Whilst I am at home between work trips and unable to grab a camera and go out and shoot new material I have, like many other photographers, been going through my catalogue of old images that I'd shot but not processed.

For non-photographers I ought to explain my cameras don't take and give me finished photographs, they give me what is known as a raw file, that is to say all the data captured by the digital sensor but not processed in any way. In comparison a point and shoot camera or cameraphone works in the same way but then processes the image for you, choosing how much saturation, sharpening, noise reduction etc to give you, based on pre-set algorithms from the manufacturer. That way you end up with a finished photo that can go straight to Facebook, or Instagram or to send to your mates. For me to get to the stage of a finished photo I have to process the image myself. It is a more long winded process but one which gives me creative control over the finished photo rather than leaving it down to an engineer at Canon who isn't sat shivering on a mountainside and has no idea what kind of end result I am looking for.

So let's start off with an image how it comes out of the camera. I've left all the settings unaltered and simply turned this into a JPEG (a finished photo) so you can see what I got out of the camera. I use Capture One Pro from Phase One so let's get into that and start moulding the image.

As you can see the whole image is rather dull and has a magenta cast across it from the filter I was using. The filter concerned is a cheap 3 stop neutral density filter from Cokin. Three stops slows the water down enough to get that silky effect. I have a lovely Lee Filters Big Stopper which slows it down by 10 stops but that would be overkill for this image where the water is moving quickly, and the cloud was rapidly descending on the mountain so I'd have lost the view of it. The downside of the filter is the magenta cast.

So first thing's first, let's get rid of the colour cast. That is relatively easily done by correcting the white balance. 

Next onto basic editing. 

As you can see I add a bit of contrast, more of which I'll add later but with a lighter touch. The high dynamic range I use to lift the shadows (the darker rocks and heather, particularly bottom right) and bring down the highlights (the sky). Some clarity gives the image a bit of a lift by adding micro contrast, this makes the smaller details, the rocks, the mountain's texture and the heather stand out.

Capture One allows me to add gradient masks. Normally I'd use a neutral density graduated filter attached to the front of my lens, but when I took this shot I was struggling with rain hitting the filters, so didn't and instead added one in processing. Naturally I had to be careful not to blow my highlights to the point where I couldn't recover them, but it was a typically dreich day on the face of a named storm so the sky wasn't so bright!

This next image shows where the mask went:

On the sky layer I drop the exposure by half a stop, add some more contrast as it is covering the mountain, some more clarity for the clouds and the mountain. 

Next the image goes into Photoshop. At this point it is exported as a TIFF as I don't want to be compressing and decompressing the image each time I work on it losing image quality. It does however make for a 100mb file which you'd not want to start emailing. This is the stage we're at so far.

The first stage is to add some warmth and saturation to the image. I use a Photoshop plugin called Color Efex which I really like. I also add a bit more contrast to the clouds. Unfortunately when I added the saturation the water became awfully cyan and unnatural, so that had to be sorted out with Photoshop's  Image > Adjustments > Replace Color tool. I also took out some of the dust spots, most evident top left corner. These are actual tiny specs of dust on the camera's sensor. I clean my own sensors but no matter how hard you try when changing lenses in the field you get some. Luckily it's quite easy to spot removal them out.

So far this is where we're at:

As you can see we're getting there. Next to add some micro contrast. I use a technique I found online, involving duplicating the layer, adding a high pass filter, making it a layer mask, inverting it and then painting it back on. It allows me to control where I want more micro contrast and where I want less. 

Here is me making the mountain pop a bit more. 

Before:

After:

I add different amounts of micro contrast to the image in different areas, painting it in. I also finish up the dust spotting.

Now I am about finished, but all the pushing and pulling the image has left some nasty noise in the sky:

A quick run through one of Nik Software's other tools, DFine, lessens that. Bear in mind that is a greater than 100% zoom into the image, when printed or viewed on screen you'd barely be aware of it even before lessening it. After it looks like this:

I save the resulting image file as a PSD Photoshop file, preserving all it's layers.

This means a file of about half a gigabyte. I also flatten the image and save it as a TIFF, which is the format I'll archive it as. The finished file is back at about 100mb.

Back into Capture One next. I add the final details to the image, keywords, description, headline etc. My contact details are automatically added right at the beginning at import stage so they're already set. Normally I'd add a stage of embedding the GPS location in from my GPS logger but like an imbecile I'd left it at home on this trip. Luckily Glen Coe is like a second home for me so if I can't remember where I shot this there is something massively wrong.

Finally it's time to output the image in usable formats. I send my images to my website (this one) and to Flickr, at full size as JPEGs, a 1600 pixel longest edge copy for Facebook and a 1024 pixel copy for Instagram and to send to my parents on iMessage!

At the same time as the full size files are exported they're also added to Media Pro which I use for cataloging my images, this allows me to search by date, location, keyword etc.

Now everything is sorted, this is the final image, compared to the initial one:

Winter at Buachaille Etive MorA brisk winter's day at Glen Coe, snow arriving ahead of the incoming Storm Ciara.

A bit longwinded I know but I hope it gives you a look at how I work with my images. I am sure there are lots of things I could do better but I am still learning and getting better all the time.

Take care everyone and hope you are managing OK during the coronavirus.