Experimenting with Editing

As I have mentioned before, I am trying to teach myself how to edit photos, so I thought I would experiment a little with Lightroom 3.

Here is my photo as it came straight out of the camera (SOOC):



Although I have recently switched to take most of my photos in RAW, I actually took this in JPEG, so the camera, itself, actually does some editing, such as sharpening and noise reduction. In my opinion, this photo is too saturated, and not very natural.

Here is my "clean" edit, which really fits my style, although I am still not crazy about this. In general, I get much nicer edits from RAW photos than from JPEGs.



To achieve this, I basically brought decreased the saturation, the brightness, the shadows, and the dark tones, and I increased the vibrance. I also cooled down the white balance a bit, and I think maybe a little too much.

I also decided to experiment a bit with the Lightroom presets.

This is Color Creative-Bleach Bypass, with a decrease in brightness. I think this probably way to green:



And this is B&W-Sepia and B&W-Blue Filter with an increase in fill light and a decrease in contrast. It's not really my style, but it's fun to play around and see what I can do.



Submitting to Pixel Perfect Before and After.