take more of a scene to allow for some cropping. You will have to decide how much is too much. It will depend on the file size from your camera, the sharpness of the image and the lighting. With high ISO from this past trip tight crops only give you more noise.
This may drive some of you crazy, but I rarely free hand crop. In LR go to the Development Module and click the box just under the histogram on the left, or hit R key.
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If you click Auto, LR will try to level the image but there are manual ways to do it also. On the right side of the crop tool you will see the lock and the word "Original". That is the aspect ratio of the image you took. The small arrows next to Original will drop down other choices. I generally use just three: Original (4x6), Square (1x1) and a Pano crop (5x16, that I set up). Why? I print and mat my images. If I use random crops I would be cutting too many different sized windows. In fact I stopped cutting my mats and simply order pre cut mats to fit a 16x20 mat and print the size to fit. Keeps it simple.
In LR as you crop your image you can, if you want to use some guides i: Rule of thirds, Golden spiral etc. (Go to tools->Group Guide Overlay->Choose Overlays to Cycle. You can scroll through these with the O key.)
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I picked an image to start that was underexposed to see if it can be cropped and still "rescued". This was shot at a ISO of 1600. Not to bad for my camera but still will cause some grain. The juvenile Eagle on the snow helped as there was some reflected light coming up on the bird.
The first is the RAW the second the final image.
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That's enough typing for this opening.