Photo Edit Show n' Tell
Loving all the bird photos! And taking notes, as I finally ordered an autofocus zoom lens so I can maybe capture some birds myself… eventually. 😅
OK so this one was just me playing around. And for some reason I chose to play around with a shot where the subject was cut off. But because I made it into a preset after this, this is the only one where I could reverse through the steps to show you. 😅
Final:
Original:
Steps:
- Auto in LR
- Applied a "Velvia 100" preset I downloaded, which to be frank didn't do a whole lot, it bumped vibrance +42 while just slightly nudging up the highlights area of the curve and not much more… joke's on me
- I lowered the exposure, tugged the curves down a bit, knocked down highlights and raised shadows, altered the color balance, and warmed the shadows up with magenta
- I added a central oval radius mask and bumped up exposure (and sharpening), and then duplicated it, inverted it, and knocked down exposure a bit around the subject.
Files below show final settings, not including the masks:
Uploaded files:
Great edit! It was lovely beforehand but the edit really draws focus to the subject, makes the background super nice, and the colors and tone (I love warm tones!) are lovely. Great use of the masking tool. I really like the retro film feel of it. This is exactly the kind of thing I've begun experimenting with lately, mostly for family portraits (which is a good place to experiment actually, since if you over do it you will hear about it haha).
I like that you adjusted the tone curve. I never actually do this but should start. I usually just bump the highlights & shadows sliders, sometimes the whites & blacks. I feel like adjusting the the actual tone curve directly gives you more control but I don't really know what I'm doing and the sliders are less intimidating. 🤣
Quote from JBP on April 24, 2022, 3:31 pmGreat edit! It was lovely beforehand but the edit really draws focus to the subject, makes the background super nice, and the colors and tone (I love warm tones!) are lovely. Great use of the masking tool. I really like the retro film feel of it.
Thank you! That's exactly what I was going for, it's so nice to hear it comes across!
I got the mask idea from an editing video on Youtube. Don't remember which one, but there are a lot of great ones to watch and learn from. (And some awful ones so we can learn what not to do, haha.)
I like that you adjusted the tone curve. I never actually do this but should start. I usually just bump the highlights & shadows sliders, sometimes the whites & blacks. I feel like adjusting the the actual tone curve directly gives you more control but I don't really know what I'm doing and the sliders are less intimidating. 🤣
Yes! I have a hard time wrapping my brain around the tone curve too. Like, I KNOW that the right top is highlights and bottom left is shadows and middle is obviously midtones but the way that the *curve itself* works still seems impossible to load into my brain.
So I just fiddle around in the general direction until it looks right. Not the most efficient process, but it's fun and it sometimes works out really well!
Generally speaking film has less-deep shadows and less "bright" highlights (but with more information) than digital. And each film stock has a particular color shift (Fujis more green, Portra more magenta, Kodak Gold more…gold…) That's what I think about when messing around.
I made the shadows magenta specifically thinking of Portra. Portra on steroids, obviously, not realistic Portra, but Portra of my dreams.
