Thursday, January 27, 2011

Shoot and Edit Wk 3-Good Night Edit

On Monday I shared my "Good Night" photo for Shoot & Edit:


SOOC:
Shoot & Edit Wk 3-Good Night {SOOC}

My Edit:
Shoot & Edit Wk 3-Goodnight {Edit}

I must lead off saying that this has been a crazy week at school, so my editing "steps" are not that great.  I honestly can't even remember what I just did.  My brain is just tired! :)


Anytime I'm shooting with artificial light (and no flash for me usually), I always try my best to work with my camera's settings and focus on the post-processing a bit more than when I do a nice natural light outdoors shot.  I knew I would have to first work in Lightroom with this photo before sending it to Photoshop.

First I used the custom balance eye dropper tool (similar to what's in ACR) to select a point on my white desk to set the custom white balance.  Boom!  Right away there was a huugggeee difference!  No longer were my pj pants a weird orangy pink color.  I then worked a bit with the noise reduction slider in Lightroom.  This tool is AWESOME.  It's so easy and it really works wonders.  The only thing you have to be careful with when you're doing noise reduction is not to go overboard.  If you get carried away, you can loose detail in your subject.

Anyways, after white balance fixin' and noise reducing, I did a bit of sharpening and sent it off to Photoshop.  There I didn't do much because I was pretty happy with the photos coloring and composition.  I did apply the high pass filter though because it is now officially my bff.  I duplicated the background, applied the high pass filter (soft light), and then reduced the opacity a bit.  I decided to flatten here and apply the filter again but to invert the mask this time (command I on my Mac).  I painted the effect on the "LL Bean" part of my slippers just to make the lettering a bit more crisp.  I flattened and moved on to the "artistic" step.

I always have to put a little color spin on my photos because my style is dreamy, light, and slightly vintage.  I confess that I am a Photoshop action addict, so I had to play around with a new set that I've had, but not worked with much.  This set was made by On the Spot Studios and it is called "Smoothie".  From this set, I ran the "Strawberry Orange Smoothie", tweaked several layers, and flattened.  

If you are new to actions, make sure you play around with all the layers until you find the effect you're looking for.  Playing around with action layers has taught me so much about the different effects in Photoshop and what is "my style" and what is not.

That's about it.  I made sure to run a little web sharpen action from Amy McMaster's free sharpening actions and saved for web.

Voila!  That's it.  Can you tell I'm a teacher by the way I ramble on and on?

Ok, time to go let my brain unwind with some Modern Family!

Have a good one and happy editing!   


Photobucket

11 comments:

Unknown

I love the SOOC and the edit is beautifully done!

koreen (aka: winn)

I love the processing on this edit. They're both very dreamy. :)

Ashley Sisk

Really nicely done and I think you're right that when we deal with artificial light, we almost have to rely on post processing. I always love the dreaminess of your edits. Beautiful work.

Our Beaten Path

Looks great even though I do love our SOOC also.

julie

What a beautiful edit...love the soft pinky vintage haze! I really need to start experimenting with soft colors! Thanks for the inspiration :)

Michelle R

Love the edit -- your style is beautiful!

And while I love it on other's pics, I just can't quite get it to look right on mine, guess that's why it's your style and not mine! (either that or I don't know how to edit it right! lol!)

Jenn

What an awesome shot and {perfect} edit! I'm with you on the crazy week. Ugh... But the weekend is just around the corner! :)

jillconyers

Wonderful edit of a great shot. Thanks for sharing your editing steps.

Mommy2Four

Beautiful edit....love the shot too! Artificial light can be tough~

faith ann raider

Really nice edit :) LOVE the tones in your after.

Brooke

Very nice edit...BTW I passed along a blog award to you, the post is here
http://photographybybrookemartin.blogspot.com/2011/01/little-natural-light.html

Post a Comment