Lightroom preset: Wilma

As promised in my previous post I will start sharing some of the Lightroom presets I put together here. I’ve simply called this preset Wilma since I created it for some shots of my parents labrador, who’s called Wilma.

The Wilma preset reduces saturation and ramps up the vibrance while it also adds a beige/yellowish split toning to the shot. I’ve also added clarity and sharpness to make it pop some more. You should note that this preset does not affect white balance, exposure, contrast or any of the basic parameters for your photo, so you have to deal with those things yourself (just go with auto if you don’t know what you’re supposed to do). It’s also worth mentioning that I’ve only used the preset on the shots of Wilma so far, so I don’t know how it would perform on other photos.

Enjoy, and if you do use it you’re more than welcome to show me what you did with it and maybe even link back to my site. You can download the Wilma preset here.

Wilma (the dog) before and after Wilma (the preset).

3rd texture test

I actually prefer this to the original.

Settings: F3.5, 1/250 sec, ISO 400
Lens: Minolta MD 35-70mm F3.5 Macro
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

2nd texture test

These are actually the exact same textures and layer setup as I used for my first test, but since the pic is different in both detail and color I got a brand new result. Pretty interesting.

Settings: F11, 1/160 sec, ISO 400, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

1st texture test

I’ve never played around much with textures in Photoshop, mostly because I’ve never been that interested in those kind of images, but after having seen some really impressive post-processed photos on Google+ I decided to have a go at it. I simply chose one of the photos from my previous post, downloaded a couple of free textures I found and messed around with them. This is what I ended up with. It’s made up of 9 layers in Photoshop:

It’s this photo as background, 2 layers with a multiplied texture, 1 layer with another overlaid texture, 1 layer with a colored multiplied linear gradient, a multiplied layer with some custom grungy brush strokes and 3 layers with a yellow radial gradient. All layers with varying opacity and fill values.

I’m not sure about the result, but it was fun to play around with, so I guess I’ll experiment some more with textures when I have some fitting photos in the future.

Settings: F3.5, 1/250 sec, ISO 200
Lens: Minolta MD 35-70mm F3.5 Macro
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

Exercising

I decided to give myself a training excercise and picked out a couple of butterfly pics I shot earlier this summer. The goal was to cut out a butterfly from one pic and add it to another. The next step was to mess around with focus, blur and shadow to make the new butterfly blend in as much as possible. I think I spent like 2 hours on this excercise, and I’m pretty pleased with the result.

Settings: F3.5, 1/1600 sec, ISO 160
Lens: Canon FD 85mm F1.2
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

Trying to fix a heron

Here’s a photo I’ve been struggling with back and forth for a while now. When I visited Bergianska Trädgården we happened to see a young heron just chilling out in a tree next to a pond where I shot the ducks in my previous post. Since the tree was at the edge of the pond I was unable to get a better angle of the bird than the one I’ve posted here, and even though it was a bit cloudy I got a real problems with sunlight straight into the lens and a backlit bird.

However, instead of just throwing away the photo I decided to try to make the most of it in Lightroom. Kind of like a lesson in image adjustment. Now, I messed around with a lot of different adjustments (different lighting techniques, contrast, clarity, color balance, saturation, sharpness etc etc) before I decided to export this version. Some were pretty good and other were catastrophic, but for me the most important thing was to get a feel for how far I could push this photo. Compared to the original RAW image I think this is a big improvement, but looking at it now I think I could have tried even more Contrast, Clarity and/or Blackness. I may return to this one again later on to try out some new things.

Adjustments in Lightroom:

Original RAW image:

Settings: F5.6, 1/800 sec, ISO 160
Lens: Canon FD 85mm F1.2
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Fjärilshuset pt 3: Before & after

For this post I’ve messed around with another photo of the black and white butterfly from my previous post. The unedited RAW image is to the left and the adjusted version is to the right. This photo was actually horizontal from the beginning, but I felt that the pose of the butterfly worked out better in a vertical format, so I started with cropping off a big chunk of background to the right of the butterfly.

