Work Flow Red Tulips

I've been asked a couple of times to go through my work flow for flora stacks. So here goes.

Terri had brought the tulips in yesterday planning for me to shoot them over the weekend. (I took a day of vacation today.) I want to do some scans of them but thought I'd try a portrait first. For the portrait I wanted to start with a sharp image, so that meant I'd be doing a stack. This time of year I get the best light for stacks in the morning. This is northern light. The light is coming in from a sliding glass door but I've put a diffuser on the chair to block the direct light hitting the vase. I'm shooting against a wall covered with black cloth that Terri has dragged in and hung up for me. The table is an old beat up mahogany that I've used for thirty years to tie flies and do fletching on.

Here's the result of the four image stack out of Helicon. The Leica doesn't interface electrically with the Sony A850 so I open the lens wide to focus and then count the stops as I turn the aperture control ring on the lens. This is about half way, so I'd guess I'm shooting at around f/11 which is a sweet spot on the Leica 60 mm macro. (I converted the lens to physically mate with the Sony using a kit I bought on the web from Spain.) I do this each time as I turn the focus ring to create the four images for the stack.

I want to emphasize the textures in the tulips, so I go into CS5, open the NIK sharpening product and set the textures slider to what I want. I then create a brush and brush on the texture for the tulips and the greenery above the vase. I don't want to emphasize the speculars or texture in the glass so it doesn't get any sharpening at this point. I now save the image into LR and crop it there.

Thank you Pat for the wealth of information on your work flow!

Next, I take the image back into PS. I bring in a silver metal texture that I created (it's very similar to the metal textures in Alien Skin) and layer it over the image using the overlay mode in layers. That probably increases the brightness by a couple of f/stops. I then select the low key filter in Nik's Color Efex Pro and crank it up to about 60 percent effect, with 100 percent glow but about 25 percent saturation. I flatten the layers and save the image back into Lightroom 3.

Now it's ready for the final work in Lightroom. I use gradients to darken the vase more but a separate gradient to brighten the bottom of it and the flowers. I work levels, contrast, expousre, brightness, the red, orange and yellow color luminosities. I tune the white balance for what I want. I do this iteratively until I like the final image. I then take it back into PS and clone out anything I don't like. In this case all I saw was some dust on the table and I got it. I save the final image back into LR. Frame it in PS and in this case used Andreas Resch's sharpening utility when I created the jpegs.

I've omitted some details but this is the basic process I used for this image. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.

pat

Thanks, Pat, for sharing your process with us. Your various selections and knowledge are vast and it shows to me how "uninformed/ignorant" I am with my own post processing. So much to learn...continuing education!!!! Thanks

Wow, that's some serious work, with a great outcome! Question: a few times you go into LightRoom to do several tasks, and from what I read, those seem kike they can all be done in Photoshop. Since you're already doing edits in Photoshop, can't you just do everything in there? I don't know a lot about LR but I'm asking in case there's some great features I may be missing out on. Thanks!

Paul,

PS has never felt natural to me or intuitive to me. I started with Aperture and then went to Lightroom when it became available. So Lightroom feels a lot more comfortable to me. I doubt that there is anything in LR that can't be done in PS and there is considerably more that can be done in PS than in LR. I just pefer the LR interface. I still go to PS though for layers, cloning, some dodging and burning, Orton effect and pretty much all my plugin filters (even though most are available directly from LR) I've tried to make myself learn more PS over the past four years but most things just seem easier to me done somewhere else.

I love LR and the NIK suite.

pat

Hi Pat:
Thank you for going through this step by step. Your meticulous work is reflected in all the beautiful images you produce.

You started with an image in CS5 - did you do the RAW conversion in ACR or LR first?

I don't have LR but I have Aperture. I don't like the interface in Aperture much so I have not used it much. Is LR and Aperture pretty similar?

Looks like I might have to get Nik Suite instead of just Viveza which I bought about 3 months ago. I should have bought the suite but did not think I would have much use of the other modules (duh!).

Glad you get the results that you want.

Gary,

I do the conversion from RAW in Lightroom. Sorry I should have spelled that out. My first step is to import all my images into LR.

I haven't used Aperture now in about three and a half years. Aperture and LR have similar functionality except for gradients and the color luminosity sliders. I don't think Aperture had either when I was using it. I use the gradients and the color luminosity sliders all the time in LR. I also prefer LRs levels control to that in PS. It all seems simpler to me.

