Thanks to all our participants that made Saturday’s workshop such a success, you guys were awesome! It was great to see everyone trying a few new techniques and working with our amazing model, Kyle. We worked through 5 different locations and 9 different setups, and at the beginning of each, I made a few test frames to give our participants a visual idea of the kind of frames we were trying to make. On a few of these, our participants took the shoot one step further and made some amazingly creative images. Can’t wait to see those!
So, let’s get on with a little processing. This one was done entirely in Photoshop Lightroom.
Our first shot was trying to work with lines, balancing visual mass and isolating our subject using a narrow depth of field. I decided to go with the young man, hard day, trying to get a break in the city feel, and I wanted my processing to reflect that. The scene was also full of lines, and Kyle’s clothing was much darker than the surrounding elements. Even while I was shooting, I knew I wanted this image to be black and white. So that’s what I did first.
I wanted this image to be a little more focused on Kyle, so a slight crop was in order. Despite always trying to frame well in camera, sometimes framing gets rushed, or I just change my mind about framing when I see the image larger.
I then added a little extra contrast, taking the contrast slider up to around +50.
This brightened the corners a little too much for my taste, so I decided to add a slight vignette to pull the eyes back to Kyle a little more.
Next thing to do was add a little grain to go with the mood I was trying to convey. Nostalgic. That long day is in the past.
Finally, I noticed as I looked around that my crop wasn’t quite right. I had the remainder of one of the fence posts in the frame still. A little rotation of the crop removed that, and it was on to the final adjustments. My editing had made that car on the far left of the frame a tad too dark, so I brightened it up with the adjustment brush. I also noticed now that one of the hundreds of lamp posts on the bridge had snuck into the top left of the frame. That needed to go! A little work with the
There we have the final product from our first little session with Kyle. I look forward to seeing images from all of our participants in the coming days! Look out for the rest of my images from the day soon.
[...] This is a follow up to my previous post. [...]