Article: Getting the Most Out of Your Reef Tank Photos: Photoshop Processing

[Jessy]

You can view the page at http://www.reefaddicts.com/content.p...hop-Processing

[Gomojoe]

Nice tutorials! It's amazing how powerful photoshop is when you know how to use all the tools!

[Alaska_Phil]

Thanks Reefmatt! I just watched the first one and tried it out on ifanview, it lets you look at the histogram, but not edit there, so I used the brightness and contrast options till I got it where I wanted. I'll be downloading Gimp soon.

First the original image.


And edited

[Jessy]

Thanks Marc! I just watched the first one and tried it out on ifanview, it lets you look at the histogram, but not edit there, so I used the brightness and contrast options till I got it where I wanted. I'll be downloading Gimp soon.

The second image looks much improved. Just wanted to mention that Marc didn't write this article. It was written by ReefMatt... Marc doesn't write EVERYTHING for this site

[Alaska_Phil]

Oops! corrected my post, Sorry about that Matt.

[GoinAcropoora]

This has gotta be the most helpful photoshop/digital photo processing tutorials I've ever seen. I'm a blockhead with computers and these videos really help. I swear, I didn't even know what that histogram was all about before this. THANK YOU ReefMatt. Please keep the tutorials coming.

[ReefMatt]

I'm glad to hear that some of you are finding this useful I've thought about making similar videos for GIMP. Does anyone here think that would be useful? Having just had to deal with the price-tag of the new Photoshop CS5, I can see why most people wouldn't want to put up the money.

- Matt

[melev]

Matt, I always enjoy learning new tricks in Photoshop. GIMP is a free program that others might opt to use, so I'd encourage you to keep up the good work with your tutorials.

I've never used curves ever, so it was informative. I also liked your feathering command as you darkened the borders some. Thanks!

[rEd86]

Great tutorial. Just to confirm, you mention that you loaded RAW format photos - do these techniques only work when you shoot RAW, or do you have more data and therefore get better results with RAW?

I've only overheard the debate of shooting in RAW and discounted it because of the storage requirements. With 32Gb cards are around, I might have to rethink that position given the results of your demo.

--Ed

[ReefMatt]

Ed,

Without getting into all of the details at the moment, RAW files contain a lot more data than jpgs (and more importantly, that data hasn't be confined to a certain color temperature, contrast, color saturation, etc) so they will always give you better results than jpgs or 8bit tiffs, especially when you make the changes in Adobe Camera Raw instead of inside Photoshop. There is a HUGE benefit to shooting RAW, and the files are not outlandishly large... for a 10megapixel camera, a jpg should be around 3 megs (highest quality) and a RAW around 7-8 megs... and considering the cost of SD cards or Compact Flash cards these days, it's hardly worth worrying about. I've shot entire weddings on only two 8G cards.

However, the way that I demonstrated things in the tutorials applies equally to any type of image. You'll get better results with RAW or other 16-bit space images, but you can also get great results with jpgs [In the most recent versions of photoshop, you can actually open jpgs in Camera Raw, but they still don't have the same flexibility as actual RAW files.]

- Matt