Woodshed
Woodshed | Warwick, NY
Canon EOS 300D | Tokina AT-X 100mm Pro D f/2.8 | 1/320 @ f/5.6 | ISO 400
(Unprocessed image here)
Alas, I have bitten the bullet and bought Photoshop CS3 - a decision made easier once I realized that, as a loyal registered user of Dreamweaver since version 1.0 and every Macromedia Studio package since, I was eligible for a Nice Price ($500) to upgrade to what is now called Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium Edition. This package includes the CS3 versions of Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks (which in my capacity as Der Webführer I needed anyway...), Illustrator (which replaces Freehand for me), a bunch of utility apps like Bridge and Version Cue (which I may or may not ever really use), and of course the chewy center of it all: Photoshop CS3.
I've come to realize that Aperture, even with its improved version 2.1 plug-ins and adjustment tools, won't (nor was it meant to) perform the magic that Photoshop is capable of. This magic, however, is elusive unless one really groks the inner workings of the program. I've been using Photoshop since version 1.5, always knew enough about it to be dangerous, and while I consider myself to be an above-average-dumbass it is still just as easy for me to turn a so-so photo into as garish disaster as it is to improve it. It's high time to dig deeper into the more advanced features which separate it from Fireworks. I bought a couple of Kelby books - The Photoshop CS3 Book for Digital Photographers (I already had the original edition, but that was a little out of date as it covered up to Photoshop 7), and his Seven Point System book. Also grabbed Leslie Alsheimer's Black and White in Photoshop CS3 while I was at it, since this is of prime interest to me as a sensitive artiste...
My goal is to fine-tune my workflow ("workflow" being the buzzword du jour amongst digital imagers) to include Photoshop in the adjustment process, while retaining Aperture as the input (from the camera) and output (to the web or printer) interface for my photos. (I may switch to Lightroom sometime down the road if I see any advantage in doing so, but for now I find the tight Aperture/OS X integration more important to me than the Lightroom/Photoshop integration.)
My first experiment with Aperture/Photoshop round-trip editing is a photograph I took earlier in the day of an abandoned shed along the side of the road in Warwick, NY. The original image is exceptionally average, not very vivid because it was a grey, overcast day without any shadows to make things interesting and contrasty. Using the Tokina 100mm f/2.8 I took three exposures at different aperture settings (2.8, 5.6 and 16). All three yielded nice, well centered histograms; I chose the f/5.6 image as my pick since it was a little sharper than the f/2.8 shot and there was barely any difference in depth of field. Aperture was used for RAW conversion, White Balance and light Levels adjustment giving me a subtly modified, yet still uninteresting image to work with. The Edit With Photoshop CS3 command in Aperture creates a duplicate TIFF file as a working image and opens the file in Photoshop.
In Photoshop, I did an Auto Contrast, then loosely followed Kelby's 7-Point method by applying Curves in an adjustment layer, merging the layers down when I was satisfied. Next, Shadow/Highlight adjustments were done in a Smart Filters layer, then merged again. I converted to Lab Color, applied Medium Contrast to the "A" channel, and finally applied some Unsharp Mask and Fade Unsharp Mask (Luminosity). Bringing the image back to Aperture, I added a small amount of Vignette and did a little more Highlights/Shadows tweaking, reduced the Vibrancy slightly, and set the Tint with the eyedroppers. I tried a few crops at different aspect ratios until I decided that a square format worked best because the background was too busy and pulled attention away from the subject.
I'm fairly pleased with the result, though I may go back and start over once I get a better grasp on what Photoshop is actually doing; right now, it's still pretty much trial and error for me.
posted by Paul @ 11:59 PM
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