You may have heard that Desley has been busy preparing her next move to Melbourne, and for that she had to reduce her blogging activities.
So, please bear with me, as I am hosting the sixth installment of our Image Reboot – a partnership between Desley’s Musings of a Frequent Flying Scientist, with yours truly Lucile’s Photo101 Rehab Clinic. You can find the previous ones by searching for #imagereboot in the Reader.
Desley has learned the technique and mastered editing images with Lightroom. I use Lightroom as well, and thanks to her, I have learned a more structured way to photo editing than my usual trial and error.
Now onto this month’s reboot.
I shot this portrait with a Olympus E-M10. I shot it after sunset and didn’t like the dull and flat way the image looked.
Here is the original, unedited photo.
I love monochrome portraits, but I gave color a go by following this process:
- I increased the exposure to +50
- I then decreased shadows to -26 which brought out a little more detail in her face and beautiful curly hair.
- To reduce the dull appearance, I decreased the white level to -100
- To bring out the image details, I moved the black level to -40
- To sharpen the image a bit more, I increased clarity to +70
- I increased vibrance to +19 and saturation to +66
Here is the result:
I thought that her face was still a bit dull, so I took two more steps:
- In split toning, I increased highlights to +10 and shadows to +10
Here’s the new image, but perhaps her face is too pinkish. Desley may like the pink color, though, so I will leave it here.
But, I couldn’t resist to convert it to monochrome. That’s how I like portraits!
To make it easy, I edited the above photo in Silver Efex Pro2, and applied the High structure filter (harsh). Et voilà!
So, what do you think?
Would you like to try doing the same? Please feel free to do your own Image Reboot and link back to this post (#imagereboot).
I enjoyed being here with you today, and hope to not have disappointed you too much. Desley is a real pro when editing with LightRoom, so don’t worry, next month she will be back with you!
Cheers!
Lucile
musingsofafrequentflyingscientist.com 
You are absolutely right, I love the pinker version. Thanks so much for hosting the reboot this month, what a fabulous job you’ve done of this shot. I like that you have us a trip through the process in pictures, maybe I should include that as well. Fabulous my queen X.
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Do I know your love for pink? 😉💕
It was fun to do it and above all to be able to support you. Count on me my Empress! Xxx
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Reblogged this on lucile de godoy and commented:
What a honor to be a guest post for the master of LightRoom editing. Thanks, Desley!
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What do I think? I think that all the work you did to make her face and her appear brighter, made the B&W image
you made from the recalibrated B&W image sing! Is that how you normally get your glorious B&W images?
I know nothing about it at all, really, but I find it interesting you fiddle with a colour image before you turn it
black and white. what would happen if you made it B&W first then fiddeld with it? Would you acheive the same effect? x
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If the image is flat like this one was, due to the low light which offered almost no contrast, then I usually do some ‘plastic surgery’ before converting the image to black and white.
It’s not always that I use a filter like this one though.
I may just convert to black and white and make new adjustments because of my preference for high contrast and a bit of drama! 😉
I always shot jpeg and raw and go to the post processing steps with the raw file, though.
Hope I didn’t bore you now!
Are you there and awake?
Thanks for your lovely comment.
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Hi Lucille, I’m here and awake. Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we? i find the concept of fiddling with tones and contrasts in colour before B&W-ing as opposed to making black and white first and then adjusting contrast intriguing. it seems like it could be a metaphor for
something, but I dont know what! If i figure it out, I’ll tell you! 🙂
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Hi Debbie, Kets have a tea! What are you having? You’ll make me of course jealous as you’re in China!
I’ll have a oolong, ok? A gift from a Chinese friend.
I’m not an expert in post processing and I’m still learning according to my preferred methodology, i.e. experimenting then reading about to learn from my failures. Now you got me curious about the metaphor!
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Why do we always meet on other people’s blogs, Lucille? 🙂 And why not? It’s fun.
Okay Oolong it is, which is 乌龙 wulong, usually translated as black dragon, but the first character “wu” is actually crow or raven, as in ‘black as a raven’…… anyhow, my favourite oolong cha is Tie Guan Yin, Iron Guan Yin or Iron Buddha tea, a lovely flavour and the strength of oolong without the bitternes at the end.
havind said that, my usual cuppa is a cup of english breakfast tea with a tiny dash of milk!!!!!
the metaphor, it will come to me, but it will take time… but if you are lucky I’ll wake up knowing what it is!!!!!
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It’s our fate to meet at different blogs because we’re global citizens. We live in different countries and like to explore and learn from different cultures, so, it’s all written in the stars.
I’m intrigued by this black raven. Is there one for the ox? I’m an ox in Chinese years!!
The oolong tea she gave to me tastes like heaven. And she gave me the wooden set for the tea ceremony as well.
But you’re having English breakfast tea! Then we are having a multicultural tea ceremony!
Cheers!
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Oh YES! I like that. Global citizens with a cosmic outlook. Yes, you with your brasilian ancestry – we must chat about that one day over a cup of tea. your tea set sounds lovely – the tea ceremony way to drink tea is wonderful. raising the glass ….
Night.
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Glass is up, wishing you a good night!
Ps: more to come
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Ah, here is the name of my tea: Ali Shan tea oolong
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