THE THINGS I DO…

A gorgeous cloud-filled sky gave me a reason to get outdoors and play around with over-saturating landscapes.

To get this particular effect, I used my circular polarizer to make the sky as blue as possible and then underexposed a stop-and-a-half to make sure I would have enough detail in the clouds. I shot this as a raw file, to make sure I would have a lot of flexibility in toning the clouds and to make the next part of the process easier. I opened this image in Lightroom 2 (have I ever told you how fantastic this program is?) and, after doing basic toning to bring out the maximum detail in the clouds, I bumped up the saturation of the blues and greens…a lot.

Once I had adjusted the color to match reality, I took the settings an additional 20 points to the right on the Lightroom saturation slider for these two colors to over-saturate things even more. The resulting over-saturated image is much more eye-catching than had I not used a polarizer and a little software “help” after the fact.

Go try it for yourself the next time you have a cloud-filled, beautiful sky. Don’t worry if you don’t have Lightroom 2, you can accomplish the same color tweaks using the Adobe Raw plug-in and Photoshop. Make your adjustments within Adobe Raw using the controls under the “HSL/grayscale” tab. Have fun learning this new technique!

Having just finished a day-long wedding shoot, I plan to share some tips of the trade with you in the next few blog posts. Today’s tip is to shoot in RAW format. I’ve extolled on the virtues of this format here many times before and can’t emphasize enough the importance of shooting events in RAW.

Having shot my share of events on film, I’ve gotta tell you my stress level’s a lot lower since I switched to digital. No more agonizing over whether I successfully captured a tricky lighting situation or not. With digital, I will know immediately whether or not the shot is a keeper.  Plus, shooting in RAW gives me even more confidence to try making photos I wouldn’t have considered shooting on film. The photo posted here was taken at the end of the reception as things were winding down. I wanted to shoot something that captured the dance floor a bit more artistically than the flash-blur photos I had been shooting all evening.  I figured I had nothing to lose but a few pixels, so I experimented a bit.

The venue lighting was tricky and called for a long exposure (1 second) to bring out the details of the tent and the dancers. I also wanted to move the camera a bit while popping a flash from the far left side to partially freeze the dancers and add some motion to the dance lights. Did I mention that this was shot during the last dance of the evening? That’s where RAW saved me time and allowed me to shoot fast with enough time to concentrate on my photography and make the shot when the dancers were in the right place. The wider exposure latitude provided by RAW allowed me to fix a lot of the problems in post-processing that I wouldn’t have been able to save had I shot this on JPEG format. For example, I bumped up the color saturation of the dance lights increased the clarity and brought back some of the detail in the blown-out highlights during post-processing.

Now that RAW has become the only format I use, I find I experiment much more than I used to and those experiments, as you see, sometimes turn out pretty well.

Reality check here. The more time and effort you put into making an image better before the shoot by lighting the subject properly and setting the exposure and color balance correctly, the better your end result will be. Although shooting in the RAW format gives you the ability to correct most of these mistakes in post processing, getting things right at the moment of exposure is still the way of the pro. 

I hear more and more photographers say “I’ll fix it in Photoshop” whenever they’re confronted with a difficult lighting situation. Don’t be tempted to take the easy way out and pray that software can save you — you’ll find that correcting the error before the shoot is faster than fixing it later. 

So, take the time to light your subject, cover blemishes, take a meter reading and/or use the right color balance from the git-go. This “old school” approach is still your best bet for success. A RAW image well shot always trumps a RAW image made without thought.