Highlighting the creative magic behind post-processed photos
Week 3 of ABFriday: 1 video and 3 photo galleries from 3 photographers.
Would love to have you participate! Guidelines are on my After-Before Friday Forum page.
Last week, Ben of Flights.Camera.Satisfaction submitted a pair of photos to ABFriday, while back on his blog, he posted a video showing his post-processing steps. I enjoyed the video so much that I thought I’d “borrow” that idea, instead of writing out my process. Hope you enjoy!
I’ve also included the after and before images.
NOTE: If the slideshows don’t load in your Reader, please visit the original post.
Submitted by Robin Kent of photographybykent
Robin says: This image was taken a few minutes before 9:00 PM on the rooftop terrace of the Printemps Department Store in Paris. First steps were in Adobe Camera Raw. I changed the color temperature to a cooler tone (4850 K). The Highlights were dropped (-100) and the shadows opened up (+43). Clarity (+26) and Vibrance (+30) were both increased. In Photoshop CC, the top was cropped, and two Curves Adjustment layers were used to: 1) lighten the glass roof of the Grand Palais and 2) darken the entire upper 2/3 (sky and tower). [Note: Robin has not written a detailed post this week.]
Submitted by Jaime Perez of My Photolanguage
Please click on the links of those who contribute, either to read their full posts (if they have written one) and to like and/or comment on their respective photos or simply to see their other works – they’d love to have you visit!
Visual Venturing 
Great video Stacy! I definitely prefer videos to a list of steps since you can actually see the effect of every change. Although admittedly they do take a little longer to put together. I didn’t know about the targeted adjustment for the saturation so I’m going to have to read up on that one, thanks! 🙂 And I really love your shot of the dock, the composition is superb.
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You were the inspiration for the video, Ben, so I’m glad you like it! I’m now working on this week’s 🙂 The TAT is really powerful – I think you’re going to find that you will really like it. Last but not least, thanks so much for your kind comment on the photo!
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HI Stacy, loved watching the video. Now I’m going to have to go buy Lightroom. It has a lot of great features. I hope to have some time soon to submit something to your ABFriday. I’m still scrambling to get caught back up from being gone last week. Great new forum.
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So glad you watched the video – thanks 🙂 Looking forward to you playing along!
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Hi, Stacy: I’m late to the game, due to travel commitments, but I really like the video you put together. You have inspired me to try to do the same, although it may be a while before I am ready for prime time. For a person who isn’t real familiar with Lightroom, such as myself, this is quite helpful. I may not get a contribution in this week’s ABFriday, but will try to have one ready for the following week.
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Robin, I love how you posted photo of the steps you take in your post-processing. I would have chosen to do the same, but the video takes up less room on the AB post 🙂 I’ll miss your weekly contribution, but I entirely understand!
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Wow!! Just what this photo-processing dummy needed 😀
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Yay! 😀
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I’m enjoying your Before-After sessions and really like looking at the results of the images. I believe that a major part of the photography-learning process is looking at lots & lots of pictures because it’s instructive to see other people’s perspectives. I watched some of the video, although not all of it because I don’t use Lightroom.
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And it was pretty long 😉 Glad you’re enjoying the series!
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This video was great but, as you admitted, it seems too involved. I would love to join up next week but no video. I’ll try a slide show maybe. Thanks. You’ve just inspired me!
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Would love to have you join in, Emilio! If you have a Mac, apparently doing a video is easy as it’s built in to Quicktime. Since I’m a PC, I had to research how to do it, then research and pick a program from those that I found, and then purchase it. But it was actually kind of fun once I understood it all (except it’s always weird to hear my own voice :)).
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Oh, Wow, Ok Stacy, you won; I give up! Such a wonderfully detailed and tutorial video this week! Fantastic job editing the picture, the After version looks better though, personally, I’d like the ship to be a bit more illuminated; maybe a range between the original and the final version you got.
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No, no, no giving up, Jaime 🙂 I did the video because I don’t do a separate post on my processing and the list of details was just getting to be too long for the post. Thought Ben’s idea was a great alternative. It took me quite a bit of time to figure out how to do it and, in the end, It turned out to be longer than I wanted – I’ll definitely have to work on that!
Thanks for your comments on the photo. I was trying to replicate the actual scene, but you could be right that the photo would work at least as well with the ship illuminated a bit more. I’ll have to go back into lightroom and tweak the exposure just to see!
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