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Thursday, February 24, 2011

Shoot & Edit - Edit (With Lightroom tutorial!)



So, for this week's edit, I thought I'd do a little Lightroom tutorial, since I know Ashley doesn't have that program and I'm a big believer in learning how to do things the long way. Presets and actions are awesome, but it's SO helpful to know how to create the affect yourself....then you can better adjust the action to your own photo too!

So, for this week's Shoot and Edit, I'm gonna talk about this photo:
(SOOC)


I love this SOOC shot. One thing I nearly always do when I edit photos is sharpen the eyes. In Lightroom, the "clarity" slider is kinda like the "Unsharpen Mask" in Photoshop. I'm not crazy about the way unsharpen mask sharpens....I prefer to sharpen with a high pass filter, (which isn't an option in Lightroom) but I really like Lightroom and if I've shot an event (lets say, a wedding) Lightroom really lets me do basic editing easily on massive amounts of photos, quickly so I can focus on doing creative and advanced edits on select images. (For example, I shot a birthday party a couple weeks ago. I was there for 3.5 hours, and left with around 300 images. I take 25-30 images and do full, creative & advanced edits on them. The other images I do basic editing for in Lightroom only...)

So, I needed to find a way to edit the eyes better in Lightroom. Here's what I came up with...

After you do your basic exposure/light balance, etc edits, select the adjustment brush.


Now, I may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, but I didn't even know this tool existed for weeks after I started using Lightroom......
So anyway, select the adjustment brush....now your lightroom panal will look like this:


So, because I numbered things backwards, the first thing you do is select "New" (#3) Now where it says "Effect" (#2) Choose "Clarity"....under the "Effect heading there are subcategories. On the clarity one, push the slider up to 100...and then where it says "brush" (#1) choose A, 100 for feather, flow, and density...choose a size appropriate for your image (you can change the size of the brush as you go along).

Now, click somewhere on the iris of the eye. A dot will appear. If you hover over this dot, red will appear where you have brushed over. This is REALLY handy, and will TOTALLY freak out your husband when we walks into the room and see's a baby with glowing red eyes on your screen..... I digress....

Brush over the iris, pupil, and the lash lines on each eye.....like this:


So now, go back up and select "New" again. This is VERY important. Now select "Exposure" under effect. Slide the exposure sub category slider up to .29 (It's all about subtle...) Select somewhere in the iris, but not on the first dot we used for clarity. Now brush over the iris/pupil area:


You can adjust the exposure subcategory slider to whatever looks good, but just remember that subtle is the name of the game. I usually pick something between .20 and .45.

Now select "New" again, and exposure..... set the exposure subcategory slider to .20, and select somewhere on the white of the eyes. Now brush over all the white..



For this, I always adjust the slider to somewhere between .10 and .30...and always less than what I set the exposure for the iris at.

Select the "Adjustment Brush" tool again to close. Now bump up the overall exposure just a touch, and up the fill lights a little, and there ya have it! Eyes edited in Lightroom!

Here's the before/after side by side


and here's my full edit, done 100% in Lightroom...


Of course, I did go into CS5 and play for a bit though.... here's my CS5 edit



and a b&w edit....I LOVE b&w :)


and real quick, here are my other edited images :)
SOOC


Edit


SOOC


Edit


SOOC


Edit

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

B&W Wed- New Lens Love :)

the long road

I got my new lenses yesterday...



Canon 50mm 1.4 & Sigma 24-70mm 2.8....
I've fallen head over heels for them.....



Just say'n :)

Monday, February 21, 2011

Scavenger Hunt Sunday-ish....



So.....it's kinda Tuesday, but my scavenger hunt items just the same!

Chocolate:

No, not romantic Valentines Day chocolate, or springtime colored candies....this is the kind of chocolate that has dominated our lives for the past two weeks. The girl-child must well 96 of these bad boys to finance her 5th grade trip.....
Thankfully, my husband is a CNC machinist....(read: he works in a building with a bunch of big, hungry guys who like chocolate)


Numbers:

Bet you're wondering why I posted a photo of fruit loops on a string as a "numbers" photo, right? Because that, my friends, was hand crafted by my (very proud) little Kindergarten man, with each sugar-coated fruity "O" representing a day of Kindergarten so far.....all the way up to a hundred. And he counted them himself :)

Canned Food:

It's my pantry.... I thought of making a canned food pyramid, but I ran out of time and motivation.

