An Evening with Barry Haynes, Photographer

Automate Color Correction Tasks

Using Photoshop with Bridge, Camera Raw and Photoshop actions to automate color correction tasks.

First, Barry will show you how he uses Photoshop CS4 Bridge and Camera Raw to sort his images and do initial color correction on them with the Camera Raw filter. For images that he's putting on his web site or showing to customers for them to pick a final image, Bridge and Camera raw is all he needs. These same steps could also be done using Lightroom, which is mostly Bridge and Camera Raw built into one application.

Next, he’ll describe how he uses color correction template action to speed up color correction of final gallery or commercial images in Photoshop. Students, even advanced ones, who have learned about this action in Barry's weeklong digital printmaking workshops have told him how much this sped up their Photoshop color correction tasks. This action automatically creates the 8 basic Adjustment layers Barry uses to color correct most of his images. For some images, especially panoramas, he needs to create further color correction layers. He’ll show us some examples of these too. 

Up-sampling and Sharpening Final Prints

Barry finds that he’s usually able to up-sample his images to twice the horizontal and vertical resolution. When he does this, he uses a three layer sharpening technique to sharpen them without producing sharpening artifacts. He does all this in Photoshop and really likes the results. This allows Barry to be able to make 24x30, or sometimes larger, framed prints from 10 megabyte RAW files.

Producing Many Copies of Different Sized Images

For each image that Barry sells in his gallery, he usually has a large framed Premium Luster print, and sometimes a large canvas too, hanging on the wall. These are more expensive prints so he also has less expensive 16x20, 11x14 and 8x10 versions of the same image available in bins as matted prints. To produce those 3 smaller sizes, Barry uses an action script that creates them from the larger master print. He'll show us this action and how it works. 

Color Correcting in the Real World

When you work at Apple Computer or write popular Photoshop books, color correction companies are always sending you their latest stuff at a discount or for free. When Barry was the digital imaging guru at Apple, he had a $100,000 annual budget to buy the latest digital toys. Over the years writing about these things in his Photoshop Artistry books, he found that many of his readers didn’t have the patience and/or money to do things like make their own printer profiles, set up calibrated viewing environments, etc. Some of them spent thousands of dollars buying calibration toys which satisfied some and frustrated many. In 2009 the profiles that come with many printers are much better than they were in the past but calibration is still an issue in many situations. Most people Barry meets in his now smaller community, even those dealing with images on a regular basis, don’t have a good understanding of calibration issues so we all have to make things work with the tools that we have. Producing and selling gallery images that people take home and display in the community, also requires different and sometimes lower-tech solutions. Barry will also talk more about these issues during his session.