It’s spring in Denver and the trees are in full bloom. Every evening for the last couple of days I’ve been wanting to go do some macro shots of the flowers. However, the wind would gust too much for any picture taking. With the weather forecast saying a high of 43 and 40% chance of snow tomorrow I figured this evening was my last chance. I have a plum tree in my back yard and it was sheltered just enough from the big gusts of wind to get in a few shots. I also wanted to use these shots to experiment with the ‘Totally Rad Actions‘ from Boutwell Studio I had picked up this morning. I’ve noticed pictures that just seemed to pop in color and wanted to know how they do that. The reason being is that I know of no camera that will capture that much saturated color in RAW format. I also can’t get Lightroom to do that much post processing either. I discovered that one way other photographers get images to pop (or snap in Butwell terms) is to post process in Adobe Photoshop. I guess I could of spent hours reading manuals on how this is done but I don’t have that much time on my hands. I needed a quicker solution and these actions seemed like they would do the trick. So for this blog post I’m going to show you the before and after shots of the flowers.
Here’s the straight out of the camera RAW image (Canon 40D). I shot this image with my new EF 70-200mm f/2.8L using a 25mm extension tube. This combination makes a pretty good macro’ish lens. I’ll also note that I had to expose to the right about a full stop to get the exposure correct in my eyes. Overall the the composition is good and image is okay.
Next as part of my workflow I bring all my RAW files into Adobe Lightroom and convert to DNG files. Why? Just because I want to. Inside of lightroom I tweaked with the white balance and some Vibrance and Clarity. I believe I also tweaked the Sharpness and Chromatic Abberration. The end result is this image.
The changes are very subtle but they are there. Then the fun started when I exported and brought the image into Photoshop. I’m still really new to the ‘Totally Rad Actions’ but had done enough research to know to use the ‘Oh Snap! and ‘Yin/Yang’ actions. I actually used the ‘Oh Snap!’ twice to bring up the color even more. ‘Oh Snap!’ does just what it sounds like, it snaps the colors and clarity. In the Yin/Yang, which is a dodge and burn action, I darkened the sky around the flowers to bring attention to them. Here’s the resulting image. Looks good I think.
