Following on from a thread about a new Nikon and some pics posted that had been taken in RAW and manipulated in Photoshop so the sky wasn't washed out…

How would I go about doing that? And more broadly, what other improvements can be made to a photograph by shooting in RAW and then processing? Please make answers very simple!

I used to do quite a bit of film photography (and have a background in physics and signal processing) so I understand the basics of exposure, stops, depth of field etc. I never used to do my own colour printing so the aim was to get the best possible picture on the negative. I've made my way back to a DSLR after years of compacts and I suppose I take a similar approach now. When I get the chance I'll try to get a decent image via the camera.

I do have Photoshop Elements but (apart from cropping) I tend to use that for altering photos, applying quite obvious effects, rather than improving them (more real than real).

For now (until either the kids leave home in 15years or I stop spending money on bikes) I'm limited to a Canon 350 and Photoshop Elements.

Bit late to the party, but I'm not sure wether Elements allows editing of RAW files. The thing with RAW is it contains all the information in the file, which is uncompressed. You can alter white balance, and create HD pictures, then save out as a TIFF or jpeg, retaining the RAW file as a safety net or for any other 'darkroom processing' you might want to experiment with. RAW files are pretty big, so a big harddrive is essential. If you really want the best possible results, then RAW is the only way to go. Check Elements to see if it handles RAW files, otherwise it might be an expensive investment in Adobe CS4. I'm sure there must be loads of articles and forum stuff on t'interweb, so Google is probably your best friend here. My work in Photoshop was on images scanned on a drum scanner, which was killed off by digital cameras and cheap decent quality scanners letting people do their own, not nessessarily good quality, Photoshop work, and CS, which came in after I lost my job, was too chuffing expensive for me to afford, sadly.

Elements has RAW processors, the new Elements 7 is on offer at Amazon for about £40 at the moment. Richpips (see the excellent http://qwertyphoto.com/) does all his processing on Elements. Paint Shop Pro Ultimate X2 is about £60 at Amazon as well, that's also very powerful and comes with loads of RAW formats built in.

As a general rule though PhotoShop can make a good picture great, it can't make a rubbish picture good. I do the bare minimum in PS – cropping and adjustments to contrast/white balance/saturation, if it needs any more than that the photo was probably crap in the first place! RAW just gives you loads more options with the image, all the data is there and it doesn't degenerate with each succesive save like a JPEG does. You've also always got it there as a back up even when your finished image is saved as a TIFF or JPEG.

Nowt wrong with the 350D, I've had lots of pictures published from mine and even the kit lens is decent enough.

Couldn't agree more more about Photoshop not making a crap picture great. The expression 'polishing a turd' springs to mind. 😀 My use was all about making pictures ready for repro, which quite often meant waving a can of Mr Sheen over the kitty litter. Metaphorically speaking.

Thanks – I might treat myself to a new version of Elements (mine is v5).

A specific question that relates to the thread that started me thinking… Where I have photos which are good apart from a 'washed out' sky, how do I draw more detail out of the sky (effectively underexpose) without affecting the rest of the photo?

Any good on-line tutorials for Photoshop Elements?

Do a search for Layers & masks tutorials

Tons of good online stuff out there, so won't spell it out here.

Itunes has some free tutorials but I've used this place for some good tips:
http://www.thedigitalphotographyconnection.com/pfdp_player.php?ID=122

Worth spending some time looking through their tutorials.

There's tonnes of information on the dpreview forums as well.

RAW will give you slightly more dynamic range, so less chance of a washed out sky. I would recommend RAW therapy as a free downloadable RAW processor which can nicely manipulate the output. You can tweak where highlights start to 'clip out to white' etc and produce some good results. There are other techniques like HDR which give impressive results if used correctly but then you have to take two seperate identical shots at different exposures and combine in HDR software (a pain), plus these sometimes look very fake if the effect is overdone.

There's lots of educational video clips on YouTube or from the Adobe (for Photoshop) or Corel (for PaintShopPro) websites about photo alterations.

'You can tweak where highlights start to 'clip out to white' etc'

The histogram is your freind. Left had side is black, right hand side is White. If you have 'highlights' that 'clip out to white', then that white bit has no data in it because it has exceeded the limitations of the sensor in the camera. No amount of adjusting is going to change this (as there is no data to adjust), although you can sometimes make it look less bad when the surrounding bit of the picture is adjusted

Get in the habit of checking the histogram when you shoot – ideally take a test shot and check, adjust, check & shoot. Overcast days are a pain because the sky will generally look poo. You could get an ND Grad filter to help, but obviously need to take it out & use it. Otherwise it's a case of either taking to identicle shots at different exposures and combining them or exposing for sky or land.

you can adjust exposure for a given picture to make the sky look good, save it as a tiff, then adjust the exposure to make the ground look good, save that as a tiff and then combine the two pictures using masks to get the best of both worlds, it's hard to do so both look good mind.

This tutorial is the one used to get me going on stuff like that.
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/digital-blending.shtml

*I* think this is my best effort…

Samuri's example is good. I reckon it works because there is detail in the sky – don't expect to be able to do this on an overcast day. The pic also has some burnout where the sun is, but doesn't spoil this picture, I think it works.

Nice, Jon. that looks turner-esque (the painter not the bike guy, obviously)

Thanks again.

Looks like 'layer and mask' is what I want to do. I'll have a look at the tutorials and have a play.

That's pretty much what HDR is, but done in software. I used to tweak a lot of photos which had no sky in. I built up a library of different skys, then use layers, select the white out sky, and drop in a new sky. Took some fiddling, but for the kind of jobs, estate agents and the like, it made a dull pic look more interesting. Interesting thread, this. I'm going to check out some of those tutorials and bookmark them for future reference.

I can highly recommend 'the photoshop cs book' by Scott Kelby as a good intro to photo shop

i think he does one for elements as well. after about an hours reading i had learnt an awful lot.