When Things Come Together

Click to EnlargeLook at this photo.  Take your time and note some of the things that you like and dislike about it.  Is there anything that really stands out to you?  Does it make you think or feel anything?  Does it tell a story?

To me there are several things that stand out.  There is a story, and yes it does make me think and feel about some very specific things.  Is it a success?  To me the answer is yes, now that I’ve seen the image transform from where it started to the final product.  Perhaps when you see the photo transform you too will have a different appreciation.

Here is the base original photo.  It was shot at 1/800, f5.6, ISO 100, 300mm, Click to Enlargeand what you see here is the file as it looked after being converted to DNG with the standard preview.  Looks kind of blah, and that’s what I was thinking when I started to work with it.  To be honest I started playing around with it to test out Lightroom 3, but that changed when I realized that I also hadn’t really tested some of the updated onOne plugin’s that I use.  They are fantastic and utilize the power of Photoshop (CS5 in my case) to perform operations that while doable, may take a lot more time to perform manually.

Just to get it out of the way, let me just say that I am incredibly impressed when things come together.  The experience of starting an edit in Lightroom performing advanced processing in Photoshop and then bringing that edited file back into Lightroom to finish it off is fantastic.  Now with the combination of Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5, that process is that much better.  Throw in the ability to run everything in 64bit, and I’d say it is exactly what I’ve been waiting for since Lightroom 1 and Photoshop CS3.

Click to EnlargeHere is the photo cropped to create a composition that I thought suited the image.  Over the past little while, I have been checking out a variety of photographers that utilize negative space in their images exceptionally well.  This is definitely something that I feel that I need work on.  This may sound odd, but getting used to not having things in a composition can be both rather disconcerting and liberating at the same time.

In this next photo, I did some preliminary corrective work. This included adjusting the exposure, blacks, clarity and contrast.  I also performed a very slight “S” curve adjustment, followed by some very slight Saturation/Luminance adjustments to affect the blues and red tones.  In this photo, (and most photos in general) utilizing a “S” curve or some curve variant, tends to act as a good starting point when dealing with colour, versus going directly to Hue, Saturation or Luminance.  When I do use H/S/L, I try to keep those changes to be as subtle as possible.  If you do not use curves now in either Lightroom or Photoshop, I would really encourage you to try them.  The will change your workflow and approach to editing.  

Remember, one of the greatest things about using Lightroom is that it is a non-destructive environment, and you can simply “reset” your image if you don’t like the way it looks.  Go ahead and play, the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll learn something, and that something will probably be really cool!

Click to EnlargeDo you recognize this photo?  I bet it looks very similar to the one that you saw at the top of this Journal entry.  So what has gone on here?  Well, it was edited using onOne’s Focal Point 2 plug in.  This helped to control where the focus of the shot was and helped to control the out of focus areas.  After this had been applied, the photo was brought back into Lightroom 3, and received another round of slight tweaking using some of the same methods listed above.  

Finally, to finish things off, I touched up the sharpening slightly using onOne’s Genuine Fractals Professional 6 plug in.  After applying that small change the photo returned to Lightroom and was then considered done.

To wrap up this meandering post, I really like when all of the tools that I have at my disposal come together seamlessly.  Even in working on this photo, you could feel the amount of research and development that both Adobe and onOne has put into their current products.  In total, I spent about twenty minutes working on this image trying different things.  By the time I was done, I just wanted to start on another one, and to be honest, that’s probably what I’d still be doing if it weren’t for wanting to write this journal entry!

Thanks for reading. ~ Jared