Image Reboot #5

Welcome to the fifth instalment of our Image Reboot – in partnership with Lucile’s Photo101 Rehab Clinic. You can find the previous ones by searching for #imagereboot in the Reader.

As enthusiastic photography enthusiasts, we wanted to include some editing techniques here – I installed Lightroom about a year ago and have taught myself the basics of photo editing, really just using trial and error in the beginning to see what worked and what didn’t. Then I did a lot of reading and have managed to make some good edits as a result.

Before we get started, take a look at some of the cool image rebooting that others have done over the last month:

Thanks so much for participating, some great drama created here 🙂

Now onto this month’s reboot. I took this photo on my lunch break while at work in Cambridge (a week-long conference). It was a really busy day and there was a lot of noise and I really needed to escape for a few minutes. So, I took my camera and dashed outside to photograph these flowers – I thought they were really pretty as I stood under the tree looking straight up at them. It was an overcast day, not especially good light, but it was great to get away for a few minutes.

The photos were nice, but didn’t seem to be quite what I wanted and I went back inside. I processed them as I usually would and was reasonably happy with the result. However, when I was looking for a new photo for Image Reboot, I went back and tried some more of the extreme editing that I had mentioned in the last Reboot.

Here is the original, unedited photo:

To do some “extreme editing”, here is my process:

• Since I shoot in RAW, I applied noise reduction and camera correction first
• Next I cropped the image to remove the building on the right and the extra piece of plant on the left
• I wanted a clean background so I increased the exposure substantially, to +2.15
• I then decreased contrast to -25 which brought out a little more detail in the flowers
• For a little more detail, I brought the highlights down to -25
• I then increased the shadows level to +24
• To really whiten the background, I increased the white level to +92
• And to bring out the image details, I moved the black level to -59
• To sharpen up the image a little, I increased clarity to +37
• Finally, to add some colour, I increased vibrance to +81 and saturation to +51

Here’s my edited image. I’m really happy with the result and it’s become my desktop image on my Mac. I really love it.

I hope you like this image as much as I do. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts. I’ve done a black and white version and a more natural version as well, which I also like, but I’m a bit of a fan of this cleaner and more extreme image.

If you’d like to get involved, please feel free to do your own Image Reboot and link back to this post (#imagereboot). Alternatively, I can give you a copy of the image so that you can try the editing yourself.

Now, I promised to give you some hints and tricks on getting started with Lightroom as well. I started to write this for you but found that someone else has already done a fantastic job of showing you how to get started in Lightroom – you can find all the information at this link here. If you have any questions at all about what you read there, feel free to ask me for help.

Happy Editing!!
x desleyjane