narlus
1st of May 2007 (Tue), 10:47
yeah, this should probably be in the post-processing forum, but i am interested in the opinions of people who shoot performance, as the conditions are very dynamic, and i think it's hard to apply automation and the same adjustment to a wide variety of photos which are vastly different.
so, that said...what sort of batching/automation/actions do you typically run? i must admit that i'm way under-achieving in this aspect, and i'd like to gain efficiencies where possible.
about the only batch stuff i do is to apply metatag data on the whole group of photos, cull through and delete the obvious bad ones, then select the good ones. from there, i do another round of selection, and these are the ones i deem worthy for PP.
i open all of them in ACR, then usually select all and apply 'tungsten' as the white balance. i then go through them individually, and make exposure tweaks as needed, sometimes also adjusting brightness and contrast (i tend to leave everything else to the defaults i've set).
once all the images are in photoshop, i should really write a simple action to add a curves layer to each one, but what i've done is to create one, make an S curve, then drag/drop to all the open files. i can then tweak that layer as needed for each image. after that, i've found that i don't really do all that much other than cropping, cloning if necessary, or some burning (maybe also adjust some colors via Channel Mixer...either tone down the red channel, or do a B&W conversion)...i then save the PSD as a full-size 16 bit file w/ layers intact. now i'm ready to resize, convert to 8 bit, and sharpen if needed, saving as jpg.
any hints on stuff i can do to make my life easier? one other thing i might do is to use Adobe RGB colorspace for all PSD edits, then when i convert to jpg go to sRGB.
there's got to a better solution, so i'm curious to hear what you all do, or if you have certain actions you rely upon a lot. i did get a few Fred Miranda actions (mono and duo-tone conversions), but i don't like that it flattens the layers. i suppose i can edit these actions, no?
so, that said...what sort of batching/automation/actions do you typically run? i must admit that i'm way under-achieving in this aspect, and i'd like to gain efficiencies where possible.
about the only batch stuff i do is to apply metatag data on the whole group of photos, cull through and delete the obvious bad ones, then select the good ones. from there, i do another round of selection, and these are the ones i deem worthy for PP.
i open all of them in ACR, then usually select all and apply 'tungsten' as the white balance. i then go through them individually, and make exposure tweaks as needed, sometimes also adjusting brightness and contrast (i tend to leave everything else to the defaults i've set).
once all the images are in photoshop, i should really write a simple action to add a curves layer to each one, but what i've done is to create one, make an S curve, then drag/drop to all the open files. i can then tweak that layer as needed for each image. after that, i've found that i don't really do all that much other than cropping, cloning if necessary, or some burning (maybe also adjust some colors via Channel Mixer...either tone down the red channel, or do a B&W conversion)...i then save the PSD as a full-size 16 bit file w/ layers intact. now i'm ready to resize, convert to 8 bit, and sharpen if needed, saving as jpg.
any hints on stuff i can do to make my life easier? one other thing i might do is to use Adobe RGB colorspace for all PSD edits, then when i convert to jpg go to sRGB.
there's got to a better solution, so i'm curious to hear what you all do, or if you have certain actions you rely upon a lot. i did get a few Fred Miranda actions (mono and duo-tone conversions), but i don't like that it flattens the layers. i suppose i can edit these actions, no?