Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Utah State Capitol - Before / After Lightroom

I love Adobe Lightroom and use it on all of my images. But most of the images I produce are probably closer to straight out of the camera with small tweaks rather than highly modified representations of the image.

Well, tonight I was playing around a little bit with the gradient adjustment layer in Lightroom and thought I'd show off the results of a before/after edit session. It's still nothing too fancy, but it's certainly different from the original:



Both of the above images are from a single raw image processed by Lightroom. The one on the left is just a standard conversion of the capture. The one on the right contains a few more tweaks:

- A couple of gradients were used to lighten the center and darken the top and bottom.

- Another gradient adds some blue to the sky

- Yet another gradient adds some yellow to center of the image (from the capitol building on down)

- While the first includes some Clarity and Saturation, the second uses a lot more Clarity and a little more Saturation.

The images were then brought into photoshop to resize and place them side by side.

Whatdya think? Do you prefer the more hazy picture on the left? Or the brighter, more well defined picture on the right?

7 comments:

orb360 said...

Ha! You have to ask?! Definitely post-lightroom

Unknown said...

WOW! Post Lightroom is amazing! I am just learning to use Lightroom - it's exciting!

Josh Moore said...

There's no question the picture on the right is better. It's pictures like these that I love in puzzles with stark contrasting colors.

Suzanne Plant said...

I absolutely LOVE the Lightroom picture. The detail and colors are so much more vivid and amazing. I actually spent more time looking at all the detail of the smaller buildings because I could see them so well. The pre edit shot is cool but I just glanced over it because it is so hazy. Love the second and I am going to have to try it out on my next editing job!

andreaKphotography said...

I really like the lightroom picture. The way it changed the sky and mountains is awesome. I can't wait for the next class on it so I can actually learn to use mine :)

Emily said...

Wow. That's incredible.

Jeremy Hall said...

Just catching up on some of your posts. Excellent write up and superb use of multiple graduated filters to accomplish the final image.