How I Edit My Night Street Photos

I figured, as I’ve been posting a lot of night street photos lately, maybe I should put together a quick post on how I edit my photos. I’ve had a few comments in recent months about the look of my photos, so now seems a good time to run through how I take my photos from this…

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to this…

In Camera Settings

Before getting into the edits, a bit about the settings I use when shooting with my XT3. I generally stick to as wide open as possible, and so I tend to exclusively use my 33mm f1.4 lens. In terms of shutter speed, I hover around 1/125 and 1/250 depending on whether the subject is stationary. I leave the ISO on automatic (with an upper limit of ISO3200) and exposure compensation around -1 to -2 to protect the highlights. I also always shoot in RAW.

I should also add that all my edits are done on an iPad Air. I tend to find with street photography I don’t need to do heavy edits, use layers and layer masks and whatever. Photoshop isn’t something I find myself needing. What I want is a convenient way of editing that enables quick edits on the fly. Lightroom and the iPad do this perfectly for my needs.

Light

As you can see, I push the exposure up quite a fair amount when editing. This is largely due to the exposure compensation I apply in-camera. It doesn’t impact upon the image quality and, crucially, it ensures I protect the highlights. The highlights too are dropped right down, although in some scenes I might lift them up, depending on how I want to work the light in the scene. Mostly though, I drop it down. I also drop the contrast to soften the image so it’s not too crunchy, I prefer a softening effect in my images where possible (although, again, I may do otherwise depending on what I want to achieve with the image). I also drop the whites, drop the blacks a tiny amount and lift the shadows a small amount (in this case to show more detail from the person’s clothing).

In terms of the tone curve, I tend to lift the blacks a little to give it that filmic quality and very slightly drop the whites. Again, I may lift the blacks on the tone curve or drop them down depending on the image itself.

Colour

With Colour, I drop the temperature right down. Typically my night shots are taken during the winter, and so I find they work best if they are cooled down a bit to around 3200k, adding in more blue tones. I then tint towards the purple and add some saturation and vibrance to the image.

Where I really start to get the colours I want is in the HSL area and the Colour Grading (more on that below). I particularly like my blues to be pushed towards the green/blue and quite desaturated, making for a softer blue that I find more appealing. I also push the yellows more towards the orange and also desaturate slightly. The combination of the two together helps to get the colour palette in the kind of place I would like to be before I move on to Colour Grading.

Colour Grading

This is where I think I have the biggest impact on the look of my images. As you can see, I tend to grade the image with blues in the shadows, oranges in the highlights and, most importantly, I add green to the midtones. I think this is the single most important element in terms of getting the tones I like across the whole of the image. By pushing in those greens it gives the image much more of the kind of atmospheric (futuristic?) look that I like in my night photos. It just seems to really work to lift the images above being a straightforward, “as it looked to my eye at the time” type edit. I think that in combination with pushing the blues towards the green-blue and pushing the white balance to the colder end of the scale really seems to work for me. Of course, I may take a different view in years to come, but for now it gives the night photos a look that I really like.

Effects

When it comes to the effects, in most cases I tend towards negative clarity (-10 to -20 typically) and negative dehaze (-5 to -10). This is largely because I want to soften the image rather than give it harsh, hard edges. In this case, I’ve slightly nudged up both just to add some detail to the hair in the ponytail. Again, it’s about the specific image and what I want to achieve with it. Either way, I tend to be fairly cautious with both clarity and dehaze as pushing them too far either way can lead to some odd looking images. Texture I always increase to add a bit of fine detail to the images.

I also always add a vignette, and quite a heavy one on night photography by my usual standards (around -15 tends to be my default). I sometimes also add a radial vignette over the subject and invert it to darken around the subject and draw more attention to it. Finally, I add a bit of grain just to add to the atmosphere of the image and help to push it towards that more filmic look.

Anyway, that’s pretty much how I edit my night photos. As I’ve kept saying above, some of the specifics are very much dependent on the image itself. Generally speaking I apply a preset then adjust according the image itself (I always see a preset as a starting point rather than a one-click solution to an image), but these are broadly the kinds of settings I go for. The things that never really change are the white balance and the colour grading, other than that, I shift things around to suit the image.

And that’s my photo editing of night street photos regime! Hope you found that useful/interesting!

ian

Post-processing with the 13" MacBook Pro

This year my mission was to take my photography a bit further, to take what I have learnt so far and improve the quality of the photos I have taken. One of the things I was most conscious of was my ability to process images. And yes, as you might have noticed, I bought a shiny new thing to help me.

For a while now I’ve not really been happy with my post-processing options. I felt like I was taking reasonably good photos (although I’ve still got much to learn), but the post-processing element was letting me down. Up until now, my workflow has been as follows:

1. Import photos into Photoshop Elements 11.
2. Run some autofixes.
3. Upload photos to Flickr.
4. Download favourites onto my iPad.
5. Process using VSCO.
6. Re-add to Flickr.
7. Post some of the processed photos to Instagram.

