Blue Poppy Edit

The colors in the blue poppy photos I shared yesterday came out a lot less saturated in camera than they appear in my final edits. Part of that is from shooting to the right (overexposing) and part of it is from using really neutral camera profiles etc. I like to be able to be the one to decide how much color I want to add back.

Here you can see the SOOC on the left and my final edit on the right, the SOOC is cool and flat and dull.

click for larger

So how did I get to the final edit?


I used my white balance target to do a custom white balance, added in a bit of brightness to the midtones, and a decent amount of black. I then added some clarity (ie midtone contrast), vibrance and a little saturation (I usually don't touch this slider but once in a while it can be very handy).


Added contrast using the tone curve


Used the split toning to add more color, a bit of warmth to the highlights and some blue to the shadows. (I have a couple of presets like this that I have made for myself)


Added some sharpening, I also should probably add some noise reduction to, but for sharing on the web it wasn't really noticeable.

That is it, nothing too major but it brought the colors back in line with what they had looked like in real life.