Friday, February 10, 2012

Charcoal beauty.jpg

FistfulOfStones has added a photo to the pool:

Charcoal beauty.jpg

Long time no see :) Well...I`m back. Unfortunately my 365 failed in the begining but I intend to do it again so I wont give up.

I decided to give Lightroom 3 a try and see what is all about. Pretty strong piece of software especially when it comes to organize,publish and ful hand of batch operations. Also the Develop mode has some advantages compared to PS and some disadvantages like lacking the most functions that I need :) So after few hours of research and testing different tools and etc. I've found creating custom presets very useful and funny. Taht way anyone can reach pro result in just a few clicks. Actually lightroom makes you shoot more in quality and edit less and preserve precious time instead of lurking somewhere in photoshop for hours. Extremely useful of course is the tethering function which helps you to connect your camera and have the photos imported straight out of the camera ready for editing, softproofing and whatever you can think about. The application costs around three times less than photoshop and it is pretty comfortable except the fact that it is lagging sometimes due to large catalog temp files which you can remove anyway. You are going to need LR3 if u want to go pro. The problem is that you may need an image editor with a little bit wider variety of tools and options that LR3. In this case I succsesfully used GIMP for that purpose. It has many useful things although it's a little bit awkward sometimes because we are all used to photoshop. Dont understand me wrong ! Photoshop is really the best out there and also the most expensive and we don't have that kind of money to spent freely for everything that we need. Managing the studio is all about buying the things that will do the job. Managing the business however is completely other thing. So Lr3 or 4 (expected soon) at the price of 300$ along with gimp will suffice for a start.
Enough for that :) ! Of course everybody probably knows about that and I am not inveting the hot water :) But may be someone will find it useful :) Goodluck !

....so I did some presets and made some tests to be able to optimize them for as much situations as possible. In this case I recived this result using vignette ,split toning, black and white conversion,noise reduction. After applying some some color over the whole image I had that nice charcoal effect making the photo appear like it is a charcoal drawing. The preset doesnt appear well on overexposed pictures since it's doing some contrast enhancement and the highlights may appear too much blown out. I will create some more presets and publish them on the web in case that someone is interested.

The quality of the photo is decreased intentionally so it may not appear as sharp as the original !!

Best regards ! I hope you like the result !

Info: One sb-600 fired through diffusing umbrella (115 cm) camera right.



No comments:

Post a Comment