In my last Underwater Wednesday post I mentioned that I happen to be in the Cayman Islands. For the next few weeks I will be posting images from that trip. This one is a pretty scene along a formation they call the mini-wall out in front of our resort. It is a place where the reef has broken away and collapsed leaving a long ridge with some 20 feet of relief. This is relatively shallow, around 50-60 feet. The main wall in further out and the wall drops off from about 90 feet.
Archive for June, 2010
Double Processing a Single Raw File–Different White Balance
This image is a composite of two different interpretations of the same raw file. One with a cool White Balance to enhance the blues and greens in the sky and foreground grass. The other version is a warm White Balance to enhance the coat of the horse. I outlined the technique for Double Processing a Single Raw File in yesterdays post.
Double Processing a Single Raw File
Sometimes processing raw files is a compromise. For example when adjusting the exposure to make the sky look its best results in the foreground being too dark. There are things that can be done during capture to mitigate the problem. Use of a Graduated Neutral Density filter will darken a sky relative to the foreground exposure. Or taking an exposure bracket sequence and process as an Exposure Blend or as a HDR. But what if we didn’t do these things and the dynamic range is just to too great to have detail in both the highlights and the shadows from a single file? One solution is to take advantage of the “hidden” dynamic range of a raw file and to process that raw capture twice, once for the highlights and again for the shadows, and to then blend the resulting files in Photoshop.
As with most things in Photoshop there are a number of ways to accomplish this. Here is one way that is efficient, relatively quick, and straight froward. Smart Objects are at the heart of this technique. Yesterday I did a post on Smart Objects. So if you haven’t read it, now might be a good time to take a look at it.
Photoshop Smart Objects–What are they?
I started to do a How-to post that shows a technique to Double Process a Single Raw File inside a Photoshop document. Since the technique relies heavily on the use of Smart Objects I thought it would be helpful to explain a little about Smart Objects first.
In Photoshop a Smart Object is a layer that contains a copy of the original referenced Photoshop or Illustrator file. (And yes it does make you file size a little larger but IMHO that a small price for the huge benefits.) From a practical point of view this means that you can edit the version of the file in the Smart Object nondestructively by opening the file in it’s application. For example, if you bring a raw file into Photoshop as a Smart Object, you can re-open the file in ACR and make edits to it. When you do this the original version of the file is not modified. Only the version within your Photoshop document, the Smart Object, is edited. That means that the preview for the raw file in either Bridge or Lightroom will remain unchanged because the edits are not applied to this version of the file. The Smart Object version of the file is independent of the original file. Read the rest of this entry »