Photoshop Work Flow

I am sure you all have heard that we need to get everything right in the camera while taking the shot however its not possible every time or for people who are self taught and still learning. I have not taken any formal photography training / course  or workshop and whatever you see is all self taught learning by watching videos on you tube or discussing with other photographers. I consider myself an amature / beginner when it comes to creating good photos and its a long way to go before i can learn the art. 

 There are many great software out there for photo editing (some are free too and some are provided by the camera manufacturer like Canon Photo Professional) but i have started to use Photoshop CC from 2014. Its a very powerful software and i only know few tools which i use in my work flow. If you want to learn Photoshop or light-room i strongly recommend you all to check out Phlearn (YouTube - Photoshop Tutorials by Phlearn , Twitter - Phlearn) which is started by and taught by Aaron Nace (@aknacer) and check out Terry White (www.terrywhite.com). I have learnt alot of things from these two individuals and i thank them for providing this knowledge for free. 

I do not manipulate my images (in terms of removing or adding stuff however i do manipulate the colors sometimes and i will specifically mention what i manipulated. The manipulated photo will be posted in a separate gallery) and show you exactly what i shot. Below is a Longhorn beetle which i shot yesterday and i have mentioned the steps i followed to edit the picture. 

Straight from the camera

Opened in Camera Raw 

Consider this (Camera Raw) as the camera itself because you can change a lot of stuff other than composition. The parts which are highlighted in Red above are over exposed which were corrected by reducing the highlights.

Step 2 - Make adjustments 

I have adjusted Exposure, Contrast, Whites and Clarity a bit for the Beetle to pop out. 

Opened the image in Photoshop and the picture above is before applying the Color Efex Pro 4 tool of Nik Software by Google

Google made the Nik Collection of the software free sometime ago and i am very happy to download and use them in my photo-editing once in a while. You can notice in the picture above that the texture (mid-tones) of the leaf and shadows are slightly rough which were corrected using Tonal Contrast Tool under Color Efex pro 4. I have adjusted the mid-tones, saturation and shadows slightly in Tonal Contrast tool to make the texture of the leaf a bit smooth. 

Applied Tonal Contrast tool

Final Version

And this is the final result of applying all the changes. So guys this is my basic workflow in Photoshop for all my photos on my page Nature's Amore Photography and what i share here on my blog. Please feel free to share this post or leave a comment if you think i can improve somewhere or some more steps which i can use to make it look even better and share your workflow.