I am going to mention two things at once in this post, so I apologise in advance for not doing full justice to either. Here is a picture of friends Gerry and Elisabeth on the summit of the little gem of a mountain in the Trossachs called Ben A’n. I found it while doing a new year tidy up of my lightroom catalogue. Here’s the picture:
The two things I want to highlight are that I had a major file corruption issue with a lot of my precious files over the end of 2007 and the start of 2008, in which I have lost a lot of data. (More about this in a posting soon). So I was sad on naming this folder of otherwise uninteresting files to note the corruption that you will see in the next picture. I realised that I could clone it out because it was in easy areas of the sky to deal with. My second point is one to which I will certainly return later, not only is the picture corrupted, but it was far from a great picture in terms of exposure. Gerry and Elisabeth are slightly backlit and underexposed, perhaps exposure compensation or fill-in flash (my then 400D had no spot metering) would have helped, but I used none of them. I did take the picture in RAW file format, so look how easy it was for me a year on to:
- warm it up with the colour temp slider.
- Increase the vibrance/colour saturation
- Increase the clarity/ midrange definition
- Use a virtual grad filter on the sky to darken it
- Use a virtual grad filter on the foreground to brighten it
- Change the curves to brighten faces
- Use the spot repair tool to clone the corruption out of the sky
And all of this without going into photoshop elements even once. I love lightroom. (Corruption issue aside).
The original (I’m embarrassed to show you).
If you can use RAW format, and can be bothered with a little tweaking, you should!
