More Extreme Post Processing

Most of the post processing I do on YLF photos is pretty light, like the example I showed earlier in the week. But sometimes I have to do a lot more to get the right image. There was a good example in today's post, so I thought I'd show a quick before and after.

In this case the original was a photo I took to get a sense of the light in Takashimaya, so I never dreamed we'd be using it on the blog. But as it turned out, this was the only photo I had of Angie's outfit that day, so it had to do.

The main corrections were...

  1. Exposure: The camera chose an exposure for the brightly lit display case and not for Angie. I actually over-exposed a little to make the outfit details more visible.
  2. White balance: The original has a yellow cast due to the unnatural light.
  3. Removing noise: Angie is in the dark, noisy part of the image.

The end result looks pretty reasonable, considering.

(If you are reading this post on the forum, try viewing it on my lookfab blog to see a better side by side comparison).

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7 Comments

  • Angie replied 11 years ago

    (And this is us admiring the Food Hall in Takashimaya - one of the reasons to love Japanese department stores. I LOOOOOVE Japanese department stores. They are amongst my favourite places to shop in Hong Kong).

  • anne replied 11 years ago

    OT -I think we bought our wedding rings in Takashimaya!

  • Jjsloane replied 11 years ago

    I am just amazed at what you can do with the images. I barely have time to snap and upload so no wonder mine look all wonky (one tripod leg is shorter than the rest) and dull. Thank you for sharing your innermost secrets Greg - it really helps to know how much work goes into these fabulous images.

  • Diana replied 11 years ago

    Wow, Greg, this is impressive! How did you do the noise removal part? I've never been able to get this amount of post-processing exposure adjustment without getting massive amounts of noise. I'm sure having a really high resolution image from a high-quality camera helps, but even so, I'd love to learn some of your photoshop tricks.

  • Sylvia replied 11 years ago

    How interesting. I never knew you had this separate blog about photos! Very good post processing. What a difference it can make! Do you use Lightroom or Photoshop for post processing?

  • Greg replied 11 years ago

    Diana, I used the standard photoshop "Remove Noise" filter. I used max strength, but set "preserve details" to 10% so it didn't lose all of the fine bits in the process.

    But the key is that I could adjust the exposure on the RAW image. This is a bit of a geeky photography point though, and only applies to people that use SLRs. Still, if you have an SLR and are serious about post production, using the RAW image format is something to look into.

  • marianna replied 11 years ago

    Wow! Super interesting. Well done, Greg.

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