Ahh, January in Wisconsin.
I’m sure that there’s some photographers in Wisconsin that enjoy venturing out in the cold of winter to take pictures. Alas, I’m not one of them. For me, winter is about spending time indoors, preferably with a hot cup of tea and a good book, and waiting for spring. As I’ve said before (probably at the same time last year), in the winter months, my photographic output goes waaay down.
Instead, I spend time shuffling through my images that were taken when the weather was more hospitable and playing around with them. So earlier this afternoon, while making the rounds in Lightroom, I came across the following picture that I took of my daughter in late November. She was leaning over a rail on a playground, and I snapped the shot looking up at her. At first blush, it’s not terribly compelling. There’s a lot of pink reflecting on her face from the rail and her shirt, and her hair is a total mess. On the other hand, though, the sky behind her looked like it could be made suitably dramatic with a boost to contrast. Plus, the kid is smiling and giving me a thumbs up. This last one doesn’t happen very much, so I figured I’d seize the opportunity to see how far I could creatively stretch things with this image.
The Edits
Black and White Conversion: The first thing that I wanted to tackle was the pink color wash on her face. It’s rather unappealing. While I could isolate her face with a layer mask in Photoshop and work on correcting the color there, an easier fix would be to simply ditch color data altogether and process the image as a black and white. There’s a bunch of ways to do that, either in Photoshop or Lightroom, but in my case, I did the conversion using Nik’s Silver Efex Pro plugin. The thing that made me decide to go with the Nik plugin is that, not only could the plugin render a quality black and white image, but it also has several Structure sliders, which work the same way as the Clarity slider in Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw–they allow for pleasing midtone contrast adjustments, which let me get the sky background where I wanted it. Furthermore, because the plugin is devoted only to producing black and white images, it has a whole host of other processing tools that are specifically designed to help render a high quality black and white image with a minimum of effort. In this case, I wanted to darken the sky somewhat, while keeping my daughter’s skin tone bright, so I applied a yellow color filter to the image (which increases the brightness of the desaturated yellows, while darkening the desaturated blues). This got me to a pretty good starting point with the sky and dealt with the pink color problem, so at that point I figured I was getting going in the right direction.
Bringing the color back: After I finished with the black and white conversion, and got myself back into Photoshop, I realized that bringing a little bit of color back probably wouldn’t hurt. The original image has two dominant colors: the blue in the background and the pink in the foreground, and preserving just a hint of that might make the image more interesting. Since the black and white conversion was saved on it’s own layer, above the (colorized) original background layer, adding back some color was as easy as decreasing the opacity of the black and white layer until I had the slight re-introduction of color that I wanted.
Local adjustments: Once the global edits were done, I started looking at how I could improve the individual parts of the image. These edits included:
- Removing the hard white line of cloud on the middle left hand side of the image: This was a quick 30 second edit with a clone brush, but it got rid of an image element that I found distracting.
- Dodging her face: The final black and white conversion made her face appear to have very little depth to it. In addition, her eyes came out of the conversion darker than I wanted them to be. By making some local dodges and contrast adjustments to her face on a new layer, I tried to make that part of the image catch the viewer’s eye. In addition, I also lightened the area around her head as well.
- Burning the clouds and foreground rail: Since I knew I wanted the focal point of the image to be her face, I darkened everything else around that, including the sky (which made it look even more dramatic and foreboding) and the rail.
- Boosting the contrast in her hair: Originally, when I started working on the image, I saw the hair as something that detracted from the image. Since, by this point in the editing process, I was working towards a dramatic image, I figured that I might as well call some attention to her obviously unkempt hair. In the end, the crazy hair almost seemed to fit with the sky behind her.
The Final Image
In all, I spent probably about 20 minutes working on this image to get it to where I wanted it to be. As I said at the beginning of the post, the original image wasn’t very interesting to look at and my object in editing was to see what I could do creatively with this image, and how far I could take it. Mostly, it involved a bunch of playing around–of experimenting and trying things, of periodically abandoning bad ideas if they didn’t contribute to the final image. While I like to be able to nail an image in camera, there’s also the benefit of taking an ordinary image and surprising yourself with it.
