It's snowing and overcast today, so perfect time to relax at home and look through old photos that would be fun to edit. There are a gazillion presets (a lot of them are free:) out there for whatever editing software you use. I just got Lightroom 3 a few weeks ago and it's become my new obsession to search for the *perfect* preset! Presets will change your life! They are a fun, easy and quick way to completely change the mood of your photo. Of course there are times where manually editing a photo is the best choice, but when editing a slew of photos from a shoot, it's nice to choose a particular preset that matches what you were trying to capture, and then use them with each photo; this way the look and feel of your pictures are consistent. Here are some photos I took a while ago that I thought would be fun to edit using presets. Now you can see what a difference a click of a button can do to a photo!
Original SOOC:
Preset: Color Creative: Direct Positive
These tulips were taken in Dover, DE when we lived there. Every spring the most beautiful flowers could be seen downtown. Really bright reds, yellows, oranges, white, purples...it was fun to take a stroll to see these gorgeous flowers (or even take a different route home so we could drive by them:) Anyways, this preset is called Color Creative-Direct Positive. This one already comes in the Lightroom library. I love how the reflection in the water has more definition!
Original SOOC:
Preset: PH Fashion Shoot III v
When my husband's family came to town for my brother in law's wedding, we took a quick one day trip to NYC. I was trying to get them to do that "walking toward the camera and looking like hot stuff", you know what I'm talking about, right?! Anyway, apparently they weren't catching on! But, I like the way the photo turned out anyway! I love how Em is like "Woah, look how tall that building is!" Yes, Em, we are in New York! I love the coloring of this preset, I did bump up the exposure just a little bit to brighten the photo, but doesn't the coloring make this photo so much more interesting?
Original SOOC:
Preset: Famous Hobo
Like I said above, my brother in law was getting married. His wife's grandpa owns this store in the very beautiful farm country of Pennsylvania. We went to check it out and see how they produce feed for horses all over the U.S., pretty neat! It was hard to decide which preset to use for this one. I went back and forth between black and white and vintage with a little color...in the end I chose this one; Famous Hobo. I like the browns and that old feeling it gives to the building. If you didn't know when this was taken and had only seen the edited version, how far back do you think you could date this? Neat, huh? (You might notice I cropped out the car, too.)
I hope you've enjoyed seeing the differences between an SOOC (straight out of the camera) photo and an edited one. Post processing is just as important as the shoot itself. An edit can make or break a photo, ruin it or make it gorgeous!
For now,
Susan
No comments:
Post a Comment