Why upgrading your tools and skills matter

I’ve many times discussed the idea that it’s important for photographers to stop grumbling about time spent in the digital darkroom and embrace it, because by spending time improving your processing skills, and by keeping your tools updated and learning how to leverage the new capabilities, you can make better photos. I know those of you madly clutching your copies of Lightroom 6 or Photoshop CS 3 to your chests will disagree, but here’s a recent example of how dramatic the improvements can be.

Here’s a photo from my Yellowstone trip in 2014 of a mother bison nursing her calf in Lamar Valley:

I think it’s an amazing composition taken under really challenging conditions with bright, harsh light leading to huge dynamic range issues. This image I last processed about 2 and a half years ago, and while I think it’s a nice image, it still shows challenges caused by the lighting and I had to do a lot of work to try to compensate for it. In this version (unlike versions processed closer to 2014) you can at least see the mother bison’s eye and her face is clean of major noise. Still, it’s a pretty good image with a much better image hiding inside it somewhere, but in 2019 this was the best I felt I could do.

I do love the image enough that I published it as a wallpaper, so it pops up on my computer screen as my background as I work — and as sometimes happen, I popped up, and I looked at it, and something in the back of my head muttered “you can do better than that”. And of course, once the muttering started, I had to try.

When I reprocess an image, I’ll make a virtual copy in Lightroom, which I then delete all processing from (I have a preset for this), and remove all fills, edits and other tweaks, bringing it back to “straight from camera”. I’ll then start making some standard changes to it (I have a preset for this, but tuned to my XS10, so I did it manually), then I’ll do an initial crop and then start working on details. Part of this is some dynamic range adjustments I picked up from Art Wolfe when I took his 2019 Olympic National Park workshop, which I’ve found really make a better image on almost everything.

A recent addition to Lightroom Classic is a revamped and much more powerful system of fills, adding two new ones: subject and sky, to the radial, grad ND, luminance and color selectors and the brush, with a new UI that I quite like. In this case I used select subject and in less than a minute I had what is effectively a photoshop layer with mom and her calf, as well as one of the bison behind it, selected out, with the full lightroom capabilities to process just those bits.

This allowed me to significantly improve the exposure of the animals compared to the really bright backgrounds, and then reduce the exposure of the rest of the image, independently of each other, mitigating a lot of the dynamic range problems in this image. I also could add a good bit of clarity and texture to the animals, while from the grasses I removed some yellow (this was shot on a Canon, which I always found had too much yellow for my taste in foliage), and I did some minor reductions of saturation and luminance to tone down the almost Velvia look of the grasses.

This select subject layer, in other words, allowed me to bring the animals more in line with the dynamic range of the rest of the image and bring out more detail in them than I previously was capable of.

There’s nothing going on here I couldn’t have done in Photoshop, of course, but it’d take me 2-3 hours in Photoshop. Here, in Lightroom, I can now do basically the same set of changes to the image, and I did it in about 15 minutes. That time difference alone makes these new fill tools worth it to me, because if I was staring 2 hours of photoshop in the face this image would have gone into the “tag to fix later” pile.

When I’m done with my processing I now run all images through Topaz Labs Sharpening plug-in, followed by their de-noiser, which I’ve really come to depend on and which I think do amazing work. Total reprocessing time: 20 minutes. Here’s the result

I was astounded at the difference in the quality of the animals and how they fit into environment around them. I think about 50% of the improvements come from things I’ve learned (thanks, Art and others!) since the last time I took a whack at this picture, and the other 50% improvements in the tools that allow me capabilities I didn’t really have. The sharpening tool and the noise tool actually play a subtle but important role here in making this image look good, as does Lightroom’s texture tool, which really helped bring out some good detail in the shadows for the sharpening tool to sharpen.

Then, just for giggles, since I haven’t done any black and white processing for a while, I thought I’d see how this might look as a monochrome. I fired up Silver Efex Pro, and started exploring the presets, which I’ll usually use as a starting point, but when I saw this image in “Yellowed 1”, I felt it was just right, so this is how Silver Efex did the conversion for me while I cheered it on…

(and yes, when I revise my wallpapers next time, I’ll be replacing the old image with — probably — both of these. I love them)

If modern tools can mitigate lousy light to this extend while looking natural…. imagine what they could do for your images. But you need to invest in your tools, just as you do your camera and field gear, and put in time learning how to use them.