Giving a photo the finishing touch is a science of its own. We’d like to share our approach to this process and give an insight in how usage of the camera’s built in RAW format can ease the whole process of color and lens correction. We are starting from a non-corrected photo (see image above, “before”).

In order to ensure maximum quality, it is crucially that you work with images that are bigger than your intended result. We always work on the Hi-Res picture and wait until the very end of our process to shrink it down. Keep in mind that the final sharpness of your image depends on the way Photoshop scales the pixels: use “Bicubic Sharper (best for reduction)” as resampling method. It includes a high-performance sampling algorithm keeping hard edges way better than the other resampling methods.
See the difference!

To support the focal point of our picture, a simple vignette effect becomes handy. The probably fastest and easiest way to do that is the Lens Correction filter grouped under the distortion filters. Change the vignette amount to a negative value.

To push it back a bit, we used the Fade method in the Edit menu. ‘Fade’ offers the ability of changing the blendmode and opacity of the last applied filter (as well as brushes or any other history step). Personally, I like my vignette grungy and colorful, so I change the blending mode to ‘Overlay’.

To boost the contrast, we prefer to use an exposure layer rather than the brightness/contrast option because the light manipulation is much more precise and closer to the light handling of a camera’s aperture. Additionally, the layer is a good choice because it keeps the changes editable. There are no perfect settings for the exposure, as they depend entirely on your shot.

To enhance the realistic (or intense) look of an image you will definitely want to add a grain to it. Create a new layer and color it white, then add a simple noise (Filter > Noise > Add Noise…).

The issue with the normal noise filter is that it won’t generate chunks of different sizes like a natural grain would have. To work around that problem, we simply copy the noise layer multiple times and scale it up. To reduce the blurriness resulted from the upscaling it’s best to play around with the levels.

To curb the biggest noise, create a layer mask for it, apply a clouds filter and change the layer mode to Vivid Light.

Using a curves layer, we boost the blue and green channels to give the image a cooler mood.

I like to make use of curves because, opposing to other tinting/color correction methods, curves also change the hue and saturation of the steps from anti-aliasing, which gives a crispier look.

As a final step, we add a photo filter layer on top to clip the whites.

To achieve a similar effect with your RAW Image is way easier. A RAW image is the digital equivalent to a film negative. It contains all the information from the image but is not yet processed by the camera.

Below are my default settings from the camera. Most of the important steps are accessible right here. We started with the temperature and tint values. To create our blue look we turned the temperature down to 3700° Calvin and the tint to +1.

We played around with the sliders until we were satisfied with the results.

In our next step we are setting the tone curves. You find them in the second tab. We wanted to have a very high contrast. Since the picture is very dark already, we just had to increase the lights.

For the vignette go straight to the sixth tab. Every camera has the ability to store information about its lens’ vignette effect. Many cameras suppress it automatically, but if you actually WANT to get a vignette, the information is still stored in the picture, being manipulated using the lens vignetting sliders. Note that there are more vignette sliders underneath that, but they just create an artificial vignette, while the sliders above use the lens’ original vignette artifacts.

Below are the two versions we just made. On the left side is the JPEG version, on the right one is the RAW version.

Download the Hi-Res package with the source files here.

Jake & Dan

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