From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

964 Combining the best of JPEG and raw

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

964 Combining the best of JPEG and raw

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland, Welcome to Deke's Techniques. So I love shooting photographs with my phone. Not JPEGs but RAW DNG files. Now, currently I happen to have an iPhone X which totally supports 14-bit per channel DNG files. The one caveat is that you have to use a third party app. I happen to like Halide, but Lightroom works as well. And so I took this photograph last year, a colony of Gentoo penguins on Cuverville Island off Antarctica. My iPhone, could be an Android device, captured a raw DNG file along with a JPEG. The DNG file gives me far more room to edit but the JPEG looked better right off the bat. Problem was, for the life of me, I could not figure out how to edit the DNG to match the JPEG. And as things stand now, Adobe does not provide camera matching profiles for iOS or Android devices. So I was left with one option: combine the best of the JPEG version of the photograph, along with the DNG. How did I do it? Well, it involves some layer masking. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right so here I am inside Adobe bridge looking at three variations on a single photograph. The first is a result of combining the best of the JPEG and raw versions of the image inside Photoshop. And then next we have the JPEG file and the raw DNG both captured with an iPhone 10. Now, in the case of the DNG file I had to use a third-party app, that I very much recommend actually, known as halide. And so to compare these two photographs I'll click on one and shift click on the other and then I'll press the space bar in order to enter the full screen mode. And so here's the bright, cheerful, JPEG version of the photo, and here's the very murky raw DNG. Now the interesting thing is that the sky is lighter in the DNG file and the foreground with the penguins is darker. And so somehow the iPhone 10 software went ahead and darkened the sky and brightened the penguins all at the same time. And so what would be great is if Adobe provided a camera matching profile so I could automatically set this raw DNG file to look like the JPEG. Problem is, as you can see on this Adobe page, camera's supported by camera raw. Where Apple devices are concerned, his camera matching profile column reads a bunch of nos and that's not only true for my iPhone 10 but for all the other Apple devices as well. And as I record this, this is true for all Android devices as well. And so notice if I return to bridge and double click on that DNG file in order to open camera raw hosted inside Photoshop. And then I'll go over to this profile option and click on the Browns profiles Icon. Camera matching, at least for me is automatically expanded. However, I'm just seeing this default thumbnail which does nothing. And so what I need to do is open this raw image inside Photoshop as an editable smart object. And you can do that by clicking on this down arrow head next to the open button and choosing open as object or you can just press and hold the shift key in order to convert the button to open object and click on it. And I want you to see that I've already opened the JPEG file in advance. And so I'm going to switch to the raw image and armed with the rectangular marquee tool up here at the top of the toolbox. I'll right click inside the image window and choose duplicate layer. And then I'll name this layer iPhone 10 underscore 2455, because that was the name that the iPhone automatically assigned it. And then I'll change the document to that JPEG file and I'll click okay. Now, if you're working along with me and you get a profile mismatch, don't worry about it. Just click Okay. All right, now you can close the DNG file and click no here on the PC, that would be, don't save on the Mac. Don't need to save the image because it's already combined with the JPEG file. All right, now I'm going to turn off that raw image layer here inside the layers panel. And the reason I'm doing it is notice this region up in the top right corner. It's got a lot of blown highlights and to see exactly what that looks like, you want to go to the layer menu choose new adjustment layer and choose levels. That way you'll be able to name the layer as you create it. And I'm going to go ahead and call this guy tester and click okay. And now I'll drag out the properties tab. So I have a floating panel. I'll go ahead and hide any other panel that may appear on screen. And now notice inside the properties panel that we have this big histogram and you can change its size by dragging this bottom right corner and notice over here on the far right side of the histogram, that we have a ton of blown highlights. To see where they are, press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac and drag that slider triangle back to 255. So we're really just trying to click and hold on it. And you can see all of these blown highlights in the sky and in the clouds and in the snow. So that we have a couple of penguin silhouettes right here as well as these blown highlights inside the blue channel along the ridges of the mountain. And