This workflow video is to demonstrate how I would edit this image that was shot by Liz Atkinson.
Now, Liz had attended a workshop that I'd run on the 19th of April here in Melbourne on capturing the fourth dimension,
the essentially long exposure photography, and she shot this image at Flinders Street Station
when the sun had well and truly gone down and there was a lot happening.
Liz's key concerns were that the facade of Flinders Street Station was blown out,
and after having a conversation with me on Google+, I volunteered to show her how I'd go about editing this image.
So, starting from the RAW file that you provided me, I'm going to go ahead and open this in Adobe Camera RAW.
Now, there are a couple of things that I do notice. Flinders Street Station is slightly off the horizontal.
There's a little bit of perspective distortion. You can see that the Arts Centre spire is leaning in,
and this is definitely blown out, so we're going to deal with each of these issues.
So, we'll start off with lens corrections. I'm going to go ahead and enable the lens corrections.
It hasn't been able to find what the lens is, so let's see.
She was shooting with a Nikon, and there we go. It's picked the lens out fairly well.
Next, moving on, I'm going to go and remove any chromatic aberrations, and that ought to find all the details automatically,
and then we're going to use the basic adjustments.
The first order of business is to find a white balance that works best for this image.
Now, you can go and try each and every one, and this is subjective.
It depends on what your tastes go. Now, I've looked through all these white balances,
and I've decided I'm going to go with fluorescent. It gives it a little bit of punch, but it doesn't make it look too cold.
Now, we've got this part of the image that's really blown out, so we know for a fact that there's a lot of excess exposure,
and there are way too many highlights, so we're going to fix all that.
So, let's start off with the highlights. We're going to take the highlights and crank them,
or if we crank them all the way back, we see that we're losing a lot of detail.
So, let's start off at about negative 50 in the highlights,
and I'm still not going to do anything with the exposure just yet.
I'm going to play with the white and black points.
I'm going to hold down the Alt key, grab the slider on the whites,
and I'm going to start pulling it back until I get just a few areas which are highlighted,
and that's going to be my white point, which is negative 92.
So, the image was well and truly overexposed, but that's not a big deal.
Likewise, we're going to do a black point adjustment.
So, once again, we're going to hold down the Alt key, and we're going to drag the black slider up, up, and up,
and it doesn't look like there's a whole lot of change happening, so we're going to go backwards
and see at what point we start getting as much white as possible.
And, well, it's coming up pretty much in zero, so the white point looks like it's all right.
So, we don't have to play too much with the white point.
Now, let's look at what we can do with the shadows, because we've pulled back all the highlights.
If we look at the shadows and we crank it up, it's going to brighten the image an awful lot,
which we probably don't want to do.
Let's pull it back, and once again, not too far, but negative 10.
It's about right.
Next up, we've got to make sure that the image is horizontal, so we're going to use the straightening tool.
Now, I'm going to start from the crest of the street station, and I'm just going to pull this downwards.
And I want to make sure that that line is parallel to the vertical areas in the arch,
and that looks about right.
So, you can see that that image was slightly off the horizontal.
Now, let's fix that.
We're going to just crank up the vibrates just a little bit, not much, 10, and the saturation just by 10.
We're going to go over to the Detail tab and crank up the sharpness to 100.
Now, this is going to make the edges look nice and crisp.
We still haven't been able to resolve these areas being blown out.
So, next order of business is to apply a couple of gradients.
To start off with the Gradient tool, click on that over there, and I'm going to start with a gradient running from the top to the bottom.
So, I'm going to click, hold down Shift, click, and drag downwards, and I'm going to let it go all the way down.
So, my gradient settings over here, I've decided that let's first reset everything.
So, I'm just going to go ahead, double click everything, and reset all the settings over here.
So, what I've decided I'm going to do is that I need to pull back on the highlights over here.
So, I'm going to pull the highlights back a little bit more.
The Exposure, that's the tricky bit.
So, let's go ahead and pull the Exposure back a little bit.
Nah, not too much.
Probably keep the Exposure at negative 25.
Now, let's see what we can do with the Shadows.
If I was to go ahead and crank up the Shadows, it makes that part look a little bit too washed out.
Let's pull it back.
Let's go to about negative 8, 10, negative 10.
So, brought out some balance.
That's made everything look a little too dark.
So, let's see if we crank it up a little bit.
That's too far.
We'll leave it at 0.25.
Now, we're not going to mess with any sharpness or noise reduction,
and we're not going to do too much with the temperature.
We technically could. We could pull this back,
and that would put a bit of a blue tinge onto Flinders Street Station,
but we don't necessarily want to do that.
So, I'm just going to leave that as it is.
So, that's our first graduated filter going from the top to the bottom.
And all we've done is that we've pulled back on the highlights.
We're going to add a new one.
So, click on New.
Then, once again, grabbing the Gradient Tool.
This is a little bit tricky.
Probably want to take that first and just move it up a little bit.
Get the second one, click, and drag upwards.
And what we're going to do over here is we're going to,
once again, pull back on the exposure.
So, give it a negative 0.67,
just to make that part look a little bit darker.
Keep the highlights normal.
Keep the shadows.
