Enhancement Techniques

Randy Hufford shows enhancement techniques that make the print look great.

Okay, here we go with enhancement techniques. I’m going to show you some real easy ways to take typical files that come in and we make the prints look spectacular. Real simple steps that make your output look better than anybody else’s. First thing we’re going to start with is a commercial application job. This is a job we did for the Meriot, and from a lot of agencies, a lot of type of commercial clients say supplied PDF4S. With the PDF I bring in to bridge, and I open with Photoshop. And what I’m going to do is cauterize that to the size that I may have want to the output that I’m looking for. So what you do is in bridge you right click on the image, and you specify open with Photoshop CS4, and it brings up your import PDF page. My aim for sizes are around to 100 megabyte, so I normally with typically build this. I move my resolution till I typically build this at around 100 megabyte. 60 to 100 megabyte is the typical size I build this. The reason you want to open your PDF into Photoshop is for you have your controls to make adjustments to make the file look its best. First thing I’m going to do is at this file opens up as SRGB a meter sign it to Adobe RGB under my color assign profile turn into an Adobe RGB file because I’m going to have more color again with then again as you print the file a little bit width. Notice the difference between SRGB and Adobe archive already my greens, and my blues looks substantially better. So I want to make it for my files. A lot of times customers when we see Y K files and SRGB files I may convert everything to Adobe RGB because that gives me the most colored gambit, the most amount of colors where I can get the best looking print. So now that I’ve converted that to an Adobe RGB. The first thing I’m going to do to this image is I’m going to make a selection of the top half of the image, and I’m going to do an adjustment layered to it. And I’m going to use vibrant, difference such as in vibrant and saturation, vibrant gives a much better look and it will not turn skin tones. If you happen to have skin tones in image it won’t make the skin tone a quick to sun burn. Look at the difference I get on my greens, my blues that’s a little bit too much, but somewhere in this range, and I will go to my layer palette and I’ll show you before and after. Just set one simple little technique makes my prints with the Meriot when they get output go wow! The prints I get from you always pop in and such good deep saturation they’re so rich. They have dimension to him and this simple technique of using the vibrantsy I would see is I applied about 95% of all of our images. It’s a real powerful tool. And I just did the vibrantsy the top half of the picture because I didn’t really want to change their logo on their background, so that’s a real powerful tool. The next thing that we do to a majority of all of our files almost every file we’re going to apply smart sharpening too. So I might view this in at actual pixels a 100% and I’m going to bring out make sure we’re on our background layer, and the filter that we like to use is filter sharpen, smart sharpen. For commercial application what I’m going to do is zoom in to these mountains, so the coconut trees, so I can see the detailing of the building, and you can see that it looks like this is a little bit too much because it’s adding a little too much glow to it. What I find is that you can over sharpen this little bit, and what I’m doing is I’m making my radius be between five to one is where my radius says, okay. And my amount I may do in anywhere from a 100 to 500. And what I’m looking for is when it just at the point where I’m not getting the glow around all the images and the elements. And I’m go on before after before because I’m just getting just a little bit of white lines around that, so I’m going to turn that down just maybe 1a—. So smart sharpen where your radius I’m always using my lens blur, my radius is between .5 and one, and the best way to do it is just turn it one to five, one to .5 and look at it. What radius is doing is looking out how far out from each pixels is increase in the contrast because that what sharpening is doing is actually increasing the contrast between the pixels, and the amount is how much you want to have that done. And I’m going to actually make it look just a touch more than I really would want it to look like. Another words, I’m just going to see just a little bit of a glow around it, but I’m not going to see as much as this see there are white glow that’s been added from the contrast, so we’re at 180 look really good for this image. So that’s the tool that we’re almost always using on every file.