As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’ve been working my way through my Lightroom catalog as part of my sheltering in place. While the majority of what I’ve been doing is culling duplicates/bad photos, organizing my file structure into some thing that makes more sense, adding the proper tags to things so I can find them more easily, making collections for my portfolio images and geotagging photos (to the best that my memory will allow me), I’ve also had some fun either processing images that have never been processed or re-processing them based on years of learning Lightroom and Photoshop.
One thing I’ve noticed pretty universally is that I spend far less time on global adjustments and far more time on local adjustments instead. I think I try to find a pretty good baseline for the image regarding tone/contrast/etc. and then focus on the adjustments that smaller parts of the image require. This image is a great example of that. The foggy section at the top of the frame needed a far different treatment than the grassy foreground, for example. And keeping just the right balance of light on the horse so that it wasn’t a complete silhouette but still stood out in stark contrast against the rising fog took a delicate hand with some very small tweaks.
If you think about it, this really isn’t terribly different that what one would do in a traditional darkroom. Very little of the time of making a print is spent on the global part of the print. Instead, it’s in the careful dodging and burning where a print really starts to come to life. My time in the traditional darkroom has been limited (something I hope to remedy in the coming years) but I always enjoyed the process of working out the dodges and burns for an image and watching the print come to life with each little tweak. Seeing the print appear for the first time in the developer certainly is a magical part of the process. But working out all of the little tweaks that bring realization to the photographer’s intents is almost as magical.
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How did I not know you had a blog? I’ll add it to my reader!
Thanks, Jim! The blog is something I’ve always wanted to make more regular but haven’t succeeded terribly well at over the years. 2020 has been a little better but I’m still lacking the volume I’d like to produce with it. I need to go re-read your great post about how to make a successful blog. Your excellent results give hope to aspiring bloggers everywhere!