I start where I left off with the import/organizing workflow, with a group of picked images in a folder, though a different group.
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(click for larger image)
Then we move over to the develop module where we can see the import preset settings already applied.
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(click for larger image)
Looking at this image I can see that it is a little cool, needs a white balance adjustment and it also is a little blown out in spots. I changed the white balance to cloudy (Temp from 6350 to 6500 and tint from +14 to +10). To deal with the blown areas I pulled up the recovery slider to +20, I pull it up to where I stop to see any recovery in the important areas (here on the flower) and then I pull it back just a bit. You can see in the image blow all that is blown now is the background. I pulled up the blacks to +10 and increased the brightness from +25 to +35 so it didn't look so flat. Since this is a flower and I wanted it to be a little colorful I also pulled the vibrance up to +20 (note that I never use the saturation slider, it is too heavy handed for how I like to edit, but I am sure it works for some people.
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After that I thought it still looked a bit flat so I played around with the tone curve a little bit. Mainly I pulled down the left part of the curve just a bit to darken the shadows even more.
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Next since I shot this at ISO 800 I needed to do a little bit of noise reduction just to clean up the images. I set the lumiance to +10 and the color to +10 as well. I start with the color slider and move it until nearly all of it is gone, and then I back off a little bit, I don't want it over-smooth, then I repeat with the luminance slider. Since 10 is a pretty low number for both of these I didn't use the other sliders to add back in detail at all.
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Once I am happy with this image, since these are all pretty much the same I sync my edits.
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To see how little editing it really is, let's compare a true SOOC image (with even my import preset settings removed other than the camera profile).
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to my final edit
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You can see that really it doesn't look a lot different, just a little more polished. Some images require a bit more work that this, and some I edit more just for fun. I will cover that in a future post.
2 comments:
Love it! It's great seeing how others use Lightroom, thanks for sharing. =D
great tips - off to find older ones!
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