Today, for better or worse, I will be showing you what goes into creating one of my photographs. Not all of my images are this in-depth (or embarrassing! Ha!) but it will give you a good idea of my process, how Adobe Lightroom 5 works, and hopefully teach you a little bit about camera settings along the way. The good, the bad, the ugly! Without further ado, here we go!

Here is the initial screenshot of the imported image. It is actually one already in my portfolio, which you can view, but I re-edited this photo for the sake of this tutorial. In other words, this will be slightly different from the first! Every photo is "hand-crafted," if you will. Every one is unique.

This is the photo taken straight out of camera, with no editing being done yet. Notice how the corners of the image are darkened. (Circled in red on the top left of the image.) This effect is called vignetting. The effect is not always bad and is often used to enhance a photo, bringing attention back to the center/subject, or what have you. You will see this done later, actually. However, in this case, it is a lens characteristic, or can be considered a problem to some. Another issue here is the horizon line. If you notice, the line is slightly curved, and significantly lower in the center of the frame than on the edges. It is distorted. When you get into photography and start adding lenses to your kit, you will begin to know the unique strengths and weaknesses of each of them, and how to correct them. Thankfully, Adobe has made it very easy to correct any sort of vignetting or distortion caused by the lens.

A quick scroll down the menu on the right and you will find "Enable Lens Corrections." This can be as easy or as complicated as you want it to be, but the easiest option here is to check the box. One click and you are done! Now, the corners are much lighter and the photo is no longer distorted. Although the photo appears to be straight and level, I wanted to make sure. Again, Adobe has made this easy in Lightroom 5 with their "Upright" tool.

In the same menu area, click "Level," and you are done! Be careful with any option in Lightroom though. This only works if there is a clear horizon line. I have noticed with other images that the Level tool will sometimes make it worse if it cannot find a clear line to use as a reference!

Admittedly, I did not shoot this image correctly. (This is one of the embarrassing parts!) I shot this at a very wide angle and did not fill the frame with my friend jumping here. This is because I had never shot her jumping before and did not know exactly how high she was going to jump or how I was going to compose it. I purposely left room to crop, as much as I hate cropping, just in case. Why is cropping bad? You can potentially lose detail and the image will appear "pixelated" or grainy. You also cannot print as large because the resulting image is a lower resolution. There are many things that can go wrong and really needs a post just on that alone to explain them all, but things happen and you have to deal with it. Chalk it up as an "Oops!" to learn from and pray it will not break the image!

I neglected to screenshot the actual Cropping menu, but the icon to get to it is circled in red, as always. You can customize the crop ratio, straighten the image manually (if the Level tool did not work), etc. I think the 3x2 ratio (i.e. 6"x4") is very natural and prints well, so this is what I used here.

Now, here comes the next embarrassing part of the tutorial!

When zooming in, you can see she is just a touch out of focus and there might be a little bit of motion blur as well. I will direct your attention to the camera settings on the right: "f/4 @ 1/500 second." The "F" number, or F-Stop (FStopStories. You get it now? ;-)), is your Aperture. Now, it is very easy to jump into the whole triangle of Aperture, Shutter Speed, and ISO discussion, but all you need to know for this image is the lower the number, the shallower your depth of field (DoF) will be. In other words, the shallower your DoF, the less that will be in focus. Because my friend is jumping here, she slipped outside of the field that I set to be in focus somewhere in the process. She is no longer in focus as a result. The second number is the Shutter Speed. Generally, 1/500 of a second is great, but when dealing with a moving subject, clearly it was not fast enough to sharply capture her jumping. To try to mend it, I used the Clarity option...

Clarity is an interesting tool and can be very destructive, so be careful! It is one of the more heavy-handed tools in Lightroom. Basically, it will make edges (of clouds, of hair, etc.) more crisp/sharp. You never want to use the tool to correct for your mistakes, like this one, but sometimes... Sigh! I also did a more traditional sharpen after this in a poor attempt to make up for my mistakes.

The following step is adding saturation to really bring out those colors...

Again, you have to be careful and not push it too far! This might even be a little over-saturated... My MacBook Pro screen shows over-saturated colors, so I am hoping it is not as saturated as it appears... Also, note the clouds that are beginning to turn to black. This is a sign that you over-did the post-processing! I have to admit, this whole photo is being pushed and very close to being pushed a step too far, if not already. Especially once I add the Radial Filter...

But, enough talking about the mistakes and where things can go wrong! Just remember to be careful. The Radial Filter is a really cool feature in Lightroom 5. It is basically a more customizable vignette. You are not limited to just darkening the corners. With the Filter, you are able to move it around, re-size/shape the circle, and adjust a plethora of options, as you can see in the menu. In this scenario, I re-shaped and positioned the circle right over her, and turned the exposure down. What this did was lowered the exposure (darkened the image) outside of the circle, highlighting her. It also gave this interesting transition from dark colors on the left to lighter colors on the right.

Before and After:

Final Shot:

And, there you have it! If you made it all the way through, I commend you! Congratulations! I hope this was helpful. I understand not everyone who reads my blog is a photographer, but at least you caught a glimpse of what it is like to be one, and what you really are entrusting an artist to do when you hire them or what goes into the prints you purchase!

Let me know what you thought, either in the comments or on my Facebook Page. This goes for anything I post! If you are interested about a certain topic or simply curious on some of the things I create, I would love to hear from you!

Inside The Black Box