How I process my photos

Just to satisfy the curious, this is how I process my photos. Doesn't take more than a minute or two - though some of my dingo shots have been re-processed unknown amounts of time - it's just so much fun :)

Let's begin with this beautiful furball above.

Here's the raw file viewed in Bibble Pro 4.10 - observe that the histogram is mostly to the left, with a speckling of highlights. None of the highlights are blown in this shot.

Next, I bring up the exposure so that the highlights are about the clip. A little bit of clipping in the unimportant highlights is fine with me.

Next. I apply contrast to taste. Sometimes in contrasty scenes, I don't even apply contrast. In this case, it was pretty low contrast, so I hit it up to 0.5.

Hmm this next part is hard to explain. I am using a plugin for bibble pro, called Ansel Pro. It allows one to shift the histogram based on the "zones" of the photo. Here, I've lifted the lower two zones upwards, in order to boost the dark areas. There is no masking involved, just very clever maths.

Next, I apply a "film look curve" to the scene. Please visit this website for more details:
http://www.prime-junta.net/pont/How_to/100_Curves_and_Films/_Curves_and_films.html?page=2

Next, I increase the saturation to taste. Again, I'm using one of the plugins for bibble for this, called Sadie Pro, as it has a different way of increasing the saturation.

Next, apply vignetting to the photo. Lens distortion is usually left off, as the 70-200 and 300/4 (and my 55/2.8 when I use it) are distortion free in practical use :)

Finally add in the film look border that everyone hates :)

Here's a 100% crop of the head, to check out how the D300 performs at iso640. This is with noise reduction on, btw. Only the chroma noise was removed, luma is untouched. Metering was spot, on the grass, manual mode.

Also, notice that I haven't played with the sharpening for this image; for shots that I wish to print out large, I will use Sharpie Pro, a special sharpening plugin in bibble for sharpening. It kicks ass :)

Till next time :)

GW