After I wrote the previous blog, I found an email from a fave wedding photography team. They shared how to do actions in Lightroom V4, unfortunately, I still use v2. But I'm a quick study. As I was looking at the images taken of my daughter, I knew that though they were acceptable right from the camera for the blog post, they needed a little work for print. Now, I do not mean they needed fixed. My camera and light meter are apparently not calibrated and I'm sure my monitor needs re-calibrated, I can not remember if it was done this week or not, so probably not.
The image are over exposed slightly, not a lot, but the highlight side is more than I really wanted. It's over exposed.
Watching the video by the wedding team, It made me take a more objective view of the images I had taken...they are a lot over exposed. The and my ratio is closer to 4:1 than 3:1. For portraits I prefer 3:1....I like shadow/highlight and that soft wrap of light I get when I use a lower ratio.
After a few minutes of playing in Lightroom, I had a nice preset for my studio work that put the highlights in place, showing the detail of the face that was getting lost in the over exposure....apparently not much over exposure because the freckles are all there! I brought the shadow side out a little more without getting funny color looking....seems to happen with underexposed, it's trying to fill in pixel info that does not exist...so shadows weren't overly underexposed. No funny colors, no pixels filling in lost info, no dayglow highlights. Just nice.
Then they talked about adding grain! I LOVE FILM. I can't add grain with LR2, but I can in CS4. It was just a matter of playing around. OMG, that reminds me, I LOVE well exposed black and white images....So with an image that is now ready for print, I can take it to CS4 and change it to black and white.
A correctly exposed black and white with details in the highlight as well as the shadows. Add a little grain and it's ready for the lab.
I love when I learn something new!
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