photo editing
The usual way to grab the code for a particular color in a region in your image is to use the eye-dropper tool in Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, etc. In Lightroom, you can find them perhaps more easily.
Read MoreLightroom’s Color Grading panel is sadly neglected. It complements but does in any way not duplicate the Color Mixing panel and White Balance. It can be used to produce monochrome, sepia, duotones and even trio-tones from grayscale images. In color images, it casts different colors for the shadows, midtones, and highlights, kind of like a souped-up White Balance for each! It can evoke a particular mood. So it is certainly a great technique that photographers can use to expand their repertoire. For comparison’s sake, we discuss white balance as a preface.
Read MoreI’ll show you some ways to shift the hue, saturation, and brightness of colors to make your images more dramatic.
First, I will show some simple ways to make a dramatic nearly Black-and-white image.
Then I will edit photos with a cinematic color scheme inspired by the movie Asteroid City.
Wes Anderson’s movie Asteroid City debuted in June of 2023. Scenes in the film were often shot mid-day in very harsh lighting. In processing, the contrast was lowered dramatically, leading to a “flat”, soft look, in which the dark shadows almost disappear. The colors were manipulated by hue shifts that moved reds to an orangish red and blues moved towards teal, producing dramatic teal skies over a warm desert. Please watch the movie’s trailer to see the style.
Read MoreTone curves are available in most advanced photo editing programs. They pre-date the use of basic sliders. Hopefully, this talk has made some basic Lightroom sliders less mysterious by showing the analogous use of the Tone Curve module. Curves can provide finer control than sliders.
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The following PDF contains most of the slides of a talk I gave to the Silver Spring Camera Club in September, 2020 about the free, open source program darktable, which is an alternative to Light Room. I’m just a beginner with darktable, so I’ve taken the approach of first finding the modules and the portions of modules which are equivalent to common things one does in Light Room. darktable offers many more options than Light Room, which makes it both harder to learn at first and more powerful.
Get Started with darktable PDFHope you enjoyed the talk’s slides!