These days, your Photoshop skills are just as important as your photo-taking abilities when it comes to producing that attention-grabbing shot.
In fact, some pictures are only made interesting at all thanks to the help of the photo-editing tool.
To highlight the ability of Photoshop to dramatically alter a picture, internationally published photographer Peter Stewart – who has thousands of followers and millions of views – has created a series of ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots.
The Photoshop mastermind tellingly shows how much of a difference clever and strategic editing can make, breaking down exactly how the original photo was altered. He uses a technique referred to as bracketed multiple exposure, which enables him to retain highlight details from different photographs before stacking them together into one unique picture.
“I like to approach my digital photography with a certain sense of the fantastical and the surreal,” Stewart has said.
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“The majority of my editing is though Photoshop, with the process starting in Adobe CameraRAW,” says Stewart. “I’ll take each of my bracketed exposures and make my initial adjustments there to things like color temperature, saturation, highlight/shadow detail and perspective correction.”
As the before and after shot samples are specifically meant to highlight the scope of Photoshop’s capabilities, he says he has deliberately provided the most dramatic examples.
Check out how drastically his Photoshop skills transform these raw, straight-from-camera images:
All photos courtesy of Peter Stewart.
Editing: HDR bracketing manually blended in Photoshop. Nik Color Efex Pro used for post-production color enhancements:
Editing: 2x Exposures manually blended in Photoshop. Perspective fixed in CameraRAW. Color adjustments made using Nik Color Efex Pro and VSCO. Replacement sky composited into final image:
Editing: HDR bracketing manually blended in Photoshop. Nik Color Efex Pro used for post-production color and exposure enhancements:
Editing:HDR bracketing composited using Photoshop’s ‘Merge to HDR’. Nik Color Efex Pro used for post-production color enhancements. Mt Fuji composited in using an earlier ‘clearer’ exposure:
Editing: Single raw image copied twice then flipped and cut diagonally, then masked to create a seamless join. Image then brightened to reveal detail. Selective Color used to bring out the reds in the walls and blues for the windows. Composite sky added. Final color grade added and color noise reduction performed:
Editing: Color temperature adjustment using Adobe cameraraw:
Editing: Various sky adjustments performed in Photoshop. Nik Color Efex Pro used for post-production color enhancements. Various dodge and burning in Photoshop:
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