Steve Cole Photography

Recently I had someone complement me on my snow photos and ask me about my processing. While I don’t consider myself any sort of expert on the matter, I decided to share my workflow techniques.

Virtually all my photos are shot using a tripod and the 2 second mirror lockup mode (which prevents vibration and increases sharpness). I also use a circular polarizer since I’m usually taking photos of flowing water and looking to portray the water with soft flow. In these snowy situations, I usually use either SHADE or CLOUDY for my white balance setting. I do seem to alternate between the two because sometimes the SHADE setting added some warmness to the scene that I didn’t like (or observe in real life).

Due to how camera meters are designed, they typically underexpose in snow conditions. Despite this fact, I intentionally try to underexpose. Why? Well, I’d rather have the ability to recover highlights from the RAW [image] file instead of being stuck with a scene that’s blown out and unrecoverable. When I’m out taking photos, I pay attention to the EV Bar on my camera. My usual goal is to take a picture where the indicator lies two ticks left of center on the EV Bar. For my photography, this usually results in a fairly quick post-processing of the RAW file.

Once back home, the majority of my post processing is handled by Pentax’s Photo Lab program [a RAW file editing program made by Silky Pix]. 99% of the time, all I do is verify my choice for a white balance setting and adjust the curve to brighten the image but still keep the detail. I don’t go too overboard here because Photoshop Elements has easier & quicker tools to help brighten just the dark areas. Here’s an example RAW image opened up in Photo Lab prior to any adjustments:

In this situation, I decided to change the White Balance from SHADE to CLOUDY. The next step is adjusting the curve to correct the exposure. The two point curve adjustment shown here is very typical of my adjustment. The 1st adjustment point I add is located in the lower left corner of the graph area. This brings up the brightness most of the way without losing too much detail. The second adjustment point added is located in the upper right of the graph. When the point is moved down into this basic curve position, it reduces the contrast (i.e. “dulls” the overall image) a bit but also helps retain some of the detail found in the bright snow areas. If this point is dragged to the right, it will increase the “dulling” effect whereas movement to the left slightly increases the contrast.

I seem to be doing this less at the moment (probably because it is winter) but sometimes I move the extreme right-hand slider (triangle at extreme right end of X axis) back towards the left in order to brighten the images BEFORE adding curve points. If the image is REALLY dark, I’ll move it two divisions left (a slider value of 192) but mostly it will probably be just one division (value of 224). Conversely (and in this specific example), I’ve notched the lower slide up a few values to knock the brightness down just a tad. Here’s the post-processed version:

This is basically all I do in Photo Lab so from here, I export the adjustments as a high quality JPEG. The very last step would be any applicable touch up work in Photoshop Elements. After fixing anything such as a specs of dust, I might brighten the darker areas using the Adjust Lighting->Shadow/Highlights Tool. Of course it depends on the photo but I never brighten the shadow areas by more than 25% (typically it might be closer to 10-15%).

Two weeks ago, I was out taking photos in the snow (recap here) and came across a situation where I did my normal processing on a couple photos but the finished images were still a bit too grey & dull. Someone suggested an alternate processing method which uses the Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) plugin for Photoshop Elements. It turns out to be a fairly simple adjustment and worked well. The adjustment uses the Exposure Slider. The default is zero (no change) but when I bumped the exposure up to 1.5 and the contrast slider up to 50%, I really liked the results:

In writing this blog, I came across the following article on Canon’s website that’s pretty informative about this topic.

Anyways, hope this information helps!