Retouching

The light on this speaker always catches my eye. It light by reflection off of some wood closet door, so there's a warm, soft feel to it. Plus just lovely highlights.

I decided that today will be a walk through of how I approach a photo like this. I know that I want to increase the contrast, crop it, and try to bring gout some of those supple greens and blues in the highlights.

First things first, cropping. This photo to very obviously frames and shot poorly. It's slated and there's lose bits of stuff on the edges. I want to very tight, straight composition. Using just the crop tool in Lr, I did this.

 Much better, it's tight and self contained very nicely. But, the "DUAL PORTS" lettering is cut in half. That has to go.

 Using the heal brush, I painted out those letters. It was much easier than I expected, usually I have to do a bunch of clean up with the stamp tool but this was perfect. Even got the tones right.

Next step is to add an adjustment layer that will bring out the shadows in the center speaker, while still keeping the highlights and blacks. To do this without affecting the rest of the image, you apply a layer mask around just the center speaker. That way, the levels adjustment only affects that one area.

On to Ps and dodging and burning. If you don't know what that is, it means to lighten certain areas (dodging) and to darken certain areas (burning). I did this across the whole image, first dodging the highlights, then going back and burning the shadows. This creates a hard light effect, which I think really suits the metallic nature of the speaker. First you have to make a new layer and fill it with 50% grey. Then change this layer to overlay blend mode, which will make it "invisible." Overlay essentially make the layer below the layer set to overlay darker where there is dark in the overlay layer, and light where there is light in the overlay layer. Therefor, if we dodge and burn this layer, we can work non destructively on our original image. Plus we can layer multiple layers in case we aren't sure a certain effect will work. I use 10% exposure on both dodge and burn brushes so I don't apply something too quickly. I stopped after one round, then toggled the layer on and off to check how the adjustment affected the image.

After another round of going into more detail around the bolts and tiny highlights. It's a very supple change technically but it does a lot visually.

So here's where major stuff happened. I brought the image back into Lr, and did a few things. First, I did a split tone. The shadows got blue and the highlights got orange. Next, I used the eye dropper for white balance, and selected a tone out of the top of that strong highlight off to the left. This made the photo a lot more "metallic" and made the colors in the highlights pop more. To add to this, I raised the vibrance a bit.

Final step is to reduce noise. You can see in the image above this last one, there is a lot of green artifacts in the center speaker. This is no bueno. Using the built in noise reduction in Lr, I cleaned all that up and sharpened it a bit.

There obviously a lot more you could do to this photo, and to any photo in general. There's no right way to edit and there's no correct look for each photo. Another photographer might have added lens flares and lights leaks everywhere, and other might have made it a monochromatic, high contrast negative image (which would be sick IMO). But for today, I was just going for enhancement of the image while still keeping it semi-realistic. Maybe I'll do another edit of it later, but for now this is the way I wanted it.

See you tomorrow.