Masai Mara and Digital Workflow

Hi Folks! It has taken a full week to process all the images from my Mara trip. It is always a pleasure reliving all the experiences though.

I keep things simple with my RAW process workflow. I use BreezeBrowser to do a quick 'dirty' edit and sift out all the obviously missed and blurred shots. Then I import everything into Adobe Lightroom and examine each shot on its own merits and then again at 100% for sharpness and noise. The agency selection is flagged and star-rated as I go.

In Lightroom, my RAW process adjusts contrast (25-35), tone curve (lights=5-10 & darks= 5-10, saturation (3-5) and that is it. Sometimes an image will need finer tweaks to recover highlights or a small crop to improve the composition or to exclude a distracting element, but none of my crops ever exceed 20% - So, on my 1DSmkII, I can still produce an image of at least 4,000px, usually 5,000px.

For this particular trip, I new the skies would be an exciting element that needed preparation and forethought. We were at the beginning of the long rains and the sunny mornings would be followed by huge thunderstorms in the afternoon. During the day, I used drop-in or screw-in polarisers to maintain a deep blue skies, soften contrast and increase saturation. When things got stormy, there was no real need for filters as the sky was really that dark (see the lion image). The hues were extraordinary with deep blues, greens, and purples!

In some cases, I wanted to enhance the sky still further, especially if I found the RAW image lacking compared to what I had witnessed. In these cases I 'double process' the image - once for the foreground and again for the sky (where I underexpose in Lightroom by 1-stop). The two images are then merged together in Photoshop. I copy all of the darker image and then switch to the primary image with the perfectly exposed foreground. Using a 250px feathered selection of the sky, I 'paste-into' using +. The darker sky is pasted as a new layer with perfect alignment. It is then a question of fading the new layer to suit the image.

This is the digital equivalent of using a grad filter. It can drastically improve an image with lots of sky, but more than that, it will greatly increase the tonal range of the image. Whenever I use this technique, I will always abide by the original experience and my images will always represent the true encounter... some RAW images just need a little work. Sometimes I really miss working Velvia where landscape style photographs required no work at all.