Adobe’s new Lightroom is unbelievable! If you don’t have it get it! This program will change the way you do things in a big way, it is super powerful. Anyway, below is an image I shot at my last engagement session and it shows the three stages the photo goes through to get to the finished image.

1) Original Capture – I underexposed this shot on purpose to retain some extra detail in the sky. It was overcast and almost dusk but the sky is still so much brighter that we realize. Most of the time it is easier to brighten the foreground than get the detail highlights back. (1/250 sec f/5.0 – 22mm w/16-35mm f/2.8 on Mark II N)

2) RAW Conversion – The middle image is what the RAW conversion looked like in Lightroom, still a little flat… I don’t normally adjust the Tone Curve, I prefer to do that in Photoshop when I “Tweak” the image. So for this I adjusted the white balance, added a vignette, and pumped up the fill flash which an awesome feature in LR along with a highlight recovery slider.

3) Final Image – I started with a little more ‘digital light’ (Dodging on a layer) so when I ran Kubota’s “Lord of the Rings II” it would accentuate those areas. Next I knocked off a little glow from the actions built-in mask. Then I created two masked ‘Level’ adjustment layers; one for an outer image burn and the other to darken the sky. Then I replaced the bulb in the street lamp and finally sharpened the edges in the photo.

Click on the photo to see a larger version:

triple-process.jpg