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Photography
Photography Wednesday
13Aug
Processing Example
August 13, 2008 at 07:44PM I just bought Lightroom 2 a few days ago, and it's great. It runs a bit slow on my laptop, but hopefully I'll be able to buy a new computer in the near future and editing photos will be snappy again. Anyway, to celebrate my purchase I decided to show an example of a photo that I processed entirely with Lightroom.
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This is Corinne, at Flat Iron Cafe. Flat Iron is a great place to dance but has absolutely awful lighting for taking photographs. The best I could do was sit her in a char next to the soda cooler which has one fluorescent bulb running vertically up the middle of it. It's not pretty or flattering at all; her great skin is turned magenta and purple by the other lights in the room. This is the original photo that I had to work with, and since the lighting is so tough I decided to do more drastic processing than usual.
;)
First, I applied a custom preset I made; I called it "Hot Tone" because it's based off of the "Cold Tone" preset that ships with Lightroom. Basically it messes with the camera calibration settings to blow the picture almost entirely out of the water, then uses the white balance, vibrance/saturation and HSL controls to pull it back. It's fun to play around with and presets in Lightroom are so easy to preview (just roll the mouse over it) that they can really help you work a lot faster, or try out effects you might not otherwise spend time trying. The settings that the preset affects are:
- Camera Calibration - Red Saturation: -92
- Camera Calibration - Green Hue: +100
- Camera Calibration - Green Saturation: +100
- Camera Calibration - Blue Hue: +71
- Camera Calibration - Blue Saturation: -100
- Basic - White Balance: 14000 K
- Basic - Tint: +87
- Basic - Vibrance: +40
- Basic - Saturation: -75
- HSL - Saturation - Red: +94
- HSL - Saturation - Orange: +65
- HSL - Saturation - Aqua: -100
- HSL - Saturation - Blue: -100
- HSL - Luminance - Red: +38
- HSL - Luminance - Aqua: -98
- HSL - Luminance - Blue: -98
That does a lot to a photo, and it definitely won't work with every photo, but it's worth a try sometimes. In this case it desaturated everything quite a bit while making it almost monochromatic; the only tones left are hot and warm ones. Already the photo looks better, but there's still a long way to go.
;)
Next I adjusted the contrast to give it some depth. I don't usually use the Contrast control in the basic section unless I'm just rushing through editing some snapshots. That control does give you contrast but it's pretty hard to work with. I use the Tone Curve for any real contrast editing which is what I did here. I brought the shadows and darks down quite a bit (-56 and -40 respectively), took down the lights a little too (-15) and brightened the highlights to help shape the face even more (+23). Now it's starting to look like a decent picture.
;)
I knew I wanted to emphasize her face, so I added a pretty strong post-crop vignette to tone down her shirt and the background. Vignettes can be cheesy but I think when they're used appropriately they can add a lot. Lightroom 2 finally lets you add vignettes after you've cropped an image; in Lightroom 1 you could only add it to the original picture. If you cropped it after that you'd wind up with a pretty uneven edge, so I'm glad Adobe added this.
;)
I shot the picture at an aperture of f/1.8 so it's pretty soft all around. I wanted to emphasize that even more so I used a local adjustment brush to smooth out the skin a bit with some negative clarity. Local adjustments are another new Lightroom 2 feature; you can now dodge/burn/etc pieces of a photo individually. I get the feeling I'll almost never be using Photoshop any more. I'm pretty happy about that.
;)
I wasn't satisfied with her eyes, so my next step was enhancing them. I dodged the irises, added some clarity around the inner and outer edges, and brightened the whites just a tiny bit. I think it really makes the eyes pop a lot more than before; they're not just solid black circles any more. I used another brush to paint in some clarity on her lips to define them a little more too. By the way, the new Auto Mask feature is amazing and will save you tons of time.
;)
To finish everything off I added just a bit more contrast and a subtle, red split tone to just the shadows to put back a little more color that the preset had taken away. I find myself doing this a lot; I'll make the biggest changes to a photo right away and then tweak it as I go. By doing that I build up lots of smaller changes that get me closer and closer to my goal.
Anyway, I hope this was useful to someone. If you have any questions about it or feel like telling me what you think, the comment link is right below!
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