Much as I like VSCO (enough to pay for VSCO X), the problem with this process was that it led to compressed files. Processing on VSCO on the iPad would turn a 12mb file into a 2-3mb file. Sure, it would look great on social media (and even in The Guardian!), but if I wanted better resolution images to blow up (or, indeed, sell at some point in the future), this process wasn’t going to cut it. I needed something that would be easy to use and produce high quality images.

My issue for a while has been that although my desktop is pretty good, I had hesitations around using it for intensive processing. For a long time, I had been thinking what I actually needed was a more powerful machine dedicated to photo processing. So, I started looking at investing in something that could help take my photography faster.

Alongside power, a key need for me was portability. I often go to Spain with my Spanish partner to visit her family, and these trips are also often opportunities for me to get out and about in Andalucia (and beyond) taking photos. As a result, rather than chucking everything on a hard-drive and process a huge number of photos when I get home, it would be much better to do be able to process photos as I go along. It seemed to me that a compact laptop I can pack on the plane would be a perfect option. So I started investigating the options and ultimately plumped for the MacBook Pro 13” model with touch bar.

Initially I had a reluctance to go for the Apple option. I have an iPad and an iPhone, but my desktop is a PC and generally I am quite happy with PCs for my day-to-day stuff. However, I knew that in terms of getting something powerful that can really help with my photography, an Apple laptop would be a serious contender. I also took a serious look at the Dell X13. It too is a powerful laptop and, hardly a surprise, significantly cheaper than the MacBook Pro. But after weighing up the two, I leaned slightly more towards the MacBook Pro – mainly after watching dozens upon dozens of YouTube review clips and reading numerous articles. Why? I guess the two factors that stood out were the screen quality and, brace yourselves, the touch bar.

Wait. The touch bar?

Er, yeah.

One of the things that I liked about processing on my iPad was the use of touch and sliders to edit my photos. I much preferred this to my other option of sitting down on Photoshop Elements and using a mouse to navigate around. Touch sliders (for me anyway) make life a whole lot easier. The realisation that the touch bar was already integrated into Photoshop was a big plus for me. Sure, the touch bar is only small and it’s not the same as using an iPad, but nonetheless it is better than not having the option at all.

When looking to go for the MacBook Pro I was also very conscious of the specs. We all know what Apple are like in terms of upgrading equipment, so it was important to buy the most powerful spec I could afford. So, alongside the touch bar option, I also went for the fastest processor available on the 13” (the i7 processor) and 16gb of RAM. In terms of storage space, I went with 256gb because I’m only intending on using the laptop for processing photos before moving to external storage. I didn’t see the point in upping the capacity on the laptop as ultimately, I would still need to eventually move stuff onto an external drive or another storage option. 256gb is plenty for the amount of processing I am likely to do, as well as giving me space for some other stuff I might want to use it for.

All that said, it took me a long time to stump up for it. I wasn’t wholly convinced the MacBook would comfortably handle Photoshop. I was concerned that I would fork out a significant amount of money, only to find myself disappointed. As well as watching video reviews of the MacBook Pro and the X13 in general, I hunted high and low for hints at how the 13” would perform handling Photoshop. Some of the reviews I read were not promising. One article I read basically argued that the 13” was not suitable for photo processing. I put this down to the fact it was using the base model, rather than the one I was looking at. Nonetheless, I was very nervous about a substantial outlay without really knowing if it was the right option.

How is it working out so far? Well, pretty good. Around the same time as I bought the MacBook, I also started a subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud photography package (which includes Lightroom and Photoshop – I’ll blog on my experiences with these at a later date). I also made the switch from RAW+JPEG to RAW only – the big leap. Now I’ll be working on photos from scratch. I would have the image in its unprocessed state and work from there.

In terms of handling the processing of the images, the MacBook has had no problems whatsoever. Processing has been quick and painless, with no lag whatsoever, even when chucking dozens of RAW images at it at a time. It’s also been easy to get great looking images thanks to the clarity of the MacBook screen.

The flipsides? Well, although the Toolbar integrates with Photoshop, it doesn’t as yet integrate with Lightroom (I hope that’s to come – particularly as most of my editing will be in Lightroom).

The other main drawback? Battery. I guess this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Photoshop is pretty intensive on the processor, so I guess it follows that it would use up a lot of juice pretty quickly. So far it has not been unusual for around 50% of the battery to disappear after about an hour of photo processing. However, that was a pretty intensive session of processing many photos in one go and I suspect in future I will take fewer photos and be more prepared to delete images I’m not totally happy with from the camera (as well as resisting the urge to take a dozen photos of exactly the same scene – my main current vice).

It’s early days yet, but I’m pretty pleased with the investment and I already notice the difference in quality by processing from RAW rather than JPEG (especially the difference when compared with those processed on my iPad). I feel already this will make a massive difference to the quality of my photos and help me to take that step further on from last year when I got to grips with manual. I’ll keep you posted!