Eldorado Springs seen from Lookout near Highway
I made this card as part of a editing process for Caitlin Cartmell (Insta) to show her some tips and tricks. She’s fairly new to photo editing so I’m helping out a bit by showing her what she could do. I might have taken it a step to far for now but I love to show you the end result which is the Postcard from the Edge.
Start from scratch
She mailed me the RAW files trough Gmail and Drive.
A RAW file from a Nikon camera is named NEF (Nikon Electronic Format)
These are unprocessed pictures so they look very flat in colour and contrast. I do most of my editing in Lightroom (LR) as this is designed for a quick workflow, has a great database and many more options which I won’t discuss all here. There is however one that I would like to point out as this is a great use of Google Maps.
The Map function in Lightroom. Every picture that has a GPS code will automatically been shown on the map. If pictures are without a GPS code you can manually drag and drop them on the map.and LR will add the GPS code. If you have external GPS tracker the map function can synchronise the GPS track with your pictures taken and add the GPS code at the time the picture was taken.
Lightroom can do 'reverse geocoding’, which means on basis of the GPS it will look up Sublocation (if there is any), City, State/Province, Country/Region, ISO Country Code, and it can also look up the altitude of the place. All these become searchable Metadata for the database.
Back to editing
The RAW file is very flat of colour as it’s just what the camera registered. If you have a JPG the camera did make a lot of choices on how to develop the picture. So what need to be done is Develop the picture to give it some colour and contrast. A great benefit of having the RAW file is you have all the info available to get the best end result.
What I did first was crop the standard camera size picture to a ratio of 16:9, this is what most screens and phones have. I think it’s a great ratio also for landscape pictures. The large picture down here is the unprocessed RAW file.
So next to the resize to 16:9 ratio I darkened the highlights, that made the clouds appear in the picture. Gave it more contrast (mountains get more depth and shadow/highlights) and gave it more vibrance to boost the colours. This was to show to Caitlin Cartmell (Insta) how I would have developed the picture.
After that I decided to take it a step further I opened the colour picture in the Silver Efex Pro 2 plug in (this was was freeware for some time from Google). I turned the picture in to B/W and chose the torn edge to give it a nostalgic feel. I than took it back to LR and decided to see if a Duotone would look good. I chose a yellowish tint for all highlights and a blueish one for all shadow parts. The end result is the small picture on the right.
To make it into a postcard I played a bit with text in Photoshop until I found some letter type that would fit the picture. Than I looked for a handwriting type to have her name written on the picture (corner right under), She was very happy with the result and loved the Duotone version.
Let me know what you like best or what you might have done differently. I be happy to hear other opinions.
Also let Caitlin know if you like the picture she took.