The aftermath of a mass pillow fight, seen from a room in the Financial District’s Hyatt Regency hotel.

Early morning fog sits between the span of the Bay Bridge and the waters below.

Here’s the first of a new series I’m thinking about: Photoshop before & after. I’ll pick a photo and show how it looked straight out of the camera vs. the finished product, then explain what was done.

This photo of the Golden Gate Bridge was made last February from the Marin Headlands. We were extremely fortunate to have clear skies and great weather on the night we headed across the bridge the see the bridge and skyline. The sun is to my right and very close to the horizon, putting a nice even lighting across the entire frame with subtle highlights on the span of the bridge.

As usual I shot this in aperture priority… most of the time I prefer to frame up, choose an aperture that gives whatever depth of field I want, adjust the exposure compensation to make sure nothing gets blown and let the camera do the rest of the work. I’m at f/10 with the EF 135mm f/2 L lens. It’s a particularly sharp lens, and the focal length does a nice job of compressing the scene.

Here’s a large version of the image straight out of camera:

Time to come up with a plan. I want to…

• bring out the colors in the sky.
• emphasize the glowing side light on the bridge.
• brighten the foreground and middle ground without affecting the background too much.

Default Settings

The base settings I use on almost every photo are applied on import to Lightroom:

• Adobe’s default treatment: +5 blacks, +50 brightness, +25 contrast.
• Some color and clarity: +20 clarity, +25 vibrance, +8 saturation.
• A slight curve to create medium shadows and slight midtones: +6 lights, -9 darks, -25 shadows.
• HSL and profile tweaks specifically for the EOS 5D.

Basic Processing

The vast majority of what I want to do can be accomplished with just the basic exposure, brightness, contrast and color sliders.

• White Balance: I like what the camera chose, so I’ll leave it “As Shot” at 6350 and -8 tint.
• Exposure: -1.05 since the image is looking very bright.
• Fill Light: +11 to slightly bring out shadow detail.
• Contrast: +43
• Clarity: +40
• Saturation: +44

The colors and contrast in the original are very flat and faded. I’m no meteorologist but I think that’s partly due to atmospheric conditions combined with the fact that I’m shooting from far away with a telephoto lens. Adding a lot of contrast and saturation pushed the colors and contrast to where I want them.

Clarity is a great tool for emphasizing edges and adding a little local contrast. Being heavy-handed with this slider can wreck havoc on portraits, but you can get away with it on a landscape.

I want heavier shadows, which can be done with a different tone curve than what I originally chose:

• Highlights: 0
• Lights: +8
• Darks: -10
• Shadows: -50

Fine Tuning

Most of the work is done, but there are still a few minor details that I want to adjust in the sky. I would like deeper and more saturated colors there, and more details in the clouds.

I can use the HSL sliders to adjust the colors in the sky without affecting the bridge, water or hills.

• Purple Saturation: +45
• Magenta Saturation: +45
• Purple Luminance: -24
• Magenta Luminance: -14

To make the bridge span glow a little brighter I’ll also slide the red luminance to +20.

For increased cloud definition I’ll use the Adjustment Brush to paint +100 clarity in the sky.

Final Image

Do some basic sharpening and slight noise reduction, and we have the end result:

The Bay Bridge and the Embarcadero during the blue hour, seen from high up in the Hyatt Regency.