When that was done I decided that I didn’t like that branch behind the little guy’s head. I don’t think I would have thought about it that much if it was more to the right or to the left, but it bugged me (get it, bugged?) to have it behind his head. Since I’m not yet familiar with retouching in Lightroom I switched over to Photoshop instead. Masking the butterfly’s head and cloning away the branch took me probably like 45 minutes or so, so I don’t really spend much time fussing over pixels when I do these things. I guess I should though, but right now I don’t want to spend hours and hours on a photo that I don’t think will end up totally brilliant anyway. Where I am right now I see these kind of adjustments as practice so that I can handle the basics in case I really want to fix something later on.

Feeling happy enough with the small retouch I applied a custom Lightroom preset that I’ve named Frosty desaturation. It’s got some pretty standard adjustments for contrast, clarity, sharpness and stuff like that, but the main adjustment is that it gives bright colors like green and yellow a kind of frosty blueish or turquoise tint. It also desaturates all colors to a lesser degree. I think it worked out pretty well for this pic, and it’s also really nice to use for photos of flowers, making the flowers pop more against the cooler background. I’ve used it on some of my previous posts, like here and here.

Settings: F11, 1/160 sec, ISO 800, macro 1:4
Lens: Minolta MD 35-70mm F3.5 Macro
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Flash: Built-in
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

Fjärilshuset pt 2: Learning in black & white

Here’s part 2 of my adventures at Fjärilshuset last week, and since the butterflies didn’t scare that easily I went from using the macro 1:7 setting to macro 1:4, which is the closest you’ll get with the Minolta MD 35-70mm F3.5 Macro lens (without extra focus rings, but more on that later). This guy was a medium sized butterfly (can’t remember it’s name right now), with a maybe 2 cm long body and large wings, and he was hanging at eye level in a tree where a lot of people just went by without seeing him. People did however notice him as soon as they saw me pointing a camera up in a tree, but I was able to try a few different angles and distances before I had to let other visitors get a closer look. For the 2nd pic the butterfly took off and flew backwards and towards the lens just when I snapped the pic, making it end up like it is now.

Now that I’ve had time to analyze these photos and my technique (or lack thereof) a bit more I’ve identified a couple of small but maybe crucial mistakes I’ve made. First of all, my ISO setting of 800 isn’t really doing anything more than adding noise to the photos. I think 200 would have been the right choice here. I should also have gone for faster shutter speed. Since I used a flash I should probably have switched from aperture priority (which I use now that I mainly shoot with my old manual lenses) to manual and set the shutter to full speed. I’ve recently read a macro technique tutorial written by Dalantech at No Cropping Zone where I learned that you can use your flash as a shutter to freeze movement, and this is something I’d like to explore more in the future.

Furthermore, as you can see on pic 1 and 2 I ended up with a black vignette at the bottom of the photos. It’s caused by the built-in flash being obscured by the lens (and possibly by my fingers since I think I stabilized the camera by holding the focus wheel). I really got to buy myself an external flash, and probably learn to bounce the light off something to make it less hard. Or maybe get a diffuser.

For these pics I decided to try out some new things in Lightroom. The butterfly that I’ve shot here is black and white (with some subtle hints of yellow at some parts), so I thought a black and white preset with a subtle tint might suit this pretty well. Other than the Lightroom adjustments I’ve cloned off some dirt and dust from the butterfly, and I’ve removed an annoying twig from the background of the 3rd pic.

Settings pic 1 & 2: F11, 1/40 sec, ISO 800, macro 1:4
Settings pic 3: F11, 1/160 sec, ISO 800, macro 1:4
Lens: Minolta MD 35-70mm F3.5 Macro
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Flash pic 1-3: Built-in
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

Cloning a cat

This is Alita, one of my brother’s three cats, and I shot this pic of her when she was lying in his garden. I liked the fact that she was looking straight into the camera, but the leash was kind of bugging me, so I decided to do a quick test and remove it using the clone stamp in Photoshop. Voila.

Settings: F1.7, 1/3200 sec, ISO 400
Lens: Panasonic Lumix G 20mm F1.7
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom & Photoshop

Before & After: Evening at Gröna Lund

Here’s a before and after image of the carousel at Gröna Lund. The original is an export of the RAW image straight from Lightroom without any adjustments. I guess it’s not a bad shot as such, but the purpose for me was to play around with a custom Lightroom preset rather than just polishing the original shot. I was going for a rather washed out and desaturated look, but without losing too much clarity and contrast. I’m kind of happy with it as it is now, but I might revisit again sometime to try out some other things.