ronintally

Ok, the first thing I did was look for a shot that was a total mess, and that way I'd get to experiment with several things in Lightroom and find out what it's abilities are.

Since Cynamin just went pink, why not grab a shot of her, right?

So I picked this one because the camera went way low on the exposure (so much for spot metering!! ) and it also has lots of detail in the rocks & trees, which would give me a chance to see how well Fireworks would perform during the process of shrinking down the photo.



Ok, so that's the original. Then I got out my handy dandy book by Scott Kelby and went through it in Lightroom. It was so tempting to just toss it into Photoshop, but I want to learn Lightroom, so I had to stick within that program. Cheating isn't learning!!

I went a bit too high on the color temp, but this was my first ever photo in Lightroom, so I just kept foraging ahead.

After saving it, I then ran it through Fireworks to shrink it down and at 176kb, I still had 65% quality, which is much higher than I would have gotten from Photoshop using "save for web", which is what I do for SG sets.



Then I took the photo and dropped it into Photoshop and saved for web and in order to get a size of 176kb, I had to drop it to 32% quality . The skin is all artifacty and the detail in her tattoo is lost and the leaves look amess in the background.



I also tried shrinking it down to 176kb in Lightroom, but the photo looked absolutely dreadful, so the compression algorhythm is Photoshop is better and in Fireworks it is far superior.

The first one was really dark, but I knew that there was a goldmine in there that just needed some brightening



After brightening it, I wanted some blue skies rather than the blown out grayness in that photo. Hmmmm, I remembered a pretty blue sky with puffy clouds from a shoot I did at the lighthouse a few months ago, so I opened up this photo:



I blew it up big and then pasted the Maine photo on top of it. I let erased the blown out sky and let the clouds show through, and we ended up with a final product of this:



The next one was much brighter, but the barren front of the photo was pretty blah blah, so after straightening it (because the lake looks to be tilted to the left) I cropped it in much closer.



At this point I remembered that a few years ago I had wandered around taking pictures of clouds so that if I ever needed them, I'd have them handy. I poked around and found the folder from 5/6/08 and then I picked one out with puffy clouds and tossed them into the Maine photo behind the hills in the background.

This is Sarah, and she kicks ass at all times



Back behind the Gravitron, I had the idea of using a long exposure and telling Sarah and her boyfriend to run away during the picture, so I turned them translucent.



Even with the colorful rides, I set up for a few contrasty b&w shots.