Music:

Elmo Rocks :) See......

Stack:

The engineering gene runs strong in my younger two....lol. YOu can always see where they've been...everything is stacked!

Shoot & Edit : Shoot! - Pink

Could you do me a favor? Whoever it is that's out there in upstate NY, that's been praying for snow...... PLEASE STOP!!!!!!!!

We have 6 inches right now........ 10 - 14 expected total..........it's coming down at a rate of MORE THAN 2" an hour....

If this is the "lion" March comes in like, I am SOOOOOOOOO looking forward to the "lamb" it ends with.

I mean, I like winter...I like snow..... but enough already!

Anyway....now on to our regularly scheduled bloghop!



I'm gonna try to get my scavenger hunt up later took, but I had to force myself to finish editing a session first! I'm almost caught up!

So, this week's theme is "Pink"...
I had the honor of photographing a beautiful little lady, who was most definitely "in the pink" :) I shared one of the photos for "Critique This!" last week.

These were all shot with my Canon 50D, and my 85mm 1.8
This first shot was F2.5, 1/250 and iso 100

SOOC (click to make bigger)

Hey there everyone!

Is she not the cutest thing?

SOOC (click to make bigger)


SOOC (click to make bigger)


SOOC (click to make bigger)


The room I was shooting in was itty bitty, and I literally had my back pushed into the corner of the room in order to use my 85mm.....I just find my 50mm 1.8 to focus too slow, and I've been spoiled by the color saturation of my 85mm. So I'm sure excited, that I have two really amazing lenses I was able to buy used this past weekend! A Canon 50mm 1.4, and a Sigma 24 - 70mm 2.8.....they are both amazing, and I'm SO excited! It should definitely make life a little easier the next time I'm shooting in cramped quarters!

Anyway, I'm off to see what everyone else was shooting this past week! :)

Friday, February 18, 2011

Love Letters......



Click to make bigger.....Gopher doesn't get to express himself very often, so he can get kinda wordy :)


To Kitty Paw!

(For the record, my husband now thinks I've gone completely off the deep end....lol)

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Shoot and Edit: Edit!



Kindergarten concert was soooooo cute. My little ham bone had a solo speaking part, and never even told us! He did so good!

Now, on to those love/romance photos....

SOOC


So, I decided to edit this one completely in CS5....so first I did my basic adjustments in RAW for my clean edit

(clean edit)


When I was done in RAW, I adjusted my usual stuff in photoshop...levels, curves, brightness/contrast, colors, ran a high pass filter..which gave me this:

(edit1)


So then I decided to play with it (even though I really like my edit)

I tried it with some cooler tones...
(edit2)


and with some warmer ones
(edit3)


and then a b&w edit with a tint....
(edit4)


I don't know though....I still think plain ole edit #1 is my fav :)

As for the other photo

(SOOC)


After basic adjustments


Final edit

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

B&W Wednesday/ Critique This!

Linking up today with b&w Wednesday and Pixel Perfect's new blog hop, Critique This!



Kindergarten concert tonight, so I'm gonna go check out everyone's photos a little later........so excited to see my little man on stage!

Ciao for Now!

the long road

Monday, February 14, 2011

Shoot and Edit: Shoot!


I can't believe the weekend is over already!

I have to admit something.....
I didn't take any shots for anything this week.......
I had all these great ideas in my head, for things I could have done for the scavenger hunt, for this awesome theme in shoot and edit....

But the fact is, I'm digging out from an event, and two sessions I did last week.....I've just been sitting here editing my little head off....lol. With little ones sick last week, I'm playing catchup on everything! (That fully includes cleaning and doing laundry...lol) Besides the fact that I had no willing models....lol

But...I do have a couple love/romance SOOC shot to share. It's from the wedding I did a while back, and it's the first photo that came to mind when thinking of love & romance....

SOOC


SOOC


Ug....the lighting on that one was so harsh....in a perfect world, I would have used my flash to offset it......

Shot with my Canon 50D, 50mm lens....

And I wanted to share my Valentines Day cards to you guys!

(This first one is inspired by Jill's Shoot and Edit a couple weeks ago...)

(click to enlarge)



Happy Valentines Day everyone!