TranquilPhotos.com

Well as all know one of the most useful tools when editing is to see how much you’ve changed.  Sometimes you find it you’ve gone over the deep end on something and need to back off because whatever was, would work better.

In Lightroom, while under the “Developer” modeule (D) 2 has the (\) can be used to switch back and forth to the before and after image of your shot.  With or without any edits.

What is going on is that the image is shown as it stands, compared to the “Import” usually the initial view.   What if you had 12 changes, but only wanted to see the last 6 changes to a customer as before and after and not all of the other corrections?

The trick is to move the “before” stamp to a new spot on the history.   Select the step you want to be “before” and on the History item, right click and select “Copy History Step Settings to Before”.   Remember, that whatever history item you have selected is the “After”.  So select the next point of comparison and use the backslash key.

There are no magic bullets on getting a knife’s edge sharp picture.

Here are some steps that you need to get you 50% there, the rest you’ll have to do…

1. Use a tripod, monopod, or anything else.
   Before you even ask — YES, you need one.  The best one that you’ll actually carry with you.
   • Be it, a $450 carbon-fiber Manfrotto, or a $12 Walmart special.  Having it and using it better than having it and not using it.
   • This includes a ziplock full of rice that you can slap down and use as a bed to place your camera on, to using the side of a building to push your camera against.
   • A proper stance is the last part of this.  Left hand underneath against your chest, cradling the camera on your palm, your fingers spread out being parted by the lens.
2. Use a fast shutter speed.
   The general rule of thumb is that if you at 100mm focal length, you can hand hold up to 1/100th of a second or faster. I would not tell anyone to hand hold anything below 1/80th — as your blood pressure, heart beat, and simple act of breathing can introduce movement in the image.   This goes double for longer focal length.
3. Use good glass.
   You have to do your research before buying your glass.  Almost all main lens manufacturers have your “regular” or “consumer” lenses, and also a “professional” series.  The main difference is the construction and optics that are used in the lens.  Canon has the “L” series, Sigma has the “EX” series,  Tamron well they don’t but they claim all of their lenses are professional.
4. Use the proper depth of field — good focus
   A whole lot of images are in fact very sharp — you just don’t like where the sharpness is.  This is because of poor focus, because the subject moved, you moved or you just mis-focus.  This plus, a small depth of field puts all or some of your subject out of focus, and not very sharp.  Using manual focus is obviously idle, if possible.  Using a larger depth of field (smaller aperture) would also help.  If you camera has a “auto-keep-focus” such as the Canon AI Servo that will lock and keep focus will also help if the subject is moving.
5. Use a short focal length
   Now this one is my personal note, I think most people try to zoom too much.  Most your feet and get closer to your subject and fill the frame.   Use the shortest focal length you have (without going into the wide range [< 50mm]).
6. Proper post-processing
   Unlike film, almost all digital images need some post processing.  Specially USM (UnSharpen mark) — opposite to it’s name it’s actually a tool that sharpens your images.  It is not a tool to sharpen a blurry image, but if you have done everything else this last step will give you that extra pop of sharpness.

As always, there are dozen different answers to every question, but I am hoping that these small points help someone get a sharper image.

Well I must have slipped or something because I totally over exposed this poor Dahlia.

As you can see I was holding the flash way too close on the bottom and totally overexposed the bottom of the flower.  Well there is a an easy way to save  this image.

If you don’t already know I’m a very big proponent of Lightroom.  It has made my life so much easier.  I can find sports images in seconds with the nice keyword searches, and I hardly ever go into Photoshop anymore.  If I do, I’m there for 30minutes to a day because what I need to do is usually a huge task.  The rest of the work is all done in LR.

This image can be saved in a matter of seconds.

First we need to identify the tool that we would like to use.  As the overexposure happened from a side, this means we need to reduce the exposure of the bottom without changing the exposure on top.  So the gradient (moving from one color to another) negative exposure is what we need.

First, lets switch to the Developer Module by either clicking “Develop” on the top row, or by hitting “D”.   The gradient tool is a right below the Histogram on the right side of the developer module, and it looks like a box with 3 dotted lines going through it.   The 4th option from the left, and 2nd option from the right.   You can see it below circled.

Now choose “Exposure” from the drop down list in front of Effect.  Next move the slider all the way left so that it reads -4.00.  That’s right we’re going to way underexpose the image so that we can see where the gradient will start and end.  Afterward we will pull the exposure back up and we’ll end up where we want.

Now click on where the image is “most” over exposed, and while holding the left mouse down drag the mouse towards where the exposure is correct.  You should be able to see the exposure change as you’re doing this, if your computer is a little slow, just hold the mouse steady without letting go of the button and LR will catch up. When you’re happy with the size of the gradient let go of the mouse, but don’t click anywhere on the picture, if you do you’ll start a new gradient.  If this should happen, click “Cancel” on the bottom right hand corner of the tool window.  You can grab the old gradient to change it’s value by clicking the little white dot (handler) that is on the image.

As you can see we have underexposed the flower on the bottom now, but we can also see exactly where the gradient starts.  If you know exactly how much exposure you need than you can set it from the start, but me, I can’t tell from the image how badly I’ve done something so I usually just go over and reduce as needed.

Now let’s increase the exposure until the bottom and the top matches.

As you can see we now have a properly exposure flower, ready to be matted and framed for the gallery or show.

Also, please notice that the history on the left shows us all of the steps that we completed.  At this point I usually take a “snapshot” of the history point so that I can break this off and/or continue to play with the image to see if anything else can be changed to make it better.  In this case I might run it through Noise Ninja once at a low setting.

Final export: