Evolution of an Edit …

Felt like playing around this morning.  Meet my butterfly baby from a couple mornings ago.  She’s about 3 hours old in this picture, still in the midst of drying her new wings.

SOOC …

+1 exposure, + One Willow Palette Vibrant preset, + edge burn, +Haze-Divine preset, + I bumped saturation a tad.

The above steps are all done in Lightroom.  In Photoshop, I added 2 Lil’ Owls texture Crackle (#5 or 6, I think) – soft light, texture erased off butterfly …

Also in Photoshop, lightened exposure a tad, and added Florabella Milk & Honey action at 28%.

Of course, I’m happy with the image at the Lightroom-finished stage.  But sometimes it’s fun to play a little further …

Iris.

"Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God."
-  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Iris

photo details:  Canon 5d, 100mm macro, processed in Lightroom 4 (confession:  I hate change.  And I wasn't thrilled when Lightroom significantly changed their exposure sliders.  But.  I must admit:  LR4 new exposure sliders are awe.some.  I significantly underexposed a couple of these images.  LR4 kept my highlight detail, recovered all the shadow detail, and didn't remotely compromise the color.  All on a mere JPG.  Awesome.)

Anatomy of a Lightroom Edit ... Redux

Last time I played around with One Willow Brush presets using a JPG image. This time I'm playing with a RAW image.

Behold, my SOOC raw file (sized & converted for web)



Below, I applied One Willow's Lyric preset, and made a slight white balance adjustment to 4835 (just to "cool" the image a tad).



And lastly, I finessed the image using the Brush Collection...



Jessica's One Willow Brush Collection is now available and has a discount code good through March 28: OWBRUSH15 (good for 15% off not just the Brush Collection, but any One Willow purchase).

Anatomy of a Lightroom Edit ...

Yesterday, Jessica, preset-creator-extraordinaire at One Willow, gave me a sneak peek of her new Lightroom brushes collection. I must admit, I don't often use brushes; I'm kinda sorta a lazy quick editor, especially with my own family pictures. Take, for example, the SOOC snapshot below of Littlest Dude. I snapped it quick and it's underexposed by about a stop.



My normal edit for this would be to add +1 exposure and maybe bump the vibrance a bit, which results in the edit below:



But, since I'm playing and experimenting with Jessica's new set, I went ahead and applied her new Everyday preset (which she's including with the brush collection - it's a great starting point!). That simple step (no adjustments) created the edit below:



Then I went ahead and locally applied the following brushes: skin smooth tones (to subtly remove skin blotchyness), skin soften (smooths lines), eye sparkle, eye white, eye define lashes, sharpen definition (to make face pop a bit),
and color enhance (just on the background).





I know I've said this before, but gosh I love Lightroom and One Willow. The End. :-)

And the winner is ...

... Michelle from Michelle Sidles Photography!



Congrats, Michelle! Contact me (susan at susankellerphotography dot com) with your email info and I'll get those presets sent to you!

Thanks, everyone, for playing along with this giveaway of Kellie Hatcher's Raw Color Presets. And thanks, Kellie, for your sharing your unique, creative skills with us!

Oh, and for anyone who may be wondering ... star was your runaway choice for favorite preset!

Giveaway - Kellie Hatcher's Color Presets!

Kellie Hatcher has a brand new set of color presets for Lightroom. This set, to me, seems very aged-film-70s inspired. The presets are dramatic, moody, and retro-feeling. Kellie is generously offering a set of her color presets to one of my lucky visitors.



Here are some other wonderful places/posts in the blogosphere beautifully utilizing Kellie's presets:

Image Bearers Photography
Kidnapped by Suburbia
Kellie Hatcher, of course
NJoy the Moment
Molly Flanagan
CF Photography
Jude Wood

The super simple giveaway details are as follows:

1. Leave a comment here - let me know which preset is your favorite :-).

2. For a second chance of winning, go “like” Kellie Hatcher Photography on Facebook and then come back here and leave another comment letting me know that you did so.

I will pull a winner's name out of the proverbial hat on Friday morning, October 7, and announce it here. Good luck, everyone!

Roadtrip Part 11, and Playing with Presets…

I’ve been experimenting with Kellie Hatcher’s presets for the last week.  They’re a pretty dramatic departure from my usual editing style.  These presets remind me of pictures from my childhood – the film pictures mom and dad took and then stored the completed canisters of film in a drawer for a couple years til there was money to develop the pictures; the pictures that when finally developed were heavily toned and kinda earthy.  I thought it would be fun to try the presets on some of my Lake Powell pics (I labeled each picture with the preset used), especially since when we were out on the water and away from other boats & buildings, there’s nothing out there to tell us what modern decade we’re in – it might really be the 1970’s …

70’s vibe, yes? 

Fun announcement:  I will be hosting a giveaway of Kellie’s color presets very soon …

ps. these edits were all using the soon-to-be-released JPG version of Kellie's presets

Roadtrip, Part 10, wherein we explore by boat...

So, we survived our “short cut,” and arrived at our glorious destination:  Lake Powell.  We rented a “power” boat (“power” written in quotes, because there was very little power in this particular powerboat.  My little dream of waterskiing on Lake Powell quickly became a pipedream for this particular trip; cue the sad violin, please). 

Luckily the boat worked well enough for the Dudes to thoroughly enjoy themselves … and to become brave enough to perform multiple “tricks” [grin].

Those gorgeous thunder clouds you see in the picture above were kind enough to hold back their deluge til we returned the boat and checked into our motel. And that little deluge made for a spectacular sunset scene. More Lake Powell to come. At the rate I'm posting these vacation pics, the boys will all have graduated by the time I finish. Note to self: take fewer pics next vacation.

Btw, for anyone interested: all the pictures in this post were edited in Lightroom using One Willow's newest presets. Specifically, I used Imagination, Harmony & Film Newspaper from The Beautiful Things Collection.

Purple Ranunculus.

I’m still having a blast experimenting and playing with Kellie Hatcher’s B&W Film Presets.  Guess what?  They’re perfectly wonderful on macro floral images, too!!  Who knew?  Deep preset.  With slight adjustment to contrast slider.

Jasmine II preset. Slight adjustment to boost exposure.

Jasmine preset.  No adjustments.

So my bummer-news is that Trader Joe’s is no longer selling ranunculus [wiping a tear from my eye …].  I’ve loved having these gorgeous flowers adorning my desk these last several weeks.  My good news is:  I have a set of Kellie’s presets to give away this week.  Click thru for the details!

Giveaway!! Kellie Hatcher BW Film Presets!!

Have you seen Kellie Hatcher's beautiful lifestyle photography? Because, if you've seen her lovely images, you've already seen her fabulous black & white film presets in action. I was thrilled when Kellie offered her presets to me to try; and then I was superduper-thrilled when she offered to gift a set to one of my lucky visitors!!!

Kellie's presets are both Lightroom and ACR compatible. They are designed specifically for RAW files. I had to dig pretty deep in my files to find some RAW images from last year to experiment (y'all know I'm a jpg shooter, right?). But, oh my... Kellie's presets + RAW files = one-click wonders. Following is my SOOC image followed by edits using the presets. No adjustments were necessary! None. Nada. Zip. One-click. Easy peasy.





Despite these presets working brilliantly and easily with RAW, I just had to try them on JPGs, also. Guess what? They're pretty nice on JPGs, too, albeit needing some minimal tweaking (mostly exposure adjustments). Here are a couple JPG examples:





So, the super simple giveaway details are as follows:

1. Leave a comment here - let me know which preset is your favorite :-).

2. For a second chance of winning, go “like” Kellie Hatcher Photography on Facebook and then come back here and leave another comment letting me know that you did so.

I will randomly choose a winner on Friday morning, April 29th, and announce it here.

My Favorite-est New Presets …

I have the pleasure of knowing Jessica Paige through our mutual involvement at I Heart Faces.  She graciously allowed me to beta test the JPG version of her latest presets, The Timeless Collection.  Bottom line:  they are gorgeous.  Designed specifically for portraits, they warm/cool/tone & convert to b/w … ALL WITHOUT DOING FUNKY THINGS to SKIN!!! 

I ran all the presets thru my paces this morning.  I used an outdoor picture and an indoor picture.  In each case, I slightly adjusted the exposure of my SOOC picture FIRST (in each picture below I added about .25 exposure, +10 fill light & +5 brightness) and then applied the presets without any further adjustments.  Jessica has quite smartly left exposure values OUT of her presets, so you can choose those for each image and not have your settings undone when you apply the preset.

 

Ok, ‘nuff talking.  On to showing…  First up, outdoor pic:

And, indoor pic:

Jessica’s wonderful presets allow me to work exponentially quicker, because every photo that I can nail right inside Lightroom is a photo I don’t have to send to Photoshop to finesse.  Thank you, Jessica – you make my “job” (that I love) so much easier!!!

Oh, and there's a discount code that's good through Feb 9 for the JPG version: TIMELESSJPG

Orange County Family Photographer

Totally Playing Around ...

Inspired by this post I read this morning. Sean McCormack developed a timelapse preset (that he's generously sharing) for Lightroom.

So I grabbed my tripod, aimed it at my two resident students, and fired off a hundred frames (turned off autofocus after I grabbed the first focal point). Edited only the first frame in each set and sync-ed all the rest. Super quick.

Here's the resulting mayhem ...





Sean's preset is super fast (24-29 fps) and high quality resolution, and really, designed to be used with 100s of frames. For my little experiment, plain ol' slideshow probably works acceptably well at 1/10 second per frame. Compare ...



Anywhoooo. Yes, I had too much time on my hands today. :-}

Lightroom on Sale!!!!

Y'all know by now, I'm a HUGE fan. Couldn't imagine my photography workflow without this amazing software. If you've been considering purchasing, NOW is the time. Amazon has it deep discounted to $150 for CyberMonday ...

Btw, I don't usually do quickie one-liner notices here on my blog of neat things I find on the web. But I do list these often on Facebook. Feel free to join me on Facebook, if you'd like to follow along ... :-)

A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows. - St. Francis of Assisi

processing thanks to One Willow's JPG Butterscotch Button preset

Bzzzzzz.....

Y'all know I love Lightroom. I also love Jessica Paige's One Willow Presets. Lightroom + One Willow Presets go together like a hand in glove. Today, Jessica is giving away TWO TRIPLE SETS of her presets at I Heart Faces. Hop on over and enter the giveaway!

Here are some examples of her gorgeous presets on some of my recent pics ...
SOOC is below or on left




Willowing + Burn + Clarify + Sharpen (Fairytale set)




Lavender Mints (Retro Candy set)




Vintage Chocolate (Retro Candy set)


Beloved (Fairytale set)