A Scenic World

I have serious jet-lag from my trip to the USA. It used to be that I’d come back from a trip, go immediately to work, and be a zombie for a couple of days before falling into my old routines. Now without even owning an alarm clock and not having any pressing engagements, I’m having a terrible time of it. Which is why when I found myself wide-awake Friday morning at 6am, I decided to make the best of it. I headed out to the fields to catch the sunrise. The clouds made sure that the sunrise didn’t happen as planned, but there were enough wild poppies growing alongside the road to make my trip worthwhile. Of course, the wind made it difficult to catch one in-focus, but that’s half the fun :)

This photo started out like this:

I scrolled quickly over the presets I have in Lightroom and ended up landing on one I made just a few days ago.  This is what the photo looked like with just the preset applied:

I did lots of tweaking after applying the preset, but the basics were there. Let’s take a look at the settings after the tweaks were done, starting with the white balance. The white balance was initially a warm 4600 with a tint of -5. I moved it toward the cooler end to 3310 with -36 tint.

Next up is the basic tones, which includes exposure, recovery, fill lights, blacks, brightness and contrast. Contrast was pushed to the max here, as well as the recovery feature, even though there weren’t any blown highlights to speak of. I find that pushing the recovery helps add to the three-dimensional look, although you have to be very careful of fine,neon-like outlines appearing where colors meet (like the orange petal and green background).

Next is the tone curve, which basically had the highlights dropped to a value of -33. The lights were gently pushed to 40, the darks to 21, and the shadows to 7.  There’s not a whole lot of difference, but the photo is brighter across the board.

Next up is the color treatment. Once again, nearly every color was adjusted in terms of hue, saturation, and luminance. The important factors for the hue were two-fold: the reds were adjusted toward the magenta end, and the oranges were adjusted to the red end. Without those adjustments, the flower was too sallow and yellow. Saturation-wise, the reds and oranges were desaturated slightly because otherwise they bled. Yellow and greens were pushed to the max, while blues and aquas (interestingly enough, after that white balance change, almost all the background foliage is blues and aquas) completely desaturated. Luminance-wise, all colors were pushed to the max with one very notable exception: blue. The blue, which made up most of the grass, made for a nasty demarcation line between the flower and the background. Thus it was desaturated to help mitigate that problem.

For this photo, I did use both split-toning, with highlights of a mustard color and lowlights of a mint, as well as overall vignetting.

The only localized edits I did was to clone out the red splotch of another poppy at the top and to dodge some blades of grass around the edges.

Interestingly enough, there were two other versions of this flower that very nearly made it as the official version. I’m including those as well, so you can see what else I came up with. I don’t have a good reason for choosing the one I did; I just stop at some point and think, “This is it.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Lightroom Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.