Post-Processing Techniques

It's time for another before/after segment. For tonight's images, I am using a photo of....you guessed it....Jake! This one was taken up at Dudley's Bakery a few weekends ago. The image was taken around 4:30 and the sun decided to move behind some clouds which diffused the light quite a bit. He was playing around this fence and peeped through at me when I told him to stop going onto the private property on which he is standing in this image. For those that are curious, I shot this with my 24-70mm f/2.8 lens set to ISO 100, 1/160 @ f3.2. The overall exposure is nice but the photo needs a bump in saturation & contrast.



I ran some actions but masked out the effect on the skin as I didn't like the saturation in the skin tones. I also ran an adjustment layer to get rid of the redness around the eyes. I finished off by darkening the edges of the frame to bring attention to the center of his face. Below is the final result.


I normally shoot with no color/tone/saturation adjustments in my camera as I like to have control over the final outcome in the image. I have tried different settings on my 20D but found I was having to do double the work on an image because I was trying to undo the adjustments so I would have a nice base image to work with.

I hope you all enjoyed tonight's post. The next couple days might not have any updates as I need to finish up some photos from recent photo shoots. It was nice having a 4 day weekend. I hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving holiday. It's hard to believe that Christmas is just around the corner!