Camera Settings and Post-Processing Photographs

Been admiring your website again, and just wanted to know something. Your pictures look absolutely stunning and rich.

My camera (Canon 800IS) takes decent pictures but the colors are kinda bland, etc.

Do you post-process the pictures via Photoshop, etc? Can you tell me more about your camera settings (manual mode, etc?)

Thanks!
Yev

Craig's Response:

Howdy Yev,

With the Nikon P5000 that I'm currently using, I'm always shooting on some type of manual mode setting (never on automatic, often because of the high pixel noise found in this camera above ISO 400). Most commonly I'm using the simplified manual mode known on most digital cameras as 'program', or the 'shutter priority' mode when I don't like the shutter speed the program mode thinks I should be shooting at (I'd rather have an underexposed image to clear up than throw away a blurry one from handshake).

Regardless of the mode, I'm always manually setting the ISO speed for every shot (at 64, 100, 200, or 400), as well as adjusting the exposure setting (often set to -0.3 or -0.7 when I'm shooting outdoors). Always changing (or guessing at) the ISO setting is something rather tedious that the camera's successor, the P5100, remedied (by tossing an automatic setting for ISO 64–400 into the mix).

Every digital camera that I've used abroad regularly suffers from same gray contrast fog in its images, varied somewhat between brands, models, and lighting conditions. With the Canon's I always shot on 'vivid color' mode, to add some punch to the colors and reduce the fog as much as possible (as I wasn't post-processing them before tossing them into the snapshots gallery).

Since November 2007, I've had access to a laptop, allowing me to retouch images before uploading them (something I was never interesting in paying to do at Internet cafés). This has enabled me to really ramp up my photography—not just in terms of post-processing, but also in the sheer number of images taken, and how those images are eventually archived.

As you might've noticed from gallery images from Eastern Europe, my personal preference (style?) is generally heavy contrast and color saturation—sometimes almost to the point where you're looking at a print from a disposable camera. I happily sacrifice some ancillary details in order to make the blacks darker, and the images to really pop out at you.

Every photo published online now gets a round with Photoshop—a task that can often take an hour or more for a batch of photos from the day. I've recorded little macros that help me initially process an image (general settings that work for the majority), leaving me to fiddle a bit more, or leave it, depending on how much work the image warrants. Those macros often sharpen the image by about 50%, increase the contrast, increase the saturation, and decrease the brightness slightly.

Sometimes I use the 'auto-levels' or 'auto-contrast' to get a feel for what Photoshop thinks the image should look like. I'd say it matches the direction I'm going in about 65% of the time.

One of the more laborious tasks that must be done with the high contrast style that I employ are the repairs that must be made to the blown-out highlights. Cranking the contrast up tends to make the images very hot, so I ratchet down the brightness to compensate for the majority, and repair where needed.

This often involves making a duplicate layer before playing around with the image too much, punching holes in the high contrast layer to reveal the original, adjusting the original layer to best fit the image/highlights, then flattening and saving. I use burn, dodge, and brush blur tools as well.

The high dynamic range photos require even more time—three times as many photos taken, additional software to merge them, clean-up, repair, and then tweak. …But the results are quite fetching, and often more representative of what the human eye actually takes in. I'm really enjoying this new mode of travel photography.

So thanks for the compliment Yev—and for actually looking through the gallery. I spend quite a bit of work on the photos and their captions these days, and wished more people would take the time to look at them (often telling more of a story about a place than my travelogue entries ever will).

Happy snapping,

//craig in hungary
September 1, 2008

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