Our Little World
Canon 1D Mark III, 85mm F/1.2, f/2.8, 1/80, iso 1000
Continuing with our holiday theme, today we have the Topaz version of a snow globe. I took this shot at my uncle's house on the 20th. He was about 10 of these large globes. I picked the two I liked best and took just one shot of each.
When I looked at it on the screen, that it is "a little world" was the first thing that popped into my head, and so decided to try to process based on that theme. So let's begin the processing with Lightroom.
The first thing I did was fix the white balance. Canon DSLR's do a poor job of white balance selection in indoor incandescent light situations (i.e. normal indoor lighting). White Balance is too big a topic for my blog, but suffice to say that the camera has to make a determination, in any given scene, for "what is white?"
If you shoot JPG, you must make a determination at that time as to "what is white?" Most people do this by selecting a given "preset" on the camera, like outdoors, or cloudy, or tungsten, etc. If you leave it set to Auto, which I assume most people do, at indoor nighttime shots will be very yellow. When you shoot RAW, you can set it yourself in the post processing software. Super easy, just with a slider, it's actually quite magical.
So after fixing the WB, I cropped, then added vignette to darken the area "outside the world." I had to do a little cloning to darken all the areas I wanted. Now into Photoshop, to use Topaz Adjust.
I tried numerous presets, figuring I would want that "Topaz Look," but in the end I decided on a "smoothed" look that you get with the "Portrait Smooth" preset. I liked this effect, but the colors weren't punchy enough. So I used a slider called Saturation boost, which is pretty interesting, it's different than just saturating all the colors. I'm not exactly sure what it is doing, but I like the effect.
Back in Photoshop now I just add the borders and my name, and I'm good to go. Click on the continue link if you are interested and I'll show you a bit more about the processing.
This is the original image before I did anything. You can now see the yellow cast I was talking about. You'll get this with a Canon DSLR, at night, indoors, every time. Unless you use flash, which I generally do not.
Here we have a portion of the Lightroom workspace. I am in before/after mode, and have set the split to be vertical. On the left is "before" and on the right "after." So what did I do to transform from the hideous yellow cast? You see where the eyedropper is? That's the white balance control. I just slid it to the left a little bit, watching the results, until the color is correct. That's it. You can also click anywhere in the image that you think should represent white, and it will set the color temperature for you.
I think my point here is that you don't have to understand anything about WB, kelvin temperatures and all that stuff. You can just make it look right, it's that easy.
Also, a couple people have told me that they have issues with wanting to use RAW. If you aren't interested in becoming a Lightroom user, then you probably don't want to use RAW. It's just too much work otherwise. If you become a Lightroom user, there is NO extra work using RAW. There's no difference in terms of your workflow between RAW and any other format, be it JPG, TIFF, PSD, whatever. LR just presents the images.
But the difference is that if you use RAW, you can do things like white balance correction. And all the other adjustments you do have a more pleasing effect because a RAW file has orders of magnitude more image data inside it, as compared to say a JPG.
Feel free to comment below on the image itself, or any aspect of the post.
