Before and After Monday: Orchid

I am not great at coming up with cute rhyming names like Mine on Monday or Ten on Tuesday or Wordless Wednesday (I am very jealous of the people who are by the way) but I wanted to start some recurring photography features on my blog. I have been doing the Tips for a while, and I plan to keep doing those (hopefully on a more regular basis) but I had ideas for some other posts as well. This is the first in what I hope will be a weekly if I can keep up with it feature of before and after edits of images. All done in Lightroom (which is my favorite editing program).

There is a dual benefit here in my mind, you get to see not only how I edit (I will post the settings I editing up using for the image) but also how my SOOC shots look. I am always curious how much editing other people do. You will find that generally I don't do a lot, but sometimes I do more than others.

On to the first image. This is one of my orchid shots from Longwood at the beginning of this month. 5D mark ii, 100mm L macro lens, ISO 400, f/5, ss 1/100


Click for larger

My edits in LR here were pretty minimal, I adjust the white balance a little to warm it up, upped the exposure 0.25 to brighten, pulled the blacks up to 7, added 25 brightness 26 clarity and 17 vibrance. The Tone curve I added +14 highlights and -9 shadows, set the point curve to medium contrast. I added some sharpening under the detail tab, amount 39, radius 1 detail 37 and a little noise reduction luminance 35 color 100. That is it. It sounds like a lot when all typed out but it really takes very little time at all.

Comment if you have any ideas for either photos you would like to see a before and after of or if you find this interesting at all.