A lot of people ask for tutorials in various situations, and while I have tried to create (and will continue creating) a variety of different tutorials, at the end of the day, most of my tutorials follow the same, basic process and workflow.
Below, I’ve listed most of the steps that I follow… however, I don’t follow EVERY step in EVERY photo. You will need to know your way around Lightroom & Lightroom masking features, and know how to mask in Photoshop in order to follow this tutorial.
Generally, the workflow is:
- Adjust White Balance in Lightroom
- Slight Global adjustments to lower highlights and raise shadows
- Remove fringing if needed
- Maybe change HSL if there are strong greens
- Selective editing in Lightroom using radial filters to:
- Brighten the dog
- Add clarity and texture to the dog
- Work on the eyes as a whole, catchlights separately, darken pupils if needed
- Remove colour casts
- Lower distractions in the scene, eg., bright highlights, too dark areas, too colourful areas and so on
- Moving into Photoshop as a smart object, creating a New Smart Object via Copy
- Doing any “fixing”/tidying up with clone stamp, healing spot brush, composition changes (generally not cropping in yet unless very sure!), fixing/brushing over bright highlights and so on
- Any kind of blur effects (rarely used, but sometimes to make the bokeh a bit “melty”)
- High pass filter for sharpening
- Bring in other layers to make a panorama
- Copy & Flip background if needed
- Content aware fill, content aware crop, etc (rasterised version of our original layer needed)
- Shape the light using curves layers, depending on the original light direction, where the dog is looking, and composition of the image
- Colour grading using selective colour layers, maybe a gradient layer
- “Finishing touches” which could but must not always include:
- Gradients on radial to create separation from the background
- Dodge and burn/contouring using curves layers
- Remove colour casts on the dog
- Fix distractions eg., too much saturation in areas
- Adding more contrast
- Adding more drama
- Adding overlays
- Save and return to Lightroom to check the histogram and make sure I’ve used the whole light range (unless it’s a specifically dark and dangerous photo)
- Raise exposure a little if needed
- Add denoise if needed