The tools of the trade. Everything that I use to realy bring the image to life.
I don’t normally do black and white but when I was processing this image in Lightroom it felt like the right thing to do. The original had a very muted colour palette to the extent it was virtually grey scale to start with. After applying a few tweaks this is the result.
I’m not overly pleased with the result though. It doesn’t feel as though this is the final image yet so any suggestions more than welcome. Alternatives and original image after the jump.
This is one of those little jobs that I’ve been meaning to do for ages and as yet hadn’t managed to make time until now. It’s time to spring clean my hard disks by migrating my image data to the NAS. Especially for my QTImages files. The ones for QTPortraits and QTWeddings are already backed up and the repositories are smaller but growing at an alarming rate with each photoshoot.
My QTImages repository on the other hand is a different matter. It spans more than 5 years and 10’s thousands of images. All that adds up to a lot of gigabytes to move around.
There is a lot of chatter at the moment about the new noise reduction capabilities of Lightroom 3. I’ve not yet had a look at the Beta 2 version but according to the specs. they’ve added Luminance noise reduction and people are going wild about it, allegedly resurrecting images that would otherwise have been far too noisy to be of usable or marketable quality.
If anyone has some results for the 5DmkII I’d be very interested in hearing. I do a lot of work with natural light and low light in particular so I frequently shoot at ISO 1600. On occasion I have even pushed it to ISO 3200 and ISO 6400 but the images need a lot of TLC or can quickly evaporate in post. If LR3 is really as good as everyone is claiming, my working ISO range has just increased, possibly extending the life of the 5DmkII. If this truly is the case the upgrade would be worth the investment. For me at least.
Now, I wonder if Mrs. LightMatters would see it that way?
I’m listening to the latest podcast 79 by CameraDojo, and they’re doing a grea review of the latest products by Adobe: Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS5. Trouble is, they’re making them so appealing I’m now hesitant to check them out. I just know that if I do I’ll want to upgrade. I’ll probably need a new laptop/pc too so if I do upgrade I’ll be looking at probably a £2,500+ investment.
Think Mrs LightMatters might not like that 😉
UPDATE – I caved. I had a quick peek at the upgrade price on the Adobe site. I wish I hadn’t as I’m now working out how many images I need to sell to cover it.
BTW – Great podcast. Keep up the good work.
Following on from the article I wrote earlier about my Fashion in the City shoot last weekend, I thought it might be fun to demonstrate just how much post processing I’d done to some of the images.
For the most part I do a very light retouch and generally spend only about 2 to 3 minutes on an image. There are excpetions to this of course, particularly where I’m going for a more dramatic look or where the image requires a lot of cleanup. An example of the latter might be for a beauty shot where the model’s complexion might need some attention or there are extraneous hairs that need to be removed. Essentially, for this type of shot anything that can detract from the beauty of the image needs to be worked on. Unless it is a permanent feature and is supposed to be there of course. Sometimes however I might spend a little longer on an image and the examples shown below vary from one extreme to another.
The “Before” image in each of the cases below is literally straight off the camera. I’ve not done any post processing to the image at all apart from a conversion to an 8-bit colour depth and a slight sharpen for screen during the export from Lightroom. That’s it. Nothing else. As you can see in all cases, the images are cold, “flat”, lacking contrast, vibrancy and depth. There simple isn’t any punch or impact. Nothing to hold the gaze of the viewer for that split second longer.
This first image has had very little post processing done to it at all. I gave it a slight boost in Lightroom before exporting it to Photoshop CS3 where I did a little noise reduction, tidied it up a bit, added a contrast adjustment and did a little burning to darken the corners.
Total edit time about 3 minutes.
Hi, I'm Gavin the photographer.
I used to work in IT until a few years ago. I was under a lot of stress at work and getting really p*****d off. Then one day I chose to give it all up and follow a dream. Everyone I knew thought I was nuts, that just made me try harder :-)
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