Post Production of a Low Light Photography

In this digital photography tutorial we look at the retouching techniques used in a low light photograph

Okay, the first thing to do on this image is to get a—I should say, duplicate a background layer and rename it, something like spotted or retouch. And we’re going to grab the navigator tool and zoom in to the image at to a 100% which is the most you need to worry about really I mean others are not really worth worrying about. And just paste this zoom across your image by dragging and holding down the space bar and dragging across, and you basically is looking for anything any bits of dust. There’s a bit here so we can grab our patch tool or a healing brush tool or even the clone stamp tool. I’ll use the patch tool here and just about to see it, you are just going to draw around it and then just do that just get rid of that. Basically, you just want to scroll around the image, back across and just look for anything that shouldn’t be there in the image. Also worth going down, I’m just looking for any cigarettes, certain thing like that that might be polluting the picture on the floor or any else you want take out. So that’s the first step, it’s just go over the image at a 100% and just cleaning up any mess that might be in there. Now on this side of the image, you’ll notice there is a streak which is actually some car head lamps, a car drove past while I was making the exposure and that’s what that this. Now if you want to get rid of that, what we can do is get the clone tool and what we’ll do first is highlight the layer, we’ll just get a marquee—rectangle marquee tool and just draw a rectangle, oops, we’re getting there, around there like so, take a bit more than you need, do command, see the copy, command v to paste and that just paste that but we need our separate layer. What we’d do is highlight this tree and I’d link them, reason being is quite easy just to knock that layer out of registration and causes yourself a few problems so best to let them off. And then we just need to zoom in, get the clone stamp tool, hold on the alt key to make a sample and just go over the affected area. Make sure that you set key moving the sample point so you don’t get any kind of repetition which is a give away that you’d been using this the clone stamp tool and we just want to work our way along here and just get rid if that, that’s if things like that annoy you, it can be real distractive. There are things we could have done we just carry on doing that. One thing we could do is once we’ve built up the image, we could obviously darken this down a bit but I’m sure that there will still be stuff showing through. So we need to carry on doing that and once we’ve gone over it a little bit, we can go back here and just find two in it just bring some of these leaves back up into shots, like so. Just make sure it looks a bit more realistic and we’ll carry on going along there until that’s finished. I guess I’ll be working along this, I’ll just turn off one current layer and see where I’ve gone over. I’m going to show you how I’ve got around some of these awkward bits. I’ve got my, let’s just rename this ‘CloningHedge’ so we know how that’s called. So what we’d do here, also you can’t get around all these bits it would just be a little awkward we do the best we can but I just want that we’d have to go over it. So what I’d advice you to do is just to get the clone tool and just alt click the set or sample point and just go over this and not worry too much for now. And then what we should do, go back and I’m going to close it in a second. I’ll say, another thing we can do is get the lasso tool and we’ve got large area, sometimes it’s better just to select that area and then just drag that selection to an area to source from, make sure you’ve got enough area to work from if we have on this from my selection. Command c, command v, which is the copy and then the paste and then you move the move tool, just drag that into place and that saves us doing too much clearing work. We can then just layer and merge down onto the clearing hedge right there. And what we can do here now is, I’m just going to get some cut off, is to go on with the clone tool and just clean some of this up. What you might need to do is to change the hardness and just harden the edge up for some of these images for cloning. So just select one of the bits of foliage there and then just drag up. I’m just trying to do a realistic clone to the tops of those—the reeds or something or grass or whatever they are, we just try we don’t want them chopped off abruptly. We want to try and make sure they look quite realistic. There’s one there which is basically nothing, so we just go with it like that. I will see a little bit of artistic interpretations needed, you can draw in or clone in but as you see—like I said, I just want it to become realistic. We’re viewing this at 167% at the moment so we can full it to come out to 100% actual pixels. And that’s what you’re going to see when printed. That is a 100% and I think you’ll see there’s a little bit here, I’ll just do a minute. This has got chopped off. So again the clone tool, hold on an alt key and just try and make a realistic clone and give them a new top to them, like so. Again, zoom back at 100% and just have a look and that looks much better. So here’s before and after it takes a bit of the distraction, the image there and we’ve reconstructed the hedge. Again, later on we may darken this, you’ll probably wonder why the hell did I bother go to that extreme but it’s better to get it right and I’d rather know I have done it properly.