I am looking for help with a few quick tips on how I can improve the quality of pictures of cattle for a special sale. I have included examples of two different pictures. One is a basic picture with a dirty cow, and the other has been professionally edited. What major differences or tips can you give a young guy trying to figure out Photoshop? I have noticed it is very difficult to use the spot healing brush and keep the same texture. Also, I can't figure out the lighting, so the image pops. Any suggestions or help would be greatly appreciated. I have noticed professionals can also move their legs while still keeping a natural look. How????
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A very important point: Most of the improvement could come from how the first photo was taken. If that was done better, the amount of work needed in editing would be greatly reduced. Also, most of the needed improvements are not specific to Photoshop, they are basic principles of photography. If those are learned, then the first photo can be fixed in almost any photo software.
With those out of the way, here is what we see:
The second photo has better light to start with. There's direct sunlight hitting the front, so that lighting helps you see the texture and highlights on the animal's hair. There is also more background blur, which helps the eye focus on the subject. (Background blur is controlled by the photographer’s choice of lens and aperture setting.)
The first photo has flat light from the cloudy sky, not even a shadow on the ground. Because of the flat light, it might have been better for the photographer to walk around the animal to figure out which light direction shows off the animal the best. The horizon is tilted, as you can tell by the vertical posts and poles. The background is relatively sharp. It’s best to correct all of these problems in camera, so that you don't have to fix them later.
Notice that Photoshop has not even come up yet. So much of this comes down to the choices you make when you take the picture. A general photography class can help with that.
So how can we fix the first picture? These are the steps I took using the Camera Raw Filter in Photoshop:
1. Straighten horizon.
2. The first photo is too blue (not the right White Balance), so shift Color Temperature to look more like the second photo.
3. Increase the Vibrance value to make up for the lack of color saturation due to poor lighting.
4. Blur the background by applying Lens Blur.
5. There is no detail in the hair due to the poor lighting. To address that, a subject mask is instantly created for the animal outline, to confine edits to the dark hair. To bring out the hair, values were increased for Shadows (lightens dark areas), Clarity (medium frequency detail enhancement), and Texture (high frequency detail enhancement). The mask’s Point Curve was steepened to increase contrast, but the curve was steepened only in the range of tones covering the dark animal hair.
The image content was not altered. It’s the same animal. Most of it is about adjusting tone, color, and contrast/detail.
If you had posted the raw version, I would have done most or all corrections to the raw version in Adobe Camera Raw to better preserve the original quality. Photoshop might not even be necessary.
What I did is not the only way. There are many similar ways to get the same look in Photoshop or other image editors. Also, the problems you will face in different photos of cattle will not always be the same, so a single recipe won’t always work with everything. That's why what you really want is to learn how to recognize specific problems with an image from a general photography point of view, and that will tell you what steps need to be taken in whatever photo software you are using.
Ultimately this is not just about knowing how to use Photoshop, but how to understand the qualities of a good photograph in general (tone, color, composition, detail…), so that you can spot where a photo falls short and target those areas for correction. And so that as you take each picture, you can anticipate and then (as much as is possible) prevent those problems from happening in the first place.
Every problem you can solve in camera is one less thing to do in Photoshop. For example, in my camera I turn on the horizon level indicator so that my pictures come out level from the beginning, so that does not have to be fixed later. Or, to blur the background, either use the right lens and setting, or on a phone turn on its background blur feature (sometimes called Portrait mode).
Also, some would say that if you’re trying to sell the animal, you’d have an assistant brushing the animal’s hair before taking the photo, removing any hay stuck to them, etc. Because grooming is another big difference between the two pictures.
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