Photo Workbench - Rocks Still Life by Michael

Michael asked me for some opinions on the shots taken with his new Fujifilm S8000 (good choice!), and this macro study of a group of rocks stood out as something that could benefit from a quick treatment from Photoshop Elements.

Michael has come up with an interesting concept - exploring the shape, texture and colour of this group of small rocks, and he's placed them against a white background to produce a "studio" look. Unfortunately the image suffers from a blue colour-cast - look carefully at the paper and ask is it really white?

You can avoid this to an extent by setting a custom white balance on your camera in advance, by using the white background as your reference. Unfortunately due to the limitations in most digital cameras, the paper will still not be really white. We could try to shine more lights on the subject, but I'll show you a method in Photoshop Elements (or its big brother, Photoshop) that'll do this quickly and easily.

Fire up Photoshop Elements (or Photoshop), open up your picture, then click on the new adjustment layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette, it looks like a circle divided into two, between black and white. We want a "levels" adjustment layer, so click on that and you''ll get the layers dialogue box come up (without the red circle!):

We're interested in the three little colour pickers / eye-droppers / turkey basters (!) that I've circled in red.

All we need to do is select the right hand one, which is for setting the white balance, then click on the photo on the white background. Now select the left eye-dropper, which sets the black point, and click on the really black shadow right under one of the rocks.

The picture should look better already, but the white background might still be a bit patchy, and the contrast in the rocks could do with a tweak, so now we're going to play with the levels sliders, seen here circled in red:

These controls do magic to your photo's - what we want to do is take the right-hand slider, and move it left a little. You should see the background get even whiter. Now move the left hand slider in a bit. The blacks should have darkened. Finally move the middle slider to the right. This will darken the mid tones. Then click ok.

If you want to lighten up areas of the background that are still off-white, click on the bottom layer in the layers palette, then select the "dodge" tool from the tool-bar. The dodge tool lightens areas - its best to zoom in to 100%, then use a soft-edge brush.

Next a slightly closer crop, and we end up with this:

Lets compare the new and old versions:

So I hope this quick tutorial has given you ideas for improving your own shots - it's quick and easy. How about a sepia / black and white treatment? How about subjects on black? Go for it!

Thanks to Michael for letting me work on his image (see more of his work on flickr), and if you'd like me to work on any of your photo's, just email them to me at scalespeeder@gmail.com.

Thanks, Rob.