The Biggest Photoshop Timesaver!!!

That title was intended to get your attention. The pendulum has swung in the digital world and many of us now fully understand that spending our lives doing "routine" Photoshop moves is not highly productive. Nobobdy wants to waste their lives in front of a computer. In addition to that fact however, not enough people are talking about how important it is to get an excellent image capture in the first place and how that can impact your workflow in a very big way.

Since the time that Cam and I jumped into the digital world, there have been generations of change in the equipment that we use, that are nothing less than remarkable. It has never been easier to create good quality images. There is a bigger "fudge factor" or safety net available now with higher dynamic range chips and better highlight recovery in software. Make no mistake however, that the path to "excellence" in digital imaging does not allow for loose exposure and white balance readings as well as poorly done RAW conversions. The acid test of your imagery is often size - when you have to make that 30"x45" enlargement, will it jump off the page or will it just lie down flat and be generally underwhelming. I would argue that the latter happens too often.

I am not going to go into great detail about exposure, but I can assure you, without the correct exposure, you will never achieve the best quality print. I understand that there are times when you have to shoot on the fly, but when you have the time, as in an outdoor portrait session, you must take the time to nail that exposure as perfectly as you possibly can. In camera meters work pretty well but the technique and skill in how you interpret their results is more important. For those who want the ultimate in metering, there is a Sekonic meter that allows you to take measurements, analyze those exposures in their software and program into your meter, the exact sensitivity and dynamic range of your chip. It literally doesn't get better than that.

Assuming the exposure is correct, the next major step is getting the colour right. In the early days of my digital teaching classes across Canada, I talked about every piece of the color management chain including profiling cameras. I fully realized that many people would not adopt it even though it created more accurate final images because it was difficult to create an accurate profile and it was very expensive to purchase the target and software to do it. I think it cost me somewhere north of $700 to do this and it would take the good part of an afternoon to make a useful profile. Frankly, it was worth it when I was copying art work for reproduction, but was too cumbersome for day to day portrait work.

Assuming a full out camera profile is cumbersome, the next best thing is to properly white balance your scene. That is, include any one of the many high quality white balance cards or devices that fit over your lens to get a good starting point. Now, because this is a Photoshop blog, I am going to talk mostly about Adobe Camera RAW when I talk about a RAW processor. This is a unique processor in that it uses two profiles instead of one, to characterize a particular type of camera. A profile created for tungsten light will be significantly different than one used for daylight because of the spectral response of the chip. Adobe takes each camera that is introduced to the market and basicallly profiles it for both daylight and tungsten conditions. Then ACR allows you to "slide" between those two spectral planets. The generic profile they create would work if each camera chip of any given make and model were EXACTLY the same, but they aren't. Therefore I would contend that a white balance tool will get you in the ballpark but it won't get you all the way. ACR has a "Calibration" tab which has always bugged me because it is not a calibration, but rather a "Color Profile TWEAK". You are not editing the profile when you change these numbers, but rather you are just tweaking it to suit your camera or your subjective tastes. For example most cameras will be most inaccurate in the Red channel and probably most accurate in the Green channel. Do you think the skin tones you print from your images will be good if your Red channel is inaccurate? Not likely. This is where I used to recommend you tweak your Calibration tab to optimize the performance of your camera chip. By using a standard Gretag-Macbeth or now Xrite color checker chart, you are able to match your color values with the known values of the chart, thereby bringing your camera closer to accurate, thereby reducing post production time. Whew! You do this once and save it as a preset so it applies it to that camera's RAW files each time you import them because the ACR processor can see the tag in the metadata of the RAW file.

This is where I am going to introduce something you may or may not have heard about. It is a new product from the Xrite people. Basically, they have shrunk the industry standard color checker chart into a pocket sized version with a durable case so you can take it out in the field without ruining it. It has a target for a neutral white balance which is nothing new and it has some "flavours" of grey to either warm or cool the capture a little bit - again, this has been done before. What is new is that they supply software that will allow you to write a very fast profile from that scene and apply it to the images you shot at that location or with that particular set of lights! This is where the real power comes in because it is portable, dead simple to use and will be effective. It is called the Color Checker Passport. I think this will be a somewhat revolutionary little device for many of us in our future digital lives because it takes your images so much closer to accurate with so little post production work. I know I "won't leave home without it" in future. We just shot a very large job that was speeded up significantly because of the profile we generated with the Passport.

I had considered showing you results in this post but this has been done in other places. If you are interested, and you should be, have a look at this Utube video by Pixel Genius member Seth Resnick at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V39n1J8IgpA I think it will show you clearly its value. It is priced at around $120 and available at The Camera Store in Calgary.