Tip Tuesday #3

I know, I should just go stick my tail between my legs and never mention Tip Tuesday again. But I'm going to revive it instead!

A few people have written to me asking about how I processed the photo that I entered in the Shootsac contest, so I thought I'd do a blog post about it. I actually couldn't find the image in a Lightroom catalogue, which means it was probably in a catalogue on my laptop drive, so this won't be exactly the same, but it will be essentially the same processing. Also, I originally used PaintShop Pro for extra editing, but I just got Photoshop, so I used it for this one.

For Clients - this is also a great example of what I mean when I say you will receive the proofs or images with "basic edits" (see photo #2), and how that is different from full processing.

So, first of all, here is the SOOC (straight out of camera) image.
This was shot with my Canon 20D and 70-200 f4L NON-IS (hello, ghetto!)
ISO 400 . f/4 . 1/500 . 122mm


By the way, in case you're interested, by SOOC, I mean really SOOC. When I import my images into LR, I apply the LR preset "General - Zeroed" and batch process from there. This sets everything to, well, zero, and I prefer it to applying Auto-Tone on import.

Here's the same photo with basic editing (just adjusting contrast, white balance, and applying LR's "Sharpen-Portraits" preset.)


But I thought I could bump this photo up a little with a different take on the processing. So I applied one of my absolute favourite presets, Dirty Old Car (I give them weird names), then tweaked it to get this:


And here's what my LR settings looked like. The major thing is the split-toning. I think split toning is great for unifying an image where there are a lot of colours working against each other, like this one.


Next I did something that I don't do very often. I pulled it into Photoshop not just to fix something, but to do some "effects" as well. First of all, I cloned out the pole sticking out of Bria's head. Sometimes you just have to make the best you can of a location and know that you will need to fix something later, and this was one of those cases. After that, I duplicated the background layer, applied lens blur, and used a mask to get rid of the lens blur where I didn't want it.


A Note About Photoshop: I just got Photoshop, so I am playing with it a lot but if you remember the first Tip Tuesday, I said I don't use it. I still LOVE Corel PaintShop Pro and think it actually has a few advantages over Photoshop. If I could take everything that is good about each, I could make the perfect photo editing program.