I wanted to take you guys behind the scenes to see my bluebonnet editing and how I transform an image from ordinary to fairytale-esque. When you book a bluebonnet session with me, you receive 5 artistically edited images and here I will share exactly how that’s different from my typical editing.
First, here is an example of a SOOC (straight out of camera) image and I’ll take you through the transformation:Pretty flowers, pretty light, but it’s a tad dark (which I do so I don’t blow any highlights). There’s a green cast and I did warm up my white balance a bit in camera but that’s a lot of grass and trees plus her outfit which is throwing a ton of green/blue on the image. Next is a typical edit done in Lightroom.Nice and warmed up! No more ugly green cast and the backlighting is a bit more emphasized. We’ll take that to another level in Photoshop which you will see next. Before I would pass this on to a client, I would definitely clean up the tall grass and weeds that are distracting, and maybe bring a bit more light to her face. However, for my artistic edit, I will bring her out even more by increasing the brightness and contrast on her alone and focus on perfecting skintones. I will go even further by extending the bluebonnets and getting rid of the road. I’ll add some sunrays to brighten up the left side of the image even more and a warm vignette.
Here it is; let me know with a comment what you think!Artistic edits by their nature take a significant amount of time. They are hand-edited as opposed to batch edited where with a click of a button a photographer can apply the same editing affects to a bunch images. My typical edits are batch-edited assuming the lighting in similar in the images, and then pulled into Photoshop to address blemishes or distractions as mentioned above. It has taken me many years to get my batch editing just right and of course, each image needs some tweaking. I can pretty quickly get an outdoor session edited with years of practice and expertise. However, each artistic edit takes approximately 20-30 minutes depending on the vision and what it takes to accomplish it! This effort is what makes these sessions so unique and fun for both me as an artist and you as a client. 🙂
I’ll share a few more transformations from this sweet sibling session just for fun! Please email me at heatherannephotos@gmail.com to book your own bluebonnet mini-session or contact me using the form at the bottom of the page._____________________________________________________________________
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PS. While we’re talking editing, do you notice how much smoother this last photo is (and all final images in this post) compared to the pre-edits above it? The final edits for facebook and the blog saved as a .png file (versus a .jpg) which makes online sharing so much prettier!
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