Editing Success Stories: Part 1

This post is a story of pictures rescued from death - or, more accurately, from perpetual hard-drive limbo without ever being really used or cherished. I am going to narrate the editing process behind four pictures; I edited all but one of them from RAW. In each case, I will show the camera's JPEG and compare it with my edited picture.

But I'll start with a little disclaimer: Not all these pictures will look exactly as I intended. I'm beginning to question the integrity of some of the clients I use to view pictures. The same picture will look a bit different depending on whether I am viewing it in Lightroom, Preview, Picasa (the program), Picasa (on the Internet), or Blogger. I am trusting Lightroom for now. But just bear in mind that my edits won't always show up quite perfectly on Blogger...so don't judge me!

This will be the first post in a series of two or three, probably.

#1) Waterfall through Leaves

For this first example, the subject matter was so striking that the picture cried out for editing. Check it out. I like the composition, with the waterfall viewed through the leaves...but the colors are boring. It's almost monochromatic in a way. Really, the only visually captivating aspect of this photograph is the waterfall, which really doesn't fill much of the frame.

What is more, the lack of color reduces the feeling of depth. Most good nature photographs (if not all) will have some feeling of depth. This composition gives a bit of this; as you shall see, however, it holds the potential for much more.

Now look at my edited version. As you will probably notice, I did brighten things up a bit. I used the "Exposure" and "Fill Light" sliders to brighten the whole thing (I didn't adjust the "Brightness" slider beyond its default setting for RAW conversion). I also brightened the Dark Tones and Light Tones using the Curves tool. I darkened the Shadows a bit to keep some contrast; I used the "Highlight Recovery" feature to avoid overbrightening the white waterfall.  I also boosted the Contrast slider quite a bit. We're part of the way there!

More importantly, creatively speaking, I changed the white balance. There are two sliders in Lightroom. One controls "color temperature" (basically, from more bluish to more yellowish) and the other controls "tint" (basically, from more greenish to more magenta-ish).

I changed both. On the first, I chose a cooler color temperature. That did not have a striking effect, although it did make the picture more accurate - the subtle blue shift connoted that the picture was taken in the evening rather than on an overcast day. This wasn't a very consequential change, though.

On the second slider, I moved the tint toward the magenta-ish side, away from the green side. This might seem counterintuitive due to the predominantly green colors. In fact, doing this just a moderate amount greatly accentuated the contrast between greens - particularly, between the leaves in the foreground and the forests in the background.

Check out the results. The color contrast creates a much better feeling of depth, and generally a more compelling image.

#2) Daisies and Orchard

This was the one for which I did not actually use RAW. I had too difficult of a time with the lighting, so I ultimately traded a bit of the image quality in exchange for building on some of the lighting correction that a JPEG file has already done. The whole picture is rather dark, the upper right hand especially so. All this happened for two reasons: I needed to keep a quick shutter speed due to this picture's being handheld, and I didn't want to overexpose the daisies. In hindsight I could have boosted the exposure a notch in the field. Too late for that, though!

First of all, I cranked up the "Exposure" slider to make the whole thing brighter. I did this to a considerable degree, so I had to make some other changes to mitigate its effects. I used the "Black Clipping" feature to slightly darken the darkest areas of the picture, so things wouldn't look washed out. I used "Highlight Recovery" to keep the white daisy petals from becoming overexposed. I took down yellow luminance a few points as well, to keep the daisy pollen from becoming overexposed.

Then, I used a nifty Lightroom feature called the Graduated Filter. It works similarly to a real graduated filter, except you can set up gradients of different attributes - brightness, contrast, exposure, saturation, sharpness, and others. Or combinations of these. I set it up to brighten the top right corner of the picture (with the effect fading as it approached the other parts of the picture). I finally upped the contrast and played around a bit with the color settings. I thought the picture was a bit too yellowish so I moved the white balance slider a few points toward a cooler temperature and the tint slider a few points toward green. I couldn't do much, though - when you're starting with a JPEG, it's a good idea to be a lot more subtle about color changes.