Today I thought I would go through the evolution of
a photograph from what it looked like as captured to something that I was at
least happy to post to my Flickr Stream.
When we arrived in Jackson Hole, WY the weather was not exactly ideal. It was cloudy, chilly and there was a haze that was contributed to by the ongoing forest fires to the North in Montana. A grey cloud cover hung over the mountains but I went out to shoot anyway. In the end I’m glad I did.
Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5, ISO 100, 1/180 @ f/8
Here is the shot as downloaded to Lightroom. It seemed grey, muddy and the greenish/grey/brown foreground added little to the view as far as I was concerned. It certainly needed some exposure and contrast work but first I needed to crop it more to my liking. So the first thing I did was create a virtual copy in Lightroom.
In the develop module I used the crop tool to create a semi-panoramic. I think this crop improved the composition considerably. Now the mountain was emphasized and the grass field no longer intrudes. Still needs work though.
I played around with the Basic adjustments in the develop module until I came up with what you see above. Now I think the exposure is better, you can see some detail in the trees and the mountains and the sky are much more acceptable. What follows are the settings I ended up with.
Temp 5350
Exposure
+1.05
Recovery 21
Fill Light 13
Blacks 8
Brightness 27
Contrast 27
Vibrance +26
Ends up as a much better shot in my humble opinion.
Then I decided I wanted a black and white version. I created another virtual copy from the
cropped version and went to the grayscale adjustments and began playing around
with the sliders. I first clicked “auto”
and then just experimented. The image
above is the result. I went heavily
negative on blue and aqua and slightly negative on the reds (red, orange and
yellow.
The results are far from perfect but I’m generally
happy. I think both the final color
version and the black and white version are distinct improvements over the
original. Feel free to let me know what
you think.
© Tim Marks 2009
I like the B&W version best, but you know I always like shooting B&W when we did film.
I agree with getting rid of the grass in the foreground, although I might try leaving more of the sky in when cropping--big skies always make me think of the expansiveness of out West.
Posted by: Dominique | June 01, 2009 at 09:51 PM
It's amazing how a few changes can really transform a picture. I don't have the same level of equipment or software you have, but I use what I have to try and compose the best picture possible.
Posted by: Becks Davis | June 02, 2009 at 05:08 PM
Thanks for sharing your Lightroom process, Tim.
Faced with so many choices, it's sometimes difficult (for me, anyhow) to remember how I arrived at the final version of an image.
Posted by: Lanora Mueller | June 04, 2009 at 02:24 PM
Thanks for the comments.
Becks
Don't need fancy equip or software even the cheap stuff can help.
Lanora
It's difficult for me as well. Most of it is trial and error and I seldom remember how I got there. I guess it is the final result that counts. i need to take notes on what I do so I can recreate it later :)
Thanks everyone
Posted by: Tim | June 04, 2009 at 03:25 PM