Saturday, October 30, 2010

Ex 1: Revisted

So, am back in my home office having spent a happy hour or two wandering around the Englischer Garten looking for locations to photograph my wife, Heidi.  Did he workflow, succeed? On the whole yes!

Deviation from the plan was minor, I did not take the 85mm lens and whilst the 135mm is a great portrait lens I found that the versatility of the 24-70 was better in a changing environment. I shot the colour target and imported the calibration it created into Lightroom.  This helped the skin tones, although the images still appear to be very warm.  I used the light meter in a couple of tricky lighting situations, but for a casual shoot such as this it is a little cumbersome.  We used around 4 or 5 locations.

Following the shoot I imported the images into Lightroom and followed my standard workflow.  First of all I selected the 85 portrait images from the 137 that I took during the shoot.  The other 52 images were landscapes, taking advantage of a bright Autumn day.

This is a screen shot of my editing work place, I have a 2560x1600 as my primary editing screen.  This screen is carefully colour calibrated.  To the right is a 1920x1200 screen in portrait orientation which I use for tool palettes, grids, etc.  The two monitor set up is great for image editing, even working on this blog, I can have the editor on one screen and the current state of the blog on the other:


The first key step in editing the images was to import the image below into the color checker software and create a colour calibration for my camera in the lighting conditions of the day. I also grabbed a neutral white balance from the card at the same time:


The next step was to select 16 images from the 85 that I would then edit:



And here is the finished result, a group of very warm autumnal portraits, not 100% sure if this isn't too warm


Of these I would select the following as the best:


The post shooting workflow worked fine, but this is something I have refined over time.

One last thing, using a cooler white balance produced the following


A little better, I think!  After a little thought I have reworked all of the images with a colder WB:

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