My little man and some editing tips.

9:44 PM
This last week I found myself getting sentimental every time Lyndon and I were out together. You see, my favorite little buddy, Lyndon, starts kindergarten this Fall. That means that I only have a handful of days left to spend shopping, going out to lunch, and meeting friends at the park with him. (sigh.) I love driving around town, listening to his adorable speech impediment from the back seat, "Hey Mom", he usually starts, " guess what? I sure love you." He melts my heart. Fall is coming way too fast.

On a whim, several weeks ago, I took some impromptu pictures of him during a much needed Texas rainstorm. I let him be his happy-go-lucky self while I snapped away. Here are a few... AND a Lightroom tutorial about how to give a ho-hum picture some pizzaz! (scroll on down)







Now for the editing tips...
learn how to go from this:

...to this (in just 4 easy steps!):



Here are the steps I took in Lightroom:
1- I cropped the photo so that the focus of the picture would be directly on the subject.
2- Then because I felt like the picture looked too drab, I increased the exposure to +28 and the brightness to +13. (increasing the brightness, as opposed to increasing the exposure even more, gives me the ability to make the picture brighter without over exposing the the highlights.)
3- Even with the exposure and brightness increase, his eyes still looked too drab. So I used the brushes and zoomed into the eyes to increased the exposure just on his eyes.
4- And to finish it off, because I felt like I still needed something to pull my eyes toward the subject, I added a "post-crop vignette" with these values-- Amount: -20; Midpoint: 59; Roundness: +20; Feather: 51.


So don't throw out your ho-hum photos right away...you just might be able to save it. Have a great week!

3 comments:

Wag Doll said...

Wonderful tips, thanks, and no wonder you're going to miss your little man when he goes to school, his little smiling face lights up the day!

Stacee Maree said...

Thank you for the tips. The pic looks amazing after edits.

Stephanie said...

Aw, I love his little shiner! Pics of our kids the way they are are such amazing memories!!

Powered by Blogger.