First we had Deciding What to Shoot and then Shooting the Images. Now we are getting to the fun part, Editing Images.
After shooting, first thing I do when I get home, is open up Adobe LightRoom (LR). I’m not real imaginative on naming the folders. Surfside Pier is in a folder surprisingly named Surfside Pier. These photos were put in the Myrtle Beach Areas Folder. LR creates a subfolder labeled 2014 and then a subfolder inside with the days date. I keep the unedited images in the date folder and save the edited images to the 2014 folder with new name. For naming images I use abbreviations of what it is or what folder it is, followed by two digit month, four digit year and then they are numbered chronologically. For instance, this HDR batch is in the Myrtle Beach Folder and February images so they are MBHD-02-2014-001. For those photos I use on my social media sites, I just take out the dashes.
Once all the images are uploaded, I start editing them. After picking three images, I open them up in HDR Pro in Photoshop. I would love to use Photomatrix Pro 5 but its not in the budget for the moment so I use what I have. After playing with all the settings to get the photo where I like it I hit OK and I’m back to regular Photoshop commands. I then will tweak the levels, possibly the color balance. The last thing I do before saving the image is Unsharp Mask.
Now that the full size image is saved, I resize it down to 7×5, 100 dpi, add a border and drop shadow and add my logo underneath. I then flatten the image so all the layers are gone and save it with the same file name as the large file but without the dashes so I quickly tell them apart.
Often times after creating the first image, I will go back to Image-Adjustments-HDR Toning and tweak the settings again to get the image to really pop. When saving these images, I use the same image name except I add a letter (i.e. MBHD-02-2014-001a).
This three part series is just Day in the Life of a Landscape Photographer. Later this year when we get closer to summer, I will be writing the Day in the Life of the Beach Portrait photographer which is quite a bit different than this series.
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