I used to be very disappointed with my Fall photos not being as vivid as the colours I remembered. Over the years, cameras have got better at choosing a good exposure, and editors have added more tools for extracting a “look” from RAW images. Now I worry about having my photos look more real than real-life – a problem technology won’t help me solve! In this post I’ll show the tools I use to get spectacular results, and it’ll be up to you how far you push!
Not interested in the details, and just want to skip to the photo gallery? Click here.
The image below shows what I started with, and the resulting photo.
Setting the scene
Given that the colour adjustment will be done in post, there’s nothing special to do regarding camera settings. Be sure to expose correctly, and set the aperture depending on the depth of field you want. The things I try to think about in composing the photo include:
- I like the contrast of a nice blue sky, rather than overcast, but one takes what one gets.
- Timing is everything, as different plants change at different times. However, I don’t have a master plan, I just try to take a camera whenever the mood strikes me, and see what there is, and try to frame my way around any poorer parts.
- I’m looking for a point of interest – a bridge, or one tree or leaf that’s changed colour while everything else is green.
- Nice reflections are always good, especially when there is a large bird swimming by.
- Crop or compose to keep man-made things (like houses!) out of an otherwise natural treescape.
- Otherwise, all the normal “rules” of composition apply, using tree shapes, pathways or colour to create an image that works. One exception is the classic shoreline with sky, trees and reflection. If there is little variation on the heights of the trees – perhaps because of the distance – you may just need to embrace the straight line and perhaps make a point of it with a panoramic crop.
Capturing a Fall image in the RAW
I set my camera to take RAW images, rather than jpg ones. Mostly, this is because RAW images have a lot more latitude than jpg. While one can achieve a nice result in jpg by carefully choosing white balance and other options, my aging eyes require a nice big screen to see what I’m doing. So far as colours are concerned, squinting at a tiny screen in bright sunlight just doesn’t give me enough information to see if I have it right in the field. Shooting RAW gives me the best chance for post processing to enhance what I come home with.
It also allows me to tell the software how to interpret the digital information captured in the camera. When a camera creates a jpg image, it is the camera manufacturer’s design that decides this, or on fancier hardware, the camera’s settings make this determination for some or all parameters. After the jpg image is produced, much of the original information captured in the camera is thrown away, leaving what’s left “baked in” to the image, but in a RAW file, it’s all preserved.
When I was first starting out with a DSLR I was rather disappointed with my results. Surely an expensive, hefty piece of fine equipment should produce better images? Compounding my confusion, some, maybe even many, photos were turning out well. For a long time, I regarded RAW shooting as a way to compensate for my failings as a photographer. Today, I see the technology as a way to extend my control of the final image beyond whatever I did at the moment of capture, and create something that might even be better than the picture I first saw.
Developing for Fall colour
Development Workflow
I have given up in my quest for a single formula for developing any picture. I’m not sure it exists. I suspect the best thing is to experiment enough with all of the tools so that experience will tell you which tools will change what. In the end, all you are doing is changing three numbers which define a given spot in the image, which gets rather boring if you have to do it individually for each of the millions of spots (pixels) in a picture. The tools let you select and change those numbers more automatically, and it’s not surprising that there are many ways to do that and achieve somewhat the same result. I’ll tell you how I use the tools in ACDSee in just a moment…
ACDSee Photo Studio
This is the software I use to change all those numbers. In terms of Adobe software, it is a combination of Lightroom and Photoshop. The Manage and Develop tabs approximate Lightroom, and the Edit tab, Photoshop. In my opinion, it excels at managing my collection of images, does a fantastic job of developing the image, and is catching up to Photoshop in the Edit area. However, my knowledge of the Adobe products ended with CS5 as that is where I was when Adobe went subscription only.
Just to remind you, this is the photo I’m starting with:
Tone Curves
Typically, I will go to tone curves early in the process. If the histogram does not reach side to side, I’ll hit “auto” so that the editing that follows uses the full range of 256 values when the image is translated to 8-bit pixels. If the overall look is a bit “muddy”, I’ll increase the contrast by deepening the shadows and raising the highlights with an S-curve. (In these screenshots, I’ve only captured the left side of the image, and it shows the results of the settings shown.)
Light EQ
My early experiments with this tool did not go well. The auto button is usually a disaster (as of the 2020 version), and I didn’t see anything I couldn’t do with tone curves. Then I found a post by Jason Hahn which explained many things, including Light EQ. Now I’m experimenting more and more with this tool and finding where I can use it. For Fall photos, I found that I could use this tool, right click on some grey yukky sky and drag down, and turn it to blue! It doesn’t manufacture blue – there has to have been blue in the sky – but if it’s there this tool finds it. Fine tune by right-dragging on the lower part of the histogram. If the curve you are creating overlaps the histogram, you have adjusted too far.
General tab – exposure and highlights
Reducing exposure often saturates the colours, which is generally good for Fall colours.
Increasing the highlights slider will darken the lightest bits, and as the sky is generally at the bright end, the highlight slider will deepen the blue even further. In this case, I judged that this was too much of a good thing, so I backed off, as shown in the second screen shot in this section.
Saturation and Vibrance
There was a time when the saturation control would have been the first thing I used for a Fall colour photo. Today, I use it more sparingly as it affects the entire image. In this example, I experimented and decided it was not necessary. For a more selective approach, the Color EQ control lets me saturate (or desaturate) just one colour (like the red maple tree) but again, I did not use it on this example, nor did I adjust Colour Temperature.
Rinse and repeat
At this point, I was pretty happy, but I went back and made small changes to tone curves and highlights.
The most important skill after applying the controls I’ve mentioned is knowing when to stop. I often find my eyes start to become accustomed to contrasty saturated colours and there is a danger in going too far. This is especially a problem for me because I don’t see colours as vividly as other people do. My wife stopped letting me choose paint colours after I painted the spare bedroom with what I thought was a nice sedate mustard colour.
You might want to put your edits aside and come back a day later and have another look. In the course of writing this post, I probably came up with five “final” versions of this photo. Your choices will be different. As long as I’ve given you an understanding of how the tools work, you’ll be able to create the look that you (or your audience) prefer, and I’ll be happy!
Final steps
To this point, any of the changes I made can be individually tweaked without affecting any other change. Once I take an image into Edit and make a change, all of the changes in Develop are baked in – if I want to change anything that relies on RAW edits, I have to either discard the edit changes, make the RAW change and then re-do the edit changes, or attempt to fix the jpg. So I try to make sure I’m happy before going to Edit.
I also try to avoid fixing pixels, as things get a lot more complicated and time consuming. However, in the course of changing the sky, several bits of dust on the sensor have become apparent, so I have to repair them. Luckily, this can be done within Develop, so all of the advantages of working with the RAW file continue.
The image also needs a slight crop to remove the roof in the tree line, so we can preserve the illusion that this is deep in the Canadian countryside! And this is what I ended up with. This time.
For those of you who don’t give two hoots about ACDSee or developing RAW images, here are some of the other photos I took in late September.
