timeimmortal

This is another shot taken on my little backyard wander at Grace’s grandparents’ house. It is a little ornament of some kind that I noticed amongst a stand of plants of some kind — a little bear holding a valentine. I wonder how long it has been laying in that patch of greenery?

This is the first picture I’ve produced that was edited with Lightroom 2.0, the beta of which I downloaded earlier today. Overall, I like the changes to the program interface, although I can tell already that learning some of the new tools is going to take me a goodly length of time. That’s okay, though — I love a challenge.

Edit-wise, this picture received what could be called a typical treatment, although I threw in a few changes at the end. I applied my usual calibration/Punch combination preset (Punch increases the vibrance of undersaturated colours in the image, incidentally), then did a bit of noise reduction (this was an ISO 400 shot, and so was a tad grainy) and applied some sharpening. And I finished it off with some highlight reduction to reduce glare on the leaves. That made things look pretty decent overall, but it still needed something to make it stand out a bit more.

To that end, I reduced all the saturations for the various colour channels to ‘-100′ (i.e. the lowest saturation value possible, essentially reducing that colour channel to grayscale), and then began “adding in” colours again. Greens were boosted to ‘+100′, and reds to ‘+40′. Aqua was boosted a bit, and blues were brought back to neutral. Oranges and browns were kept unsaturated, which meant that (most of) the bear and the twigs and branches in the background stayed uncoloured, while the leaves and valentine stood out.

I also took advantage of a new “on export” sharpening feature in the program. While it doesn’t give you the tightest control over the amount and kind of sharpening applied, it does give you a pair of dropdowns that allow you to kind of customize the output: sharpening can be set to ‘low’, ‘medium’, or ‘high’; it can also be optimized for ‘Screen’, ‘Matte Photo’ printing, or ‘Glossy Photo’ printing. For this image, I tried ‘low’ sharpening with ‘Glossy Photo’ optimization.

I’m pretty happy with the results — the image looks exceptionally crisp and clean, more so than any other I remember taking and editing. This is true even near the edges of the photo, which is usually where the 17-85 mm lens is quite soft.

~ by Kenneth on April 2, 2008.