What had been “film, processing and scanning” on my estimates years ago are now billed collectively as “processing”. Although I don’t hear that from clients as often as I have in the past, some of my customers still wonder what it all means.

Rarely do images come out of the camera ready to go to print or to put on the web. In this photo of Dave Veerman, partner at the Livingstone Corporation, I used a generic fluorescent white balance setting on my camera. Having shot in the camera’s RAW format, I knew I could easily fine tune this later. Knowing that each room in which I shot this series of portraits would have a different white balance as well as mixed light sources, I opted to just come close with the white balance. Taking the time to try to perfect this in camera would have taken time away from the subjects. With mixed light sources, this was impossible anyway.

Below is the progression of the image from the in-camera RAW file to color and contrast-corrected file to final B&W file. (I aslo delivered a B&W version to the client hoping that they might use this for its corporate-warming effect.)

Camera Version

This is how the RAW file looked upon opening it in Capture NX. It was shot using a generic fluorescent white balance. The primary light source was an overhead fluorescent light. There was also light coming in from a window to the right.

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image as viewed RAW

Processed Image

In Capture NX I changed the white balance to indicate a fluorescent 3850º kelvin light source. This brought the entire image into a more natural-looking color balance including the artwork on the wall. Using curves I slightly increased contrast. I then removed a considerable amount of blue from the right side of the face that had received the daylight. The eyes were slightly brightened and the hand slightly darkened.

I then changed the resolution for web use and used unsharp masking to increase overall sharpness for this blog representation. It’s important to note that the type and amount of sharpening is dependent upon final output size and type. Each use requires very different sharpening criteria.

image as processed

Black & White File

There are an extraordinary number of options for black & white conversion. We rarely use a generic “convert to black and white.” For this image I used CS4 to create a relatively gritty look but one that I feel still conveys the feeling of warmth.

image processed as B&W

Okay, so all of this takes time and that is why we bill for processing. This is a tremendous value for our clients. We don’t consider any of this to be retouching. That will be discussed at another time.