Back in August I posted a photo of our dog, Jodie and suggested in the comments that I discuss my post processing technique. Well better late than never – here’s a “before and after” and a description of my post processing steps.

Here is the after image:

And the before:

I shoot RAW and all of my images are processed and catalogued in Lightroom 1.4.1. So this “before” image is actually after the RAW conversion, but I’m generally only doing basic processing in Lightroom to get the most information out of the RAW file before taking it into Photoshop CS3 to finish it off.

I wasn’t happy with the amount of detail in Jodie’s head, so I firstly ran the shadow/highlight tool to regain some detail. As I do with most adjustments I did this on a duplicate layer with a layer mask and painted in the areas I wanted to gain more detail. I use a Wacom A5 wide tablet, which makes this process a dream:

I then ran an action I’ve created, which has become the starting point for most of my images. It firstly creates another duplicate layer (using “merge visible”) and then Unsharp Mask with the settings Amount: 20%, Radius: 50 pixels, which adds some local contrast to the image. It then adds a curves adjustment layer with a gentle s-curve …

…and a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer with +10 saturation. The curves layer opacity was reduced to 20%. It helps the image to ‘pop’:

Next I wanted to enhance her eyes by adding some selective sharpening, saturation and contrast. For this I run an action I made called “Crystal Eyes”, which creates a duplicate layer and runs Smart Sharpen with the following settings Amount: 200%, Radius: 1.3 pixels. The saturation was increased by +30 and contrast added by a gentle s-curve in a curves adjustment. I then painted the layer masks to enhance areas I wanted with sharpness, saturation and contrast. Here’s a 100% crop of the right eye, before and after:

You can clearly see my reflection in her eye too!

Another favourite action I’ve created is one that adds a soft glow to the image. It duplicates the current image into a new layer, runs a Gaussian Blur at 15 pixels, changes the blend mode to overlay and then the opacity of the layer can be adjusted to suit the image – in this case 41%.

Nearly finished – the final step was to add a vignette using a curves layer adjustment to darken the midtones…

…and a Gaussian blur at 3.5 pixels with a layer mask to apply the affect around the edges of the image:

That’s how I processed the image; reasonably subtle changes, which I hope you agree enhances the finished photograph. Hopefully this will be helpful to someone. Let me know if you have any questions or if you’d like to see more posts like this in the comments below.