Words & Images

Posts Tagged ‘Digital Darkroom’

When you open an image in the Develop Module, you can see that some sliders have presets. Since they sort of work for me, I have not taken the time to find out if I can change those settings.

My flow is influenced by my habit of just going back in the develop history instead of actually undoing a step. I feel if the log gets too long it becomes cumbersome and it is easy to undo a step that did not work out.

Normally, I start with the spot brush set on healing (not cloning) to clean up spots – sometimes a bird can look like a ‘spot’. You can move the circle from where LR gets its data for replacement, which can allow for some creativity. Then I look at the temperature. In the camera, I have the White Balance set on Automatic and most of the time it is right on. Next, I look at the exposure / brightness of an image as well as shadows and highlights. If there are relatively straight lines bordering the area that needs to be changed (overexposed sky for instance), I use the ND filter otherwise the adjustment brush (check the automask this helps in the transition areas)

ND filter: by having the 3 lines of the filter close together, you work with a hard transition. The more they are apart, the softer the transition becomes. You can tilt the lines of the filter to parallel ‘lines’ in the image. Depending on need, I apply the filter from the top down, from the bottom up (usually to open up a shadow area) or from the sides in.

Adjustment brush: I use it for the same purposes where the ND filter does not work or to play with light in small selective areas. It works great to make white really white.

The next step is the clarity slider and last the color treatment. In about 90% of the time I am done at that point. In rare cases, I will export the image now into Photoshop for more complex editing

In the Develop Module, the sliders Vibrance and Saturation sit right next to each other, yet have very different effects on the image, which sometimes can be subtle and sometimes drastic.

Vibrance gets applied in a curve. It affects already saturated areas the least and dull areas the most.

Saturation gets applied equally to all the colors of the image. Therefore, if you have some areas already well saturated, they will start to look unnatural.

Overall, I tend to use Vibrance  more than Saturation

Saturation – Luminance: Often I go for the individual color sliders with the setting on Saturation to fine tune an image. (By clicking on the circle in the upper left corner of the field, you can select with the cursor the color in the image you want to affect. By pulling up, the saturation is increased, pulling down will decrease it.) Lately, I have begun to also look at the Luminance of a color. When Saturation is the ‘amount’ of color, then Luminance is the ‘amount of light’ in that color. The effect in an image is quite different and, when applying Luminance, you have to watch your histogram so you don’t create a hot spot. The image below is am example of applying Saturation in the highlights and Luminance in the shadows.

Split-toning: With this, you apply a selected hue to the highlights and / or the shadows. I have used this mostly with my ice crystal images to create a sense of cold. Some of them I needed to convert to greyscale in order to bring out the crystal structures. I then added ‘color’ to mostly the highlights.

In my first LR Virtual Copy post, I referred to the possibility to editing for mood / weather. I want to show an example with one of my images.

First, I edited the original. When I was satisfied with it, I made a virtual copy of it.

Then, I gently pulled the clarity slider to the left in this copy to give more the effect of the wind I experienced while taking the photo. I feel it also enhances the windblown grasses.

Finally, I selected both copies in LR, under the drop down menu ‘Photo’, is ‘edit in’. I chose edit in CS4 as layers. This means both copies will be opened in CS4 where I then combined them into one image. The original edit was layer 1, the edited virtuI copy layer 2. I erased the sandhill cranes in the front to show the sharp birds from layer 1. After being done with the composit, I saved the new image back into the folder in LR where the copies had come from.

I have folders for my images on both the external hard drive and in LR. On the hard drive, the Raw images are sorted under either shoots by year and month, by trip, or subject. The “shoots” folder contains the mix of images taken during that particular month.

In LR any new images are imported into the folder ‘new’ with a subfolder for the month or trip. Once I am done with the selection and editing, the really good images get moved into the appropriate folder, the rest stays for a little while longer in the ‘new’ folder until I decide to have a final look at them and toss what I do not like.

In the LR library, I have many folders that make sense to me and allow me to quickly find images without having to do a search with keywords. (I have to admit that I am often not very good at keywording when I import and it is something I feel I need to to do some catch up work). Here are some folder titles as examples: National Parks (with subfolders for each park I have pictures of), landscapes (subfolders for areas in the US), International Travel (subfolders for countries or larger geographic areas). All local images go into the folder ‘Greater Santa Fe Area’ with subfolders for special local projects.

Since I have more images on my computer than I have on the web sites, I use color coding to denote which image is where. I don’t use the star coding much, except during the selection process.

As I said, my keywording can use some improvement. I am good with it, if I import images after every single outing where I can apply the keywords to all imported images. In catching up with it, I select the images, which get the same keyword(s) and apply them this way. Another option is the spray can symbol at the bottom.

In the beginning, while still learning much about editing photos, I decided to keep an untouched version of the image files. Today, I still do a dual import: one to an external hard drive and the other into LR where I can be ruthless in the selection of images. Knowing I can go back any time and import a photo again, allows me to delete all images that, at this point in time, don’t appeal to me as ‘keepers’.

The selection process has several rounds, the number depending on the number of images. In the first round, I delete all the obvious ones. Normally I have more images of moving objects – wildlife, trains, wave action along the coast – than of stationary ones – landscapes, clouds, trees, etc. I look for good composition. With the landscape images, for instance, I analyze the ones I toss for the mistakes so I can learn.

After the first round, I go through the remaining images again and again until I feel I have the best ones left. In those instances I use the compare feature and begin to mark with a star those that stand out for me. With a larger shoot, I often need to take a break and come back the next day with fresh eyes to finish the selection process. A third round often includes minor editing to be better able to discern if an image truly has potential. The final round is done completely in the develop module of LR with an occasional ‘excursion’ to Photoshop.

LR has the wonderful feature of a virtual copy. Sometimes, while editing an image, I wonder which might result in the better photo. I can go back in the history and choose a point where I am still clear about my process, create a virtual copy and then continue with the differing ways of editing. I will have 2 images as an end result that I can easily compare and then make a decision which one I like better.

The same applies if I have different ideas about the final look of an image and so I can start out with virtual copies. It also opens up the possibility to edit one for the highlights and the other for the shadows. By selecting both, they can be exported into CS4 and combined there.

In a future entry, showing a before and after image, I plan on sharing a creative application of virtual copies to better represent the mood / weather.

As I see it, the big benefit of a virtual copy is the fact that it eats hardly any memory compared to a full blown duplication of an image.

I have a tendency to sometimes play around with an image to see what happens if …. In one of these instances, I discovered a cool application of the Clarity slider. Here is an image that I edited in my usual way:

The setting for the Clarity Slider is +92 on the above image. When playing with the Clarity slider, moving it to -60, I found this image:There are several effects the Clarity Slider has in the negative region: It can bring a glow to an image, like in the above. It can create a very dreamy appearance. Moving is just a tad into the negative area, it enhances the skin tone in portraits, smoothing it out.

Play around with it for yourself and have fun with the discoveries.