A Scenic World

As promised, today I’ll cover the exciting post-processing steps of “Take a Little Piece.”

Let’s take a look at the original again:

As always, I’m going to try to present this in a linear fashion, although this isn’t the way I do the post-processing at all. I generally start with one of my pre-existing presets and then fiddle with all the sliders a million times until I like what I see. As a result, some of the settings at the end don’t necessarily make sense unless you see them through the prism of all the other changes. As such, I’m going to try something new. I’m going to show the original, the specific setting change, and how that change affects the other changes (to a degree). This is still a bit disingenuous; for instance, the “last step” below is using the brush to desaturate bits of the petal. In reality, this is probably one of the first things I did. Likewise, “calibration” is shown toward the end; I probably hit those sliders first. But hopefully this shows a bit of how some of these steps interact.

So, first the white balance. We’re going to take this photo toward a much cooler and much greener white balance:

The next setting in Lightroom is “Basic Tone,” which covers exposure, highlight recovery, fill light, blacks, brightness, and contrast. The main change was exposure; the photo was taken to nearly one full stop brighter. The blacks were increased slightly, as was brightness. Contrast, surprisingly, remained constant.

The next major change is the tone curve. This behaves just like “curves” in other software. I pulled the highlights all the way back and then pushed the lights and darks a bit and lowered the shadows to make a good range between tones. My curve at the end looked like this:

And the photo looked like this:

The next category in Lightroom is “Color,” which I take to mean saturation, vibrance, and then individual color changes (hue, saturation, and luminance). In this photo, the vibrance was increased from 0 to +60 and the saturation was decreased from 0 to -43. The individual color values are all over the place, as evidenced by this screencap of the values:

After making all these changes, the photo itself looks like this:

In the photo above, the last one – the culmination of our edits – looks like crap. This is where we really have to put in the context of the other changes. In this case, camera calibration is what’s going to make the big difference at this juncture. The calibration sliders have been altered as much as the color sliders above. The reason is that adjusting each of the calibration channels results in vastly different color profiles. This way, I can manipulate various colors more easily by separating the colors themselves using the calibration tools.

These crazy values are going to result in this:

We’re nearly finished! All that’s left is to add some khaki highlights and shadows:

And some vignetting:

By using the adjustment brush, I can desaturate the remaining pink bits in the backlit portion of the petals, to give me the final version:

And now for your listening pleasure: Take Another Little Piece by Janis Joplin (via Grooveshark)

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 4:44 am 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.