Will Robb Photography

I often talk about the editing process I go through for my assignments, so I thought I would elaborate on it a little bit here. For all my work I use the Mac dedicated Aperture software. I use the new version, Aperture 3 on my iMac and Aperture 2 on my macbook. I use Aperture as it lets me deal with large number of images easily, for doing heavy edits for fashion mag spreads or advertising, photoshop is the way to go, but for huge edits like I have to do, Aperture 3 is a real lifesaver.

At the moment I am going through my photos of Korea to edit them up ready to send off to Lonely Planet. First off, I use Aperture to import images, either from my camera memory cards or my back up files. For my current edit, I am taking them from my portable HDD where I have already saved the best images from my trip. I just make a project file called “Seoul” in Aperture, click import, go to where my images are, select a file and all images in the file pop up in a window.

First off, before I import the images I write in the essential Metadata I need to fill in, the date the images were taken, the city in which they were taken, the state/province and the country. If all the images are from a similar place with a similar event (such as a festival) I also add some information into the comment sections, but here I can’t as the photos are from different places in Seoul.

Then I go to the pop up window with the images. All the images are automatically selected, seeing as how these are pretty good images anyway I deselect a few “iffy” shots if I see them so they won’t get imported and then click import to bring them all into the project I created and repeat the process with images in different folders (I always save travel events by days) until I’ve imported all I need.

Once I have imported all my shots, I usually have a fair bit. In this case, 609 images. I select the “split-view option” so I can see the individual images in detail and see the images before and after them in the browser below. At this point I am viewing the images rated “unrated or better” which means all the shots are on the screen.

As you can see, a lot of them are very similar. I won’t send all these shots, just the very best of them as the guys at Lonely Planet wouldn’t have much love for me if I sent dozens of images of the same thing that differed only very slightly. If, for example, I’m looking at photos of a temple guard, I will look at the best of them together, see which one is best in terms of lighting, colour focus etc and send just 3-4 images if I have some different angles, if not, just the strongest shot. To get the strongest shot I just look at each image along a similar theme and compare them, when I find the shots I like, I click on them to bring up my options and then give them a rating of “***” which has no meaning attached to it, it’s just an arbitrary way for me to separate the wheat from the chaff as it were.

Once I have went through all my shots and rated them, I then select to only show images with a rating of “***” and the amount of photos I have to work through are drastically reduced. For this edit, I plan to use about 200 shots from the 609 best, but for the example here I only selected about 10 images with a “***” rating.

First off, I go through all the images and edit them. For this, I crop or straighten them if I have to, then I have to view the image at actual size to see if there are any dust spots on the sensor. Despite the canon EOS 5D mk II having a sensor cleaner (or any other DSLR for that matter) you don’t always get a 100% clean image, so I scan the image to select and eliminate the pesky little specks with the retouch brush. You’ll see one in the 3rd shot down just slightly down to the right of the brush icon. All you do is select the size of brush you need to cover the speck, put the brush over the speck and then it works it out as you will see in the 4th shot down. Brilliant.

After I’ve done that, I click on the adjustments toolbar to give me my editing options and then I will check if I need to adjust white balance, exposure,recovery, brightness or anything in the colours section. For Lonely Planet, I can’t adjust noise reduction, sharpness, highlights, shadows, contrast, definition or the likes. If I adjust any the initial variables I mentioned I can only change them slightly as well, so there isn’t much scope for making a bad pic look good, if it’s not good in the first place, I can’t use it so I won’t waste my time.

For the sake of making the example easy, I selected the blue colour in the background of the photo with the dropper tool in the colour section which automatically puts the exact same colour into my adjustment options and then I increased saturation and reduced luminance to show you what Aperture can do. As well as doing this for the image as a whole, Aperture 3 lets you adjust specific areas on your image with the new upgraded brushes section which is brilliant when there is only a little bit of the image needing changed.

Once I’ve been through all the images and edited them, I then go back through them all one by one whilst checking the metadata is OK and add in my captions.

After all this is done, I go through all my images again to make sure they are all up to standard, do one final check over all my captions as I inevitably make some spelling mistakes and once I am satisfied, I export all my images as 8-bit Tiff files to my portable HDD. Then finally burn them to disk and send them off by mail to Lonely Planet. I always get good feedback on my edits and my captions, so I guess I must be doing it half right. To be honest, I am not the most technical guy in the world, I know what I have to do to get the images I need up to standard, but if you asked me to use photo shop to adjust layers and the likes I wouldn’t be much good…until I maybe had a while to study it anyway.