How to postprocess fireworks pics?

[rollercoaster]

Hi everyone, Today I could do with some help.

Diwali festival has come and gone and I took some 400 shots of various fireworks. I am new to photography and it is the second time for me with fireworks. I posted earlier, didn't get much response but tried to learn what I could. Shot all of them using the Shutter priority mode with shutter speed ranging from 10 to 1 second(s) letting the camera do the rest.

Now the problem is, I don't know how to work on the images (forget the how just let me know what to do and I will figure out the how part)

Here are some of the examples(not the best of the lot but these show what I may need to fix)

Click here for slideshow or just photos

In my mind, I want to make the background black while keeping the colors vibrant and may be do something to the smoke and sun like brightness in some of the pics. I had to use my cheap 70-300mm for some of them as they were really far and so they are not so sharp too.

Also, what are the guidelines to crop these to look better and anything else you can think off, please recommend. Thank you.

[acedrew]

Great shots, I think in order to accomplish the PP you want, you'll need to adjust your black clipping levels, in Lightroom there is simply a "Blacks" slider, but I think most software is capable of this.

Andrew Rodgers
Perfected Perspectives -- Photography by Andrew Rodgers | Andrew Rodgers (acedrew) on Twitter | Login | Facebook

[shutternut]

Ok. I hope you don't mind but the best way I could explain this was by fixing one of your images myself. I don't know what kind of processing you use, but I use photoshop cs4.. although what I did was all very basic so any processing software should do you fine. If you mind me editing your image, let me know and I'll remove it straight away.

Anyhoo, the biggest problem is your white balance. If you had raw files originally then it's an easy fix. Open it in camera raw and move the "white balance" slider towards the blue side to get rid of the warm color cast.

If not raw, I went into levels. I went into the red channel and moved the black point in to the edge of the histogram (if you hold down alt while sliding the bar you'll see where your clipping is). I stop before clipping off anything. Then I went to the next dominant channel green, then blue, making slight adjustments until I was happy. Then I went back to RGB channel and adjusted it slightly to darken the background more.

I know that's a very amateur sounding description of it but I can't think of all the techy terms for what I did right now...I'm just assuming you know how to do levels. If not let me know and I'll try to get you a better explanation.

You could always load it to picnik though and use their warm/cold slider.

Then I did an adjustment layer and upped the vibrance (I prefer it to saturation because it will pop the colors without being too obvious). Then I mad a quick adjustment to contrast and voila.

Not the best example because I did about a 2min rush on it but it gives you an idea of the effect I hope. Taking a second look at what I did, this one could still use some adjusting to make it less warm I think.

I'm certainly no pro.. someone may know a better way to do it.

Simplest solution - fix the white balance.

I had to do this when I took my fireworks photos as well - same exact issue but you can pull a lot of color back out of it. http://www.flickr.com/photos/shutter...7621013875895/

[rollercoaster]

@acedrew Thanks for your comment.

@shutternut. wow. I was not expecting so much help and such practically. I am new to photoshop as well so I just have a basic Idea about levels. I tend to use teh auto contrast and such functions in Picasa but your detailed exampel helps a lot. thank you very much.

Here are a few that I just uploaded to Flickr

Fiery


Fairies


Razzle Dazzle


Fireball


I hope you like them. They are not nearly as good as yours but better then my last attempt. May be next time I can get even better : )

View a slideshow of the other pics I uploaded or just the set. (total 18 for now)