finally, we have a bunch of dots inside the penguins. And so we need to repair that using the raw image. Now just so you can see that we do have some blown highlights where the raw image is concerned, I'll go ahead and press and hold the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click and hold on the white triangle. And you can see that this region of snow is blown and everything else looks just great. All right, so what I'm going to do is double click on the thumbnail for that raw image layer in order to open it inside camera raw. And then I'll just go ahead and expand the basic panel right here. I'm not interested in changing any of the white balance settings. In fact, I'm going to drop all the way down to this White's value and take it down to zero which will help with the blown highlights. We'll still have some in that region of snow. And now I'll tab my way down to the clarity value. And what I want to do is enhance the contrast in the sky. And so I'm going to take that value up to 60 which helps as you can see. It doesn't do enough, however, so I'll tab to the Dehaze value and I'll increase it to plus 30. And now you can see, we have a lot of contrast in the sky at least where the luminance is concerned. It's still a little drab color wise. And so I'll tab down to the vibrance value and take it up to plus 30, and then I'll tab to the saturation value and take it up to a plus 20. That's it. Now I'll go ahead and click Okay. In order to update that Ron smart object here inside Photoshop. All right, now I want to add a layer mask and that way I can combine the best of the raw image up here in the clouds and mountaintop, along with the best of the JPEG image, where these penguins are concerned. And so I'll go ahead and turn that raw image back on and I'll drop down to the add layer mask icon. And instead of clicking on it I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click in order to add a new black layer mask which is going to hide the contents of that layer. All right, now we want to do a little brushwork. And so go ahead and select the brush tool which you can get by pressing the Biki. And then I'll right click inside the image window so that you can see that the hardness value is 0%. That's very important and I've cranked the size value up to 700 pixels at which point, press the enter key or the return key on a Mac in order to dismiss that panel. And then I'll tap the D key. D for default colors so that my foreground color is white. As you can see down here at the bottom of the toolbox and now I'll go ahead and zoom out just a little bit so I can see the entire image and I'll paint inside that layer mask around the sky. So you want to make sure you include all of the sky like so, and then down into the mountains and into those top penguins, that is the few penguins in the top, right region of the image. And if you want to make sure that you've gotten everything right then you can press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click on the thumbnail for the layer mask in order to view the layer mask independently of the image. So you can see it's white at the top, black at the bottom and we have this softness in between, and I'll just go ahead and paint a little more in the top left region of the image and then I'll click on a smart object thumbnail in order to bring back the full color image like so. All right, I'll just go ahead and zoom in so that we can test out that image to make sure it's in good shape. I'll go ahead and select the tester layer. And then here inside the properties panel I'll press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click and hold on that white slider triangle. We've got the blown highlights inside the snow, nothing to do about that. We also have these pinprick highlights in the regions occupied by the penguins. If you want to make those highlights go away, then click on the thumbnail for the layer mask and then return to the properties panel. You should see this density value right here, in which case clicking it and take it down from a hundred percent to 90% like so, and then switch back to the tester layer and press the alt key or the option key on the Mac and click and hold on that white slider triangle. And you should see some blown highlights here inside the snow, but all those pinprick highlights have gone away. All right, I'll go ahead and turn off the tester layer because we don't need it anymore. You could throw it away for all that. And then I'll click on the background just to make it active. And I'll go ahead and drag the properties panel back over here into this column of icons and now press shift Def to switch to the full screen mode. And I'll go ahead and zoom on in. Scroll down a little bit as well, so that we can see a combination of the best of a raw version of the image. Along with the JPEG here inside Photoshop. If you're a member of LinkedIn learning I have a followup movie in which I show you how to match the Detail. That is to say the sharpness and the noise of a raw photograph in order to match its JPEG counterpart. I know, sounds exciting but it's even more exciting than that. Deke's techniques each and every week, keep watching.

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