In photography, as with most other pursuits, a thirst for knowledge will help keep your skills honed and your interest piqued. To that end, I’ve been on a mission lately to get serious about knocking off the cobwebs and really using my post-processing tools tho their fullest. Today I was reading Piet Van Den Eynde’s Dodge & Burn from Craft & Vision and after spending some time digging a little deeper into the Develop module I decided to revisit some earlier pictures. On my recent trip to Savannah there were several shots that were pretty much blown. When they happened I was really more in snapshot mode and didn’t pay attention to how the camera was set. In one case the scene was incredibly overexposed and in then the pendulum swung the opposite direction leaving me with an image so dark that the scene was barely visible. Here is the result of just a few minutes worth of work. [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] I hate to admit that the image took quite a bit of work. I boosted the exposure more than I’d ever like to. Heck, I boosted just about everything. I also played around with dodging and burning the […]
Yesterday I took a trip to the Georgia State Railroad Museum and had a great time. It made for a great trip back in time and one of the things that really caught my eye was the 1913 steam locomotive #30 made by the American Locomotive Company (ALCO). After posting this image I thought I’d share how I created it. I found #30 in the roundhouse sitting with some other engines. I really wanted to focus on this beautiful locomotive, though, so the first thing I did was crop everything but the front of the engine out of frame. I think this gave the perfect look and focused the viewer’s eye where it needs to be. The first step was to apply the generic B&W conversion within Lightroom. For this post I’m using Lightroom 5.6 on my Macbook Pro. [twentytwenty] [/twentytwenty] The histogram looked pretty much perfect to me. There wasn’t any clipping on either end and I was happy with the overall tone of the image. However, I still felt it was a little too bright so I dropped the exposure about 2/3 stop. Next I dropped the highlights and boosted the shadows with a very small increase to the […]
