It has been a while since I posted a picture I know but the main reason was that I have been re reading Lightroom Adventure and going through in more detail a number of the ideas and suggestions that I picked up, and re working my workflow and adjusting a lot of the preferences and settings.
I have also downloaded a huge number of presets from the excellent site here. Now that I have my workflow set up like a Pro, numerous custom presets in place, and some pretty cool metadata settings in place I just need to get out there and take more pictures.
As a number of things have changed in my life recently (all good and all to be posted on in due course) I now more than ever need to live my the mantra of Quality not Quantity so I intend to take a lot of pictures but process and publish only a few. The irony is that this picture was actually taken by Sands for a post she wanted to do on Almerimar Life, but I took the opportunity to manually make all the adjustments and at the same time demonstrate to Sands the power of Lightroom, and my developing skills. As ever your comments are welcome and appreciated.
Original Picture
The original picture is good and I can see why Sands was attracted by it. The first thing I did was some cropping and straightening. I wanted to bring out the dramatic effect even more with some deeper moodier colours, and to remove a few areas where the original image had blown out a bit.
I think we managed to achieve that.
Nice work there. Very very nice.
The original is much nicer looking IMO. In the edited version there is way too much emphasis on the clouds and the land is forgotten and so dark that it isn’t pleasant to look at.
I’m the opposite to Dustin, I really like the darkened shot in terms of the clouds. Probably my favourite of your shots I’ve seen to date.
[quote comment=”10999″]Nice work there. Very very nice.[/quote]
Appreciated!
[quote comment=”11003″]The original is much nicer looking IMO. In the edited version there is way too much emphasis on the clouds and the land is forgotten and so dark that it isn’t pleasant to look at.[/quote]
Sands and had a discussion that was very much along those lines. This is how I figured it:
If I wanted to show a landscape presenting the sunset in context I would have gone with the original, but as I wanted to focus on the dramatic effect of the sunset I wanted to focus the eye on that part.
Really appreciate the comment – welcome 🙂
[quote comment=”11004″] Probably my favourite of your shots I’ve seen to date.[/quote]
Wow – appreciate that!
I totally agree with Dunks. The landscape is secondary. It’s the clouds and the sunset your focusing on. In the original the focus is washed out, and not very clear. The modified version brings out the contrast, and the dramatic effect of the clouds. The landscape is there, although silhouetted against the sky. It still gives meaning and perspective to the shot. Like I said…. nicely done.
Same here. The original makes it difficult to focus on the beauty of the sunset. Nice work here Chris.
🙂 gracias!
Very nicely done. You had to “focus” on the sky since the exposure of the land was already a bit too dark to show any sort of detail. You’ve really only darkened the land a little.
Speaking of Lightroom, can you tell me if the software comes with a printed manual? I’m looking at the 30-day demo of v1.2 which came out a week or two back. It comes with a PDF manual which is only 135 pages long, so I’m wondering if they’ve been cheapskates or “done the right thing”. Since I’m probably going to proceed to buy the software, I may well buy “Lightroom Adventure” at the same time if Lightroom doesn’t have a paper copy of the manual.
I don’t think so. Lightroom is a downloadable purchase and it certainly doesn’t come with that 🙂 I checked through the other purchase options on the site and there was no sign of a manual there.
The inbuilt help/manual isn’t that good. Adobe put all that stuff on line which is very good.
I would certainly support the idea of buying the book to go with it.
The book is written by professional photographers so what I liked most was the how to use Lightrioom more than the what it does approach.
Sorry Chris – I hadn’t realised that you had made an electronic download/purchase to get your copy. I’ve been looking at buying the boxed software from Amazon (the same as I recently did for my Photoshop upgrade) and was assuming that you would have done something similar.
I know about their online stuff – I’ve been going through a lot of online video tutorials, both at Adobe and elsewhere.
Interestingly (and usefully) there’s commentary on the book from Aaland himself over at Amazon.com. Amongst other things, he says that while there were a lot changes from Lightroom v1.0 to v1.1, the changes from v1.1 up to v1.2 are much less significant from the point of view of how the user works with the software. So the book hasn’t gone out of date yet… 🙂
I don’t really have an option here in Spain, other than to pay stupid postage charges.
He says the same thing in the book 🙂