Some Post Production Theory
After noticing in the light of the new day that I had left my foot in one of the images from yesterday (a constant problem I have with giant feet and wide lenses), and having been watching Chase Jarvis’s live shoot feed all day, I decided to not only clone out my foot, but do a bit of extra punching up to the image to show a bit of how I work what post production I do.
Here’s the original picture:
And here’s the one with some post work done.
In general, my goal is to get as much right as possible, in the camera, at the time of capture. The only thing I don’t worry about on the set is white balance. I could set a custom white balance with a gray card in camera, but it’s a few seconds I don’t want to spend while I’ve got the model or client in front of me. It’s only about 5 seconds to eyedropper and sync settings in Lightroom, and I have to do it to set the camera profile anyway, so no biggie.
That in mind, 90% of my post production is global adjustments. I don’t want to have to go in and paint in details or anything. If I’ve got to grab my wacom pen, I’m going to have to do too much.
All I did for the above image is boost the blue saturation to make the skies a bit more dramatic. I bumped the clarity in Lightroom, which is a sort of edge sharpening that comes off looking similar to doing high pass sharpening in Photoshop. I don’t use it often, but it adds an edge to an image that I like when something’s a bit more modern and fashion-y like this image was. 99 times out of 100, I won’t touch the slider. It’s an effect I don’t use liberally. Lastly I applied a gradiated exposure filter set to half a stop on the bottom of the frame. I stated yesterday I wish I had added a 2nd light down to bring out her shoes, and this is just a virtual way of doing that. With only half a stop change, and having shot at ISO100 and gotten everything else right in camera, it doesn’t bring any noise to the table. It’s still super clean.
All together they’re fairly minor changes. With the exception of the edge sharpening, it could very well be just a change in camera presets. But that’s how I roll. If my post image is unrecognizable from my original image, I’ve done it wrong. It works for some people, but it’s just not how I like to do things.
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