One of today’s big hurtles a good photographer must overcome is getting that amazing final edit. If you take your image straight out of the camera and leave it at that, you probably won’t get much notice.
Standing out is about being excellent as well as being different. Being different however is more than it suggests. Just looking different isn’t good enough if it’s not attractive to your target audience. With all the effects I make, I get people asking me what effect I used for a certain look. The simple fact I try to get across is that no single photo works the same. What an action may do to one image and look great, may effect the pixels different on another and look horrible. The details count. Today I’ll illustrate that by analyzing a recent image.
I call this shot The Gazebo. Though it’s a new favorite, it’s not an HDR or any other special acronym. It’s just a good foundation image, edited right. What I did to it was not so amazing, I just used the right effect at the right time.
The left side is straight out of camera. It’s good. I used my Canon 70-200 @ 150mm 1/125 at 2.8 ISO 320 with just a little fill flash. I got nice compression and blur in the background. The evening light was coming from the right side and worked perfectly but was not really unusual.
I knew right away it had potential, so I started playing. Playing is the the keyword here. I use Lightroom presets and Photoshop actions not because it couldn’t be done manually, but because I want a great variety and I would not have that variety by doing it all manually every time. The effects I used were my own that are sold here in Seim Effects, but this applies to whatever you happen to use. I started with a vintage preset from Power Workflow2. I tend to use use vintage looks sparingly, but it worked well with this simple scene.
Then it’s on to Photoshop. I used the Old Fashioned Love Song from Hollywood Effects Actions. This helped me manipulate the light into something more interesting and glowing. Then thinking it needed a touch more I ran Simply Soft from Creative Essentials Actions. This is a skin softener that gives an almost porcelain quality. As I did this I used the masks to remove blur from areas of detail like the face.
Finally I finished up the way I normally do, and that’s by adding a little burn and dodge. This is a tool that most people overlook, and it one of those editing gems that right in front of us. I can draw the eye wherever I want it using burn and dodge. If you want to learn more about that see this post.
So there we have it. The finished product is done in only a few minutes had had that dreamy loving look to it. My point here if not that you need to use these specific effects to get your look. It’s that you need to do things other than just snapping the picture. Set up your system so it’s easy to add effects, because otherwise you’ll avoid them. I have my favorite actions or presets a click away, and when I’m working on a good shot I’m not afraid to try various looks because I can try ten different effects in the time I could do one of them manually. That gives me an edge.
What do you see in this image? How would you have done it differntly? Share your ideas in the comments. More to come in this series so stay tune… Gavin Seim
