People say to me all the time “How did you get that photo to look like that?”

Actually (doh!) nobody has ever said that, but I thought I’d do a little post on how I edit from straight out of camera to finished file.

So here is the shot of Carter and Paige sitting a on log down by Lake Erie as it came SOOC.  I leave a bit of padding so that I can grab an a variety of crops.  I learned early on that filling the frame is awesome, but sometimes it can leave you hanging when you get to the dreaded 8 x 10 crop.

That’s a wide shot with the Canon 20mm f/2.8.  It’s a new lens and I’m trying to shoot it as much as possible so that I get to know it.  I knew it would work great in this composition.  I also spiced things up with off camera flash.  I wanted to bring the sky in for the background and catch that little sliver of light just above the horizon.  Shooting without a flash would have left me with no choice but to blow the background out while getting a decent exposure on their faces.  In this case the light is a 580EX II just off camera right and triggered with Pocket Wizard Mini tt1 and Flex tt5 – but not on ETTL – I was running manual mode.

I already had the idea in my mind that these would end up as B/W shots, but I still went through the process in color.  All the editing is done in Light Room unless I need to swap out heads or something   First, I knocked the exposure down around a 1/2 stop, maybe 1/4.  Then I increased the contrast to the “strong” curve and finally I through in the LR “Punch” action.  I also warmed up the white balance.  Lastly, I cropped it to the little bit nicer composition.  Total edit time – about one minute.

Like I said, I had a vision of the shot being in B/W so I hit up the LR “High Contrast B/W” action and tweaked out the exposure setting the blacks to get my final image.  Really, this is a pretty solid color shot and I almost left it that way, but the beauty of digital is that you can play with a lot of options.