August 14, 2012

My Workflow—Part 4



Someone needs to teach me how to read a calendar.  I prepared this post before I went on vacation and thought that I had set it to appear on August 7th.  I did not notice that it had not appeared until I started looking at my blog this past weekend.  Sorry about not catching my mistake sooner.   I am sure many of you put your lives on hold until I posted again.
The final step of almost every photo that I take is to do some dodging and burning.  Here I burned (using the adjustment brush) the bokeh background and the leaves behind the flower.  In addition, I blurred a few of the leaves by reducing the sharpness and clarity with an adjustment brush.  The whole purpose of these adjustments is to make the flower and starburst to come forward and make the background sink further into the background.
I think that if you go back to the original photo you will see that my intended subject of the photo is definitely the subject that the viewers' eyes go to first and rest upon the most.
Enjoy.
Camera settings:  Nikon D4, 70-200mm f/2.8 at 90mm, ISO 1600, f/19 at 1/60th of a second on a tripod.
Post Processing:  
Lightroom 4—see above.

3 comments:

  1. The intended subject flower and star burst certainly disappeared among the leaves in the first photo. The last photo brings the subject out, and indeed pushes the leaves and background away from it, isolating it in the frame.

    The steps you applied along the way, as well as your narration, made it easy to understand the process. Thanks for taking the time to show us.

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  2. I can hardly believe that this is the same photo that you started with. I agree with Doug (I usually do), you did a great job bringing out the subject and made it seem very simple. Thanks again.
    Debbie

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  3. Everything that you have done to the photo has been in Lightroom. I know that you sometimes use Phottosho. With this photo what would you do in Photoshop?
    Allen

    ReplyDelete