Light, Shadow, Form, and Texture

A recent article on dpreview.com was about some of the new editing tools in the new Adobe Lightroom. I was aware of these things but haven’t had the time to really try them out.

The updated tools were first released in Lightroom 4 and will be incorporated into Adobe Camera Raw 7 in the new version of Photoshop. The beauty of using these tools is that they allow the adjustment of images “non-destructively”, which means that you can always go back and change it.

A recent presentation at the Jefferson County Photography Club about using tone mapping techniques to create a “pseudo-HDR” effect got me thinking about how far one could go in balancing out the tones in a high contrast situation.

The following shot was very high contrast with a view out a window on a sunny day. Although I had bracketed this shot two stops under and two stops over, I wanted to see if I could get a reasonable tonal balance using only the image that was the default metered exposure. This task was somewhat more complicated because the camera original was a .JPG file as opposed to my usual RAW file. But that’s another story.

The image has some detail at the extremes, but the outside is still overexposed and the interior is under exposed. Using the tools in Lightroom, however, I was able to balance these out nicely.

Having seen the value of the new tone adjustment tools, I decided to take it further so the next step was to straighten out the vertical lines that were a bit skewed due to the camera angle.

Finally, I converted the image to black and white, which is optional in this case but Lightroom has a good tool for this purpose.

Although I don’t think I would ever eliminate Photoshop from my workflow, I think I will be using Lightroom more and more for what I will call “pre-processing”.

For the record, the shot was captured with a Panasonic GH2 Micro 4/3 camera with a 14mm f/2.5 prime lens (28mm equivalent in 35mm).

~ by Rsmith on April 25, 2012.

Posted in Photography, Workflow and Printing