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Friday Slide Show: Growing Images
2 July 2021
You know you're having a good editing session when you don't have even an empty cup of coffee at your side but you keep leaning back in your chair and reaching over for a sip anyway.
We'd already had our morning reverso (our name for a cappuccino made by steaming the milk in the cup before pulling a couple of shots into the milk) when we sat down to work on these images.
So we didn't make another.
In fact, we weren't planning to hang around very long. We thought we'd just take a peek at some images in Photo Mechanic to see if we had a slide show or not.
They were taken in the garden in June with an Olympus E-PL1 with 14-42mm II R kit lens. Old stuff capturing the new growth.
But we've shown images of the garden plenty of times. We wondered if we could add a twist. Maybe just more creative crops.
Uh, no. Leave the crops alone. The focus was doing the cropping, just in a different dimension. With one exception (the large angel trumpet), we didn't crop very much.
So what then?
Lightroom has a file cabinet's worth of color and monochrome presets. We're not fans, generally speaking. But these images were shot in the fog. The diffused light was flattering but not exciting.
So we scrolled through the presets and found two that enhanced the images. One enhanced most of them (TR01 in Travel of all places) and the other (Warm Shadows) the rest.
We had already imported the images using our own preset for old cameras liked the E-PL1. So the basic tonal and color corrections had been made. The preset took it from there.
We liked the effect. Suddenly we weren't an amateur gardener in the San Francisco fog but a plantation owner in Brazil. The colors came alive.
Of course, they weren't real. And as a set, if they didn't exactly jump disturbingly from one effect to another (we checked), they didn't exactly match either.
No problem, we thought, reaching for the non-existent coffee cup.
We made virtual copies, set all of them to use the TR01 preset and then changed them to monochrome, which left a warm color cast that we liked.
We edited the tonalities for yet another take on the garden, growing this set in a different direction.
We prefer the naturally colored ones we are not showing you here (well, except for the one just below). That's really what we like. It's hard to compete with Nature but it's fun.
Apples. A straight edit of the first image, just for comparison.
This, though, is competing with expectations. It's growing our own sense of what we can do with an image's color palette.
Which is why, after making the changes, we leaned back in our chair again and reached out for that coffee cup.
We wanted to savor the effect.
