S
SNC1923
Guest
So I took some shots. Okay a bunch of them. I learned a few things along the way also. I am having some trouble getting the white balance tweaked in. . . .
So I understand the rules of not photoshopping, so here are the six keepers. But I wanted to improve the output a little more so I did white balance, crop, rotate, tweaks in Lightroom. I kept the file names the same so that they can be compared and "whipped".
I figured out that I need more light, and probably a better background solution.
Cropped a little and WB
I took a look at these shots and saw a lot going on correctly. Good composition, excellent focus, etc. The white balance is really tough though. Like Brad, I also am learning LightRoom, an adobe file organizing software program. It offers the ability to substantially tweak your photos but doesn't even approach the complexity of PhotoShop, which is, well, cumberful.
Anywho, I took a stab at further tweaking the above image and came up with this:
This is by no means perfect and I'm sure there are others on our site who are far more familiar with these programs. I can't remember everything I did, but for the most part I fiddled a bit with color temperature, greatly increased the exposure, reduced contrast (unusual for me), played with sharpening a bit, and really cranked "lens vignetting." Most zoom lenses vignette a bit, that is appear darker in the corners. This is hard to notice unless against a light background and you are looking for it. LightRoom has a correction for this under "lens corrections" of all places.
One of the chief difficulties with this image is that it's on a plain, white background. Camera light meters are engineered to register 18% gray reflectance. Anything starkly different than that (total white or total black) throws the meter off. I think the issue here was not so much white balance (maybe a little) but that your picture was underexposed because the camera's light meter was fooled. When photographing a plain white background (snow for example) one should OVERexpose by about two stops; conversely, a plain black background (a spotlit stage for example) one should UNDERexpose by about two stops. Counterintuitive, perhaps, but trust me on this.
Did you have it set for centerweighted or evaluative? CW metering is the old-fashioned system used by cameras for the past fifty years. The evaluative system is a light meter controlled by a computer program trained to correct typical lighting problems like backlighting, white or dark backgrounds, etc. They're very good, but far from perfect.
Post-processing is an art all unto itself and I've only begun to scratch the surface. I'd love to take a class one of these days. . . . . However, the knowledge about under- and overexposing high contrast backgrounds would negate the need for editing software to render the above image. Just sayin'.