I don't use the NIK suite that much but I always use some aspect of it. When I'm doing avian and landscape I can pretty much do the whole thing in the NIK suite. For avian in particular it's rare for me to spend more than 15 mins in PP.

pat

Pat : first, thanks so much for sharing all of this.

My question is whether this process should largely be a logical or an intuitive one. I find ( with Aperture 3, Viveza and now Color Efex 3 ) I seem sometimes to be swapping around more in hope than expectation ! So I wonder if there is a best, most logical order to tackle post processing or do you find each image requires its own, more intuitive response ? ( the only thing I have read on this is to do the sharpening at the end - which I find rarely works, as you often see something else that needs adjusting after you've done any sharpening ! ).

Ian,

I don't have an algorithm for it - It's practically all intuitive. In broad strokes, I'm trying to control texture, color, exposure and to a more limited extent image content (things I want to eliminate). The problem is that these variables with the exception of content are non orthogonal, they interact with each other. If I increase texture using the sharpening tool, the exposure is also increased slightly and that means that the colors become less saturated. And of course, the limits of the changes I can make are dictated by the amount of noise in the image.

I start with texture first because texture control is probably my first design decision in making the image. If I want to see fine texture throughout the image, I'm going to do a stack. If I wan't blurred areas I may still stack but I'll skip the initial texturing step in my workflow, I won't introduce contrast into the image via a layer or the Mr. Contrast filter or the NIK texturing filters. If I'm going soft I'll probably try the Orton technique or a gaussian layer just to see what they look like. So I guess the logic portion of the process for me is a decision before I ever decide what technology I'm going to use as to whether I want to allow blur in the image. Since I've already made that decision by the time I get to post processing, it drives the rest of my workflow. Of course I may change my mind if I see something in post processing that I hadn't expected and that I like or dislike for that matter.

I love the post processing. So long as I just don't do stupid things when I shoot the images. The image is a necessary but certainly not sufficient condition for the result I want. It obviously takes on more importance in wildlife and avian work but even then the post processing is a critical element in the result.

Thanks, Pat ! That all makes a lot of sense. I like the notion that, while intuition plays the major role, there is a place for logic. That's very helpful in starting to work with unfamiliar software.

I love hearing about other workflows! I have just started working with the Nik suite a few months ago and am now finally starting to understand what they're all about. I flip between LR and PS also, Pat. Some things are SO much easier for me in LR, but, like you, I use PS for all my cloning.
Thanks so much for sharing!!

Pat, thanks for all the time you put in to show us what you do! (And as Moderator, also).
Tutorials like this are invaluable - I hope this one will become a permanent part of the "Instruction" Archives here.
Sandy

You're welcome. I'm glad you found it interesting.

pat

Nice image, Pat.

I wonder why you bounce from LR to PS and back a few times, when PS surely has all the stuff you need in it. Also curious as to why you are stacking. I make images like this and simply stop the lens down appropriately to get the dof I need for one exposure. There is not that much dof required.

Jeff,

I don't care for most of the PS interface. LR seems more intuitive to me and I can work faster in it. I do what I have to do with layers in PS but then prefer to work in LR. A move either way rarely takes five seconds.

I do the stack for several reasons: The stack has significantly less noise and holds up better under the post processing I do. It lets me shoot at the sweetest f/stop on the lens I'm using and that helps me get the most detail out of the image. It lets me control the dof past the subject to more effectively isolate the subject.

pat

Thanks Pat! Your work sharing your workflow is appreciated almost as much as what I learn from your images and critiques. I like your Lightrroom tips because I have not bothered to use it much for image processing, after taking over 25 years to get used to PhotoShop. I find PS and ACR to be more precise and reproducable for some operations. I suppose there are many ways to accomplish the many tasks, and it's good to see what works for each of us. In the end, it's the artist's vision that determines the outcome more than the tools we use. (That's why I still keep trying to learn from looking at your images, as I noted above, but learning about the workflow is very helpful, too.)

By the way, even though our software history is different, we are alike in another way: I also have spent many years tying flies and doing fletching. My wife still complains about the smell of burning turkey feathers, years after she kicked that part of the process outdoors.

P.S. Hey, I just noticed you started this thread two months ago. I still have no idea why it just showed up at the top of my list on the screen, but I'm glad it did.

Thanks Wayne.

The smell of burning turkey feathers. It's been a few years. That brought back some good memories. (smile)

pat