I often shoot studio shots. And these often need finishing - you cannot always shoot what you want in the camera, for very practical reasons. Like space.
Take this for example. My friend and client Sarah, a physiotherapist, needed some portraits, including a shot of her with her table. We shot these Friday night. My studio is small, and even with a wide background, the table only just fit:
But “just” is enoughn.
So now the post work. I chose to do this in Lightroom’s “Develop” module, as usual.
- First, I straighten the image.
- Then I change the whites to make them fuller white.
- Then I adjust any other exposure paramaters.
These adjustments are minimal except for the whites: Lightroom 4 dims my overexposed areas; but I want them overexposed, since this is for white background web use. I shot them overexposed too – blinking furiously – but Lightroom sees latitude in the RAW file and pulls the whites back from what I did. So I correct that (“Whites” and “Highlights” adjustment).
And now I do the rest. I first use the clone too to roughly fill in the sides:
That’s rough, but a good beginning.
Now I turn on the overexposure warning (the right-side triangle in the histogram), and I use the local adjustment brush set to +2 exposure to fill in the whites properly. Once that is done, I see:
I then make last minute adjustments (such as using the brush to decrease the overexposure on the legs), and then I have my finished image, ready to go on the web:
That does not take long - that’s how it is done in Lightroom. Yes, I could have done it in Photoshop, but that would take longer. What I can do in Lightroom, I do in Lightroom - fortunately, that is almost everything.