Let's see if we can crank the shadows up a little bit.
We don't want to do that, and we don't want to go too far back.
We'll keep the shadows at negative 10.
What happens if we pull the highlights back?
It gives us a little bit more definition.
Probably negative 50 is just about right.
We've got two graduated filters, one from the top to the bottom,
the other one from the bottom to the top.
It's brought a little bit more definition in.
We still have that facade that's blown out.
Now, to fix that, we're going to have to use the adjustment brush.
I'm going to take that, and you'll see that the brush has got two borders,
one that's dotted and the other one that's solid.
Now, they show the edge of the brush,
and I can increase or decrease the size using the square brackets.
But the dotted area is what encloses the soft edge of the brush.
The solid area encloses the hard edge of the brush.
So, we're going to use this particular brush.
I'm going to use it for something that's too small,
probably about 8 big.
You'll notice that I've got the exposure set to negative 0.67.
I'm going to pull the highlights all the way back.
I'm going to keep the shadows zero.
With those settings, I'm going to go ahead and just paint over this area
that I need to fix.
You'll see that that automatically reduces the overexposure on that area.
We might need to do some more work on this, but this is a good start.
Let's just paint over this area.
Once you're done, just let go of the mouse.
You'll see that there's a little pin that shows up.
If you mouse over, you'll see that that's the area that's been painted over on.
This is when we can actually decide to play with the different settings.
Let's take a look, starting off with the highlights,
and see how much of an impact that's going to make.
You'll see that when we get to negative 30, there's still an impact.
Negative 55 is an impact.
But beyond negative 55, there's not much happening.
We'll just leave it at negative 60 just to be on the safe side.
Let's see what we can do with exposure.
If we let it be normal, it's still blown out.
Let's try negative 0.33.
It's brought back some detail.
It's still blown out, but we're getting some amount of detail out there.
Let's crank up the clarity and see what we'll get.
Brings in some amount of detail.
What we might do is crank up the clarity to about 60.
I'm not sure that the saturation is going to do very much.
It might make it too colorful.
If we really saturate it, it could actually work.
Let's go with the full saturation.
We've gotten to a point where it's getting to a point of being balanced.
This has all been done in a Derby Camera Raw.
We haven't even gotten to anything more fancy in Photoshop.
At this stage, these corrections have fixed this much of the image.
If you disable the preview, you'll see the before and after as to what's happened.
Let's go ahead and open the image and see what else we can do.
Here we are, and we've got some perspective correction to do.
Ctrl-A to select all, hit Edit, Transform, and we're going to do a perspective correction.
We're going to grab one of the anchor points and drag it.
That's flattened the facade of Flinders Street Station,
but when you do that, it kind of flattens the image.
In order to balance that out, after applying the perspective correction,
hit Edit, Transform, Scale, click and pull upwards.
That's returned its dimensions to more or less something that's normal.
Let's deselect everything.
At this stage, you could pretty much pass this off as an adjustment from Camera Raw alone.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and save it as a Camera Raw Edit.
Once again, very basic corrections.
I'm now going to apply some more corrections using Nick ColorFX.
Let's go ahead and go Filter, Nick Collection, ColorFX Pro,
and we're going to go ahead and use the Pro Contrast tool.
The moment that I did that, you'll see that there's a fair bit of change that's come.
Let's go ahead and apply that and keep the Dynamic Contrast to about 50%.
Let's also see if a skylight filter is going to help us.
It doesn't make it a lot more vibrant,
but I'm not sure that it's decreasing the overexposure on the facade.
I'm actually going to leave it on because it is balancing out the colors a little bit.
They're not by much, so I'm going to go ahead and add that filter.
Then I'm going to use a cross-processing filter.
This is predominantly yellow, so I'm going to use a blue filter to balance it out.
Let's try going with the B10 and apply that.
That looks about right.
If you look at the before and after, we're getting a lot more balanced look.
I'm going to finish up with a little bit of vignetting.
Negative 50% is an awful lot, so I might just set it at negative 15 or maybe negative 10.
I'm going to go with negative 10 and add that filter.
Let's go ahead and hit OK.
There we have it. Neck color effects has applied its corrections.
There are a couple of minor fixes that we can do on this.
There are a couple of eye magnets out there, so I'm just going to clone that out.
I'm just using the Clone tool over there.
Over here we've got a couple of dust spots from the lens.
I'm just going to use Content Aware Fill to take care of that.
Brush over that and sort that out nicely.
At that, I'm going to go ahead and flatten the image filter.
I'm going to use Noise Aware to clean up any noise.
I'm just going to use the Night Scene filter.
It's going to clean up a lot of that noise. Go ahead and hit OK.
I'm going to go ahead and save this image as the Nick Edit.
There you have it. That's how I'd go about editing this particular image.
Once again, this is not an intensive amount of correction that I've done.
I've just done some very basic corrections.
You could do something more funky like use three different exposures
or create three different exposures and use some HDR.
That will bring out a lot of detail, but it will also bring up a lot of noise.
You're going to have to do some masking and some fairly sophisticated editing.
At this stage, we've come a long way from what came straight out of camera to this image.
I hope this helps.
