Review your Rejects Carefully

keithlm

I was messing with Lightroom and had the second monitor displaying the photo at max magnification.

I was moving around in the pictures looking for things I could use on the Dgrin mini challenges. Then I noticed one that looked WAY better zoomed in/cropped.

Here is the Original: (Nothing to write home about)
NOTE: All day at the Renaissance Festival moving from shadows to direct sun and doing +/- adjustments all day. I messed up on this photo. But underexposure was no problems for lightroom. Not to mention I had quaffed enough brew to kill a normal person.




BUT THEN: after seeing it zoomed in on the second monitor I had to crop it because it totally changes the mood of this shot:
(Not bad for a photo that originally was a "reject".)



SIDE NOTE: I had taken these all (RAW) before I had Lightroom. I was using Corel PSP which I got for $30.00. It has awful RAW processing and I never really used RAW. Then I played with Lightroom for a few hours and was totally SOLD on it. (And on always shooting RAW.)

0scar99

I've had quite a few lucky finds moving between monitors and zoom sizes in LR... I have to say I love LR, great workflow tool..

keithlm

I messed with Lightroom about 4 or 5 months ago for a few hours... but didn't really use it long enough to understand the concept of non-destructive editing. As soon as I understood that AND saw some results like I showed above: I immediately knew I needed it. Now I rarely use Corel PSP even though it has some fairly nice features. Actually make that... pretty much never. And the link between Lightroom and Smugmug is just icing on the cake. (Or flickr/google/facebook I guess. I don't use those.)

rob marshall

keithlm wrote: »

I messed with Lightroom about 4 or 5 months ago for a few hours... but didn't really use it long enough to understand the concept of non-destructive editing. As soon as I understood that AND saw some results like I showed above: I immediately knew I needed it. Now I rarely use Corel PSP even though it has some fairly nice features. Actually make that... pretty much never. And the link between Lightroom and Smugmug is just icing on the cake. (Or flickr/google/facebook I guess. I don't use those.)

Yes, it's always useful to attempt some more drastic editing because you can get away with so much more with RAW. I have on several occasions nearly junked what turned out to be a very good shot after it's been through CS5 RAW edit. And it's the same with Silver Efex Pro for BW conversions. You can often 'rescue' a shot. Mind you, you should always aim to get things right at shooting.

dogwood

Just my two-cents, but your initial hunch to reject this one was correct. Her eyes are kind of muddy/dark even in the 'fixed' version. No catchlights work sometimes, in this case, I don't think it does. You can fix a lot in PS/LR but you'll always get better results shooting is correctly in camera. A reflector or fill-flash would have helped tremendously here.

Artlife

keithlm wrote: »

I was messing with Lightroom and had the second monitor displaying the photo at max magnification.

I was moving around in the pictures looking for things I could use on the Dgrin mini challenges. Then I noticed one that looked WAY better zoomed in/cropped.

BUT THEN: after seeing it zoomed in on the second monitor I had to crop it because it totally changes the mood of this shot:
(Not bad for a photo that originally was a "reject".)

I think this is a wonderful shot. Great angle, interesting mix of colors and textures, of fantasy and reality. I hope you don't mind I took your uploaded image and made some further adjustments with Topaz and then with Mystical Lighting, and I dodged the eyes a bit to bring them out. What do you think? She's lovely.

DL, artlife.us