Copyright Peter West Carey

It’s time to offer up another photo for your critique and edits.  This month’s photo will have some variety, I’m sure.  The finished product in this case ended up being a panoramic photo (above, click for original size), but there are many options for your cropping pleasures with the original file, found here(Warning: 12MB download).  The original is a Canon RAW file from a 5D (.cr2) and should be openable in most versions of photo editing software.  If not, here are two articles on DPS describing the freely distributed GIMP photo editing software and UFRaw, used to convert RAW images.  As a member of the DPS community, you are free to download the photo and edit it anyway you wish, posting your results here for all to see.  Please do not distribute the photo outside of DPS.

Along with posting your final edit, please also post a bit of the tale on how it came to be.  Which program did you use and what kind of edits were needed?  This type of critique is most valuable when there are more descriptions of what was changed so we can all learn from each other.  I look forward to what your editing mind develops!!

In my case, I used Photoshop Lightroom 2.5 for my edits.  The image was first ‘leveled’ and then cropped accordingly.  I upped the exposure by half a stop (it was shot intentionally at -1 1/3 to help ensure the glaciers did not get blown out) and increased the contrast to +41.  Highlight recovery was adjusted to +21 to bring just a bit of detail into the snow and ice while black clipping was set to +8 for a sharper feel.  Clarity was moved to +45, Vibrance +24 and just a bit of sharpening.  I used the Adjustment Brush to mask off the upper and right third of the blue sky and increase exposure by one stop.  Lastly, I changed three colors’ luminance values: yellow +43, red +36 and green +36 to bring out colors in the flags.

Photoshop CS4 RAW: Using Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop to Get the Most out of Your Digital Camera by Mikkel Aaland
| Number Of Pages: 224 |  PDF | 20 Mb
The RAW file format is the uncompressed data file captured by a digital camera’s electronic sensor. When your camera saves an image in RAW format, settings like white balance, sharpening, contrast and saturation are not applied to the image but are saved instead in a separate header. Because RAW files remain virtually untouched by in-camera processing, they are essentially the digital equivalent to exposed but undeveloped film.
This makes RAW an increasingly popular format with amateur and professional digital photographers, because it affords greater flexibility and control during the editing process-if you know how to work with RAW files.

Most digital camera manufacturers supply their own software for converting RAW data, as do some third party vendors. Increasingly, however, the RAW converter of choice is a plug-in included in the latest version of Adobe Photoshop, the most popular and widely-used digital image editing tool in the world. Adobe Photoshop CS4 is emerging as the best place to edit RAW images, and the best way to master this new format is with Photoshop CS4 RAW.

An important book dedicated to working with RAW in Photoshop, this comprehensive guide features a unique design that helps readers grasp the subject through visual instruction and prompts. The entire RAW process is explored, from shooting to using the Adobe plug-in converter and new Bridge navigation software. The primary focus of Photoshop RAW is, as the title suggests, Photoshop editing technique: automating RAW workflow, correcting exposures, extending exposure range, manipulating grayscale and working with the new DNG (Digital Negative) open standard that Adobe supports.

Presented by photographer Mikkel Aaland, a pioneer of digital photography and author of eight books, including O’Reilly’s Photoshop for the Web and the award-winning Shooting Digital, Photoshop CS4 RAW investigates and instructs in an accessible visual style. Required reading for professionals and dedicated photo hobbyists alike.
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A Guest Post by Jodi Friedman of MCP Actions:Your shortcut to better photographs.

As a photographer you shoot in Raw or Jpeg, or sometimes both. Then you edit. You may start in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw, but eventually you may end up in Photoshop doing more detailed editing of your photographs.  In time, you come up with the “perfect” edit. Now it is time to save. What do you do? Do you save as a PSD, Tiff, Jpeg, Gif, Png or something else?

Here are a few of the most common formats and why you may or may not want to use them: