SHARE
Now that you all know how to get your exposure right, and choose your background, and hold your camera correctly your pictures are coming out perfectly, right? Yeah, mine aren’t perfect either. That is the beauty of software!
There are lots of options when it comes to software. Here is a list of just a few…
I’ve played with all of them but I chose Lightroom because it was the easiest for ME to use and still offers me a lot of flexibility. Lighroom is a database program so it keeps track of the thousands (close to 25,000) of images I shoot every year. Lightroom also keeps track of all of the changes I make to an image but those changes are never saved to the original file. The changes only appear when the image is exported so I can go back, at any time, and either revert to my original image or change the changes.
There are certain basic fixes I do to every image I take and then there are some extra goodies I can play with to really take my images to the next level.
Here is an image as it was imported into Lightroom. SOOC – Straight Out Of the Camera. (Note-The computer I used to demonstrate this to the kids only had Lightroom2. I have upgraded to Lightroom3 on my production machine.) You should know that the color on your monitor is probably quite different from mine. I calibrate my monitor regularly so the pictures from the lab look like the images I am processing on my computer. You should also know that I like my images bright and somewhat on the cool (blue) side. That is just a matter of opinion or style.
I love the expression on Kate’s face in this picture but I don’t love how dull this image looks. I fixed the white balance (the image was too blue), increased the Exposure, Fill Light and Brightness (the image was too dim) and I boosted the Vibrance (this makes the blue and green, in particular, pop). Finally I added a dark vignette to the corners to focus the viewers attention on Kate’s face.
Big difference, right? It is easy to spend hours working on an image. Especially an image that needs more involved fixes like skin blemishes, or removing objects (lint, trees, etc.) from an image. The nice thing about Lightroom is that if I fix an image with basic fixes (like above), I can copy those fixes to all the other images that were shot under similar light conditions. This saves me HOURS!
So now you know all my secrets. This is the last lesson for now. Was this helpful? Are you taking better pictures? Have I put myself out of a job? Only time will tell!