Last week, I kept going with the “speed up your editing” process and I intend to do that now, as well.
The number one thing you have to do it stop using so many actions and presets – and overdoing them! I was looking back at some of my old photos and realized how awful I was about vignetting images. It just dates your images so much. You really want to develop a style, of course, but the more timeless and classic you can process your images, the better. In 10 years, they won’t look like some outdated style.
So, after I’ve culled in Photo Mechanic, I only bring in the images that I’m going to process, in Lightroom.
The original:
Not bad, but a bit underexposed. We were working with light that was coming in from a large window – and clouds kept moving in front of the sun. So, the light changed frequently. Nothing that concerned me too much. The main concern was us keeping baby Reagan asleep!
The only things I do in Lightroom are what you see above.
If I haven’t used a grey card, I manually adjust the White balance by cooling down my images a bit. By moving your blue slider to the left and pink slider VERY SLIGHTLY to the right, you can get more natural, and even skin tones. There is nothing worse that yellow or orange skin tones! Get out of the habit of just letting a preset do the work for you. They don’t. You have to adjust your images for the lighting situations you are in.
Then, I slid my exposure up slightly and my blacks for contrast. I brought my brightness down a tad. That’s it. Nothing else. Done with this image in Lightroom. And, then, if I have several from this same location, I just sync and voila. Done. Lightroom is the easiest part of processing photos!
Before & After:
Now, because we were shooting her on a bean bag, I want to crop this image before I leave LR – I know I want it to be out of there. Normally, I only crop in LR if I know I want something gone before I show a client. Other than that, I crop mostly in camera and leave images alone until they are ordered for the size the client wants.
I now think I want this to be black and white so I desaturate in Lightroom and crop where I need it to be – sometimes, I bump my blacks a little more after this for more contrast.
Now, I’m ready to export this image so I can do any special retouching (getting rid of baby acne, etc.) in Photoshop.
But, first, you should read this tutorial. I use Kevin Kubota’s BW GM Warm 2 and Snappy Action at about 30%. So, I want to save a little time. Any of my images that I know will be in B&W, I rate them, so I can export them at once and run the droplet from that tutorial I made using the Warm & Snappy. I created a duplicate so it was at 30% and not full blown, by the way. Once it exports in LR, it then opens in PS and runs the action. I can walk away, whatever. TIME SAVER!
After a bit of retouching, the final image:
Now, mind you, I don’t always retouch every image unless the image is ordered by my client. This again is a huge time saver for me. If you are nailing your exposures, or getting them really close so that a bit of tweaking in LR enhances, then your client will love the image no matter what! Removing a few zits should only cost you time if you’re making money off the image.
So, there ya go!
