Stella sleeping #?

[purplehaze]

This is my first try at processing in Lightroom. How'd I do?

[chauncey]

Janis...ya done good but...assuming ya shot in RAW, start moving some sliders around for some totally different "looks", read weird.

[Shadowman]

Very nice.

[FrankMi]

Hi Janis, nice to see you again!

If you are just starting out in Post Processing and want advice to help you improve, let us know what you are trying to achieve and what changes you made. That will make it a whole lot easier to give you effective pointers. It might even help to post a SOOC image along with your final results so that we can more easily see where you can use help and what you've already become good at.

Hope this helps!

[purplehaze]

Thanks, William and John. William, are you just trying to encourage me to experiment or did you have some particular form of weirdness in mind?

Hi Frank, nice to see you again, too. I am not new to post-processing, but I am new to Lightroom, having just subscribed to the CC Photoshop/Lightroom bundle. I have been using Aperture and the Nik Collection until now. I do like a number of things about Aperture, not least of which is its file management system, but it is interesting to play around in Lightroom and compare features. I have not mastered selective brushing in Aperture. In truth, I hate it because it aggravates my CTS and so I usually prefer to do selective editing in one of the Nik tools, but it costs me disk space. LR uses brushes, too, but in this case I was able to accomplish what I needed to do easily, quickly and without creating any artifacts that I can see. Whether this was due to luck or some superiority of LR remains to be seen.

The original of this photo was under-exposed and when I brought up the exposure in LR, I had to selectively pull back the highlights on Stella's legs, as they were the brightest parts of the picture and pulling attention away from her face. Otherwise, I made various global tonal adjustments, took out a chair leg or something just below her ear, cropped, and added a vignette.

It looks nice to me, but I am always surprised by the potential that resides in images that I don't see, so that was my main motivation for posting.

Stella is getting on; her 11th birthday is... tomorrow! Goodness, I will have to do something nice for her. Anyhow, good pics of her are precious. I will never have too many.

[Mike Buckley]

The post-processing looks good to me. Very natural yet with plenty of detail.

[chauncey]

William, are you just trying to encourage me to experiment or did you have some particular form of weirdness in mind?

Merely experiment...I had no direction in mind.

[FrankMi]

The original of this photo was under-exposed and when I brought up the exposure in LR, I had to selectively pull back the highlights on Stella's legs, as they were the brightest parts of the picture and pulling attention away from her face. Otherwise, I made various global tonal adjustments, took out a chair leg or something just below her ear, cropped, and added a vignette.

It looks to me that you've accomplished all of your goals for this image! Well done Janis. A keeper for sure!

[purplehaze]

Thanks, Mike. Chauncey, I'll give you wild another day. Thanks, Frank. I have tons yet to learn about PP, so always open to suggestions for improvement.

[Pappadi]

A very good image, well shot and nice pp. The legs are a shade brighter, perhaps.

[purplehaze]

The legs are a shade brighter, perhaps.

Thanks, Ramachandran. I was thinking the same. If I ever print, I will perhaps bring them down a shade more, or brighten her face, whichever looks better.