Before and after of the Swamp Raider picture

Thought I would outline the workflow of post processing the photo of my dog Terra, the one from the swamp weekend. Here are the four steps that I took to get to the final image starting with original file with only my default RAW settings applied:

Jump inside for details!


I started with adjusting the black point in all three RGB channels (to do that click the RGB dropdown menu in the Curves dialogue and select each color channel one by one; then drag and drop the black or white triangles in the corner of histogram to achieve the coloring effects). For Blue and Red I slightly pushed up the shadows triangle (that is why red and blue dashed lines are not ending up in the very corner of histogram window) and I moved the Green to the right side. Here is how the histogram of the Main Layer looks like:

This is probably the lowest amount of cross processing ever done :) But you are welcome to adjust to your tastes. It is all about playing with the different RGB channels to get to the look you like. Could start out with the default cross processing preset that comes with bibble. Check out the changes done to curves after it is applied. It is a good starting point to figure out what is what.

In addition to RGB tweak I increased the exposure a little. That sorted out the colors, but they needed a little more punch. So here I used Texa plugin. It is originaly designed to add textures on photos, but I used it to beef up the colors by using the 'Original' image twice. Created a new layer (with Bibble layers, not in Texa). Painted the layer mask on the dog, clicked invert mask button (this way the dog is not affected by the adjustments I am going to make on this layer). Normally you don't want your subject to be affected by this- go to Texa plugin, enable second layer within Texa, set the blending mode to Multiply and adjust opacity to fit your needs. In the end my Texa plugin window looked like so:

Here is a good moment to mention that Bibble 5.2 is going to have built-in layer opacity slider! Hooray! The layer blending mode has not been mentioned amongst the mirriade of new things coming in the next release, but I keep my hopes high that it will not take too long!

OK, back to the image - the last remaining thing was to decrease depth of feald. For that I used another layer and zBlur plugin with vignette set to this:

That turned out into the final image of Terra in the swamp :)

My signature is added with TypeWriter plugin within the batch process, while exporting to JPG. More on the Bibble 5 plugins really soon!

Cheers!
//M.