I mostly go into Photoshop to play around with my photographs, and just use Lightroom for its automatic adjustments. But, I’ve recently learned how to get more out of Lightroom, and am using it more often to adjust my shots. Here’s a shot I adjusted completely in Lightroom, before my adjustment. Cute image, but totally hazed over.
I first removed the hazing (a one-click adjustment in Lightroom), which was a big improvement.
But, it’s still not exactly what I want. I’d like the background to be blacker so that the lighting around Cosette’s head really pops. Normally, at this point, I’d go into Photoshop, create a layer with just the background, and adjust the exposure. But, hey, there’s a *much* easier way to do that. In Lightroom’s Develop window, instead of doing an all-over adjust, you can grab the light magic wand, adjust the settings just for the wand, and then wave the wand over any area you want to change. If you add feathering to the wand features, the adjust is far less harsh than what I normally achieve in Photoshop. So, i just moved the exposure way down, and wave the wand over the background of the image
In the middle of the night, Cosette hears a sound and wakes up
Much, much better, IMO. I wish Lightroom let me use multiple wands with different settings, because I’d love to do more dehazing and a slight darkening on the area in front of Cosette. But, as far as I can tell, it’s one wand per photo, so I’ll let it go with just darkening the background. Once I’d gotten a handle on this, I went to fix one of the old Underfoot images – the one where Cosette and Mathilde sit by the fire while Rat is out scouring new digs. I love this picture, but the main characters are out of focus. I just chose it because all of the other shots in the series had a strong tint to them from the led I used for the fire. Here’s the shot I went with for the episode:
So, I went back to another image that was more in focus, but where I didn’t like the lighting as well.
I lightened it up in Lightroom, then went into photoshop to swap out the background of the image for the underground cave. Finally, I went back into Lightroom and this time used the wand to add highlights around the image (mostly on their hair and faces). Here’s the final image:
Updated image of Cosette and Mathilde around the fire