Wednesday, October 12, 2011

How to edit a high contrast image using ACR and CS5 …

A lot of images on sunny days come out of the camera with significant exposure issues. Blocked shadows, blown highlights … that kind of thing. Even the D700 is no guarantee of a fantastic exposure if the image has a slash of sunlight cutting across it.

Here, for example, is an image that is converted by Adobe’s default settings in ACR.

DSC_6932_sophie_default_ACR

And here is the same image after processing in ACR and CS5.

DSC_6932_sophie4

I think most would agree that this is a more pleasing image. So how does one perform this edit? Well, here is a 24 minute video (shot in two segments, hence the brain fart near the end where I say it is 13 minutes long) describing the process in painful detail.

Cherish this one, as I recorded it in full 4 times … the first three using Hypercam 2 and trying to fix the out of sync audio to no avail (yes, I checked out a half dozen videos on how to fix it and none of them worked.)

The final one was recorded with a trial version of Screen Recorder Gold (hence the watermark top left) and I must say worked beautifully. Much, much better than Hypercam.

The final version was mastered in Sony Vegas Platinum 11, although next time I will try and edit it in SRG …

Please ensure that you open this to full screen (1080p) so that you can see it as close to the original as possible. I am still tweaking the settings, hence this one is not quite a perfect rendering of the final sharpness. But it is pretty good and it certainly demonstrates the relevant techniques.

Enjoy. Or not. As you wish Smile