Life Through The Viewfinder - Land Between the Lakes

Hello everyone! This time we're discussing the first episode of the new series over on my YouTube. You can see me breakdown the entire experience over there, but over here I wanted to dive deep into the editing process. One photo at a time!

This is one of the first images I captured on this trip, and I really love how it turned out! On this one the edit was pretty simple as well.

I use Lightroom to edit my photos so I'm going to go tab-by-tab breaking down the edits.

Light - First I boosted the contrast to around 50, and decreased the highlights. I toyed around a little bit boosting shadows and dropping the whites, and then I almost maxed out the black values.

Curves - The curves are a bit hard to explain. So let me show you!

Color - For this one I didnt adjust the temp, while slightly boosting the tint. Then I jacked up the vibrance, and took the saturation to around -25.

Then in the Color mixer I touched up just about everything, but focused on making the greens a bit more cyan, and tuning the oranges in the stones.

then I added a slight vignette, and boosted the grain to get that staticky old timey look.

And that's the editing breakdown for this image! But I wanted to go into one more in this blog. SO here is my FAVORITE image from the trip.

I was so lucky to get this little guy perched right on top of this flower. I was immediately drawn to it, as it was the only one bloomed on this tree. And the ant was jus there crawling around! So let's get into the edit.

Light - I slightly boosted the exposure, and almost maxed out the contrast. Then decreased the highlights, slightly increased shadows, put the whites to around -25 and blacks to +80.

Curves - the curves are actually the same as the previous image! I love the way that setup looks, and it's become a standard for a lot of my images!

Color - same story as before. I tuned the greens to be more cyan, and really boosted the red of the ant, and the purple hue of the flower. Then of course I added a little grain in!

Now, I tell you all of this so that you can understand my process, and when you open your editing software to correct an image you can be inspired, play with things, and find the look that suits your style!

That's gonna be all from me this time. Tune into Life Through The Viewfinder at YouTube.com!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISRMy_Ng-KE