I’m a strong supporter of post processing images from the camera. I grew up with cheap film camera, 24 exposures in full colour (mainly as I didn’t appreciate the beauty of black and white as a child), and having to wait a few weeks for the Postie to deliver pictures that we’d sent away for developing… and… we’d really only take (what were essentially family snapshots) when we were on holiday in the summer or at special occasions – weddings, Christmas and the odd birthday.
So, I love the freedom of digital with so much to control both before and AFTER the shutter has clicked. I mean I’m no pro so the option to work out my pre-shooting mistakes in post processing is great, and I love the massive amount of control there to really take my image to where I intended when I was out in the big wild world.
What I want to do in this post is show a before / after image and then talk through the steps I went to get to the final image. I’ll do this in a number of steps:
- Import the original image into Lightroom
- Pass it off to Photoshop to convert to black and white
- Do some processing there (using Adobe Camera Raw)
- Throw this image back to Lightroom
- Finish processing there before a final export.
First, lets look at the original image along with an overlay of the final processed image for comparison.