Curiosity killed the cat. I’m here to ask this one question: Did it? As humans, especially of the female variety, I’m convinced that we were designed to have an innate curiosity. I for sure am always wondering how things happened, how do things work, how do you feel, and how did they do that?! So I figure I’ll start sharing just a bit about the back end of Jennifer Eileen which you never really see.
Here is an example of an image I shot at the Lest Wedding a week ago. This is an image of the guys; the hilarious, witty guys.
The first image is straight out of camera, my RAW image. 100% unedited. If you look closely you can see my lovely hand at the top shielding the sun, you can see cars in the background on the far right which b/c of the border around the image you can’t really see it (and it’s my sisters car to be exact… just thought you were curious), and you can see how overexposed it is. I tend to overexpose some, other photographers don’t. If I were shooting film I can guarantee I would NOT overexpose my film. I’d be a bit more exact like I was trained to be in school (Brooks Institute of Photography).
The second image is edited to be viewed as a proof online at my photocart website. I edit everything in Lightroom. I love me some Lightroom. In this wonderful program I adjust the lens distortion, white balance (meaning if their skin looked green I’d make it look as normal as I possibly could), exposure (ie, I darken the brights), I try to save my highlights, I up the dark tones, I edit out large distractions (ie: my hand and the car) and bring the blacks to a place where it suits the image. Some people tend to up the blacks for contrast but in actuality they do it so much that when it is printed it creates a big black blob of ink without detail in there. I like to keep detail in my blacks. I also adjust the contrast and brightness and sometimes I add a vignette (darkening of the edges) but for this image I didn’t… I didn’t like the feel of it. Now, every image is different so I adjust according to the feel of an image.
The third image would be the image that the clients received if they ordered a print or a product. Once the image is ordered I take the adjusted image from lightroom, export it as a photoshop file (it holds more information than if I exported it as a jpeg file), and then I do the final edits on it. So for this image there are a few things that I edited. First off do you see the groomsmen on the left? In the first two images he’s looking off into space. So for the final product I took his head off of another similar image where he was looking at me and I swapped out his head. I fine tuned the skin tones for the guys as well. Typically my proof images have a hint of red in them and I see it so it drives me nuts! Anyways, the skin tones get corrected, I sometimes bump the contrast a bit more, sharpen the sucker, and then do some artistic finishes on the images. For this specific wedding I know they love the vintage, warm feel… shoot, their whole wedding had that flare to it. I specifically adjusted the tones to have that yellow warmth and slightly aged look. After doing my own final touches, I then make sure my color profile is correct, my size and such is perfect, then I go ahead and order the products. So far, I haven’t heard of any clients who have been disappointed (thank you God!).
Well, this concludes the first of my “Evolution of an Image” series. I’m sure there will be many more to come and I’ll try to adjust the topics a bit. But it’s kinda fun to see right? Anyhow, if nothing else, I hope this was fun to read!
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thanks for the fun read. super cool. beautiful work.
Love your photography and style. Thank you for the insight into your workflow.
Thank you Mike! Any specific topics you’d like to read more about? I’m trying to compile a list of posts to put together concerning Post Production & Editing… at least what I do for those things.
Most of my training for Post comes from my schooling at Brooks Institute so I hope it’s somewhat helpful for others to learn what I learned.