Part 5 Lesson 3: Tonal adjustments

This week's optional theme: Still life

Still life photography is where you take a series of objects and create an engaging composition, usually at a table-top scale. The objects need to work as a group, and the lighting needs to be as much a part of the image as the objects themselves.

There are a couple of excellent, short videos in this post from the Science and Media Museum that accompanied their "The Art Of Arrangement" exhibition, which explain photographic still life in more detail: Photography and the Still Life Tradition.

If you find it very hard to create something that works, start off with a 2 dimensional still life, also known as a "flatlay":

tonal adjustments

The tones in your image are simply the shades of grey. Most editing software splits them into 3 broad groups: dark tones, mid tones and highlights. You can add pure black and pure white on each end if you want to. The better image editors will let you change each tone group separately, rather than having to lump them all together. So you can brighten just the shadows, or bring down just the highlights.

If your image is colour, you need to imagine it in black and white to get the most out of this week's advice. Or just try the edits suggested, and watch what happens to your photograph carefully, to see which part of the image is affected.

Why manipulate the tones separately?

Once you start seeing the darks, midtones and highlights separately, you'll wonder why you ever tried to edit them together. Being able to change them individually means you don't have to sacrifice detail at one end (light tones) just because you are changing something at the other (dark tones).

For example, this image is straight out of camera:

It's a bit dark. If I just increase the exposure in editing (all the tones at once), I lighten the dark and midtones (the sky and sea), but at the same time I lighten the highlights as well (the clouds) and lose all the detail there:

If instead I use the curves tool, which lets me manipulate each of the tonal grouping separately, I can lighten the darker tones but hold the detail in the highlights:

THIS WEEK'S PROJECT: Tonal editing

Find out if your preferred editor or app lets you manipulate tonal ranges individually. If not, try Polarr, then have a go. Create at least 2 completely different edits from the same photo, just using the curves tool, or dark tones/light tones sliders.

1. If you want to share in the app, join your start date’s group (eg. “June 2020”) and share there.

2. On Instagram, share with the hashtag #AYearWithMyCamera and the date for your start, eg. #AYWMCNov2020.

The AYWMC app

Did you know there’s an A Year With My Camera app for Apple and Android?