The weekly Creative Critique—Live continues this week with our 4th webinar this Thursday, April 23rd…
Creative photography not only involves the work you do in the field, but also how you approach the processing stage. Your goal should be to let your vision for the image serve as a creative guide from beginning to end, whether that’s a finished file or a fine art print. It’s an approach that I believe yields better results, gives you a much better sense of creative direction, and enables you to use the tools in Lightroom much more effectively. Why to use a tool becomes much more important than how.
Check out my latest screencast where I share my creative approach in processing a recent Photo Journal image: Fog at Sugarloaf. (The original post explains my notes on the making of the image.)
Please share your questions, comments or feedback below – I’m always happy to clarify or help in any way I can.
Thanks for the excellent video! I enjoyed seeing how you process your pictures and the improvements the processing did.
Nancy
Thanks, Robert. Appreciate that.
Great video. Extremely helpful to see the workflow from start to finish. Thanks.
Thanks Don, appreciate the feedback and kind words.
RR
I really like the video, but I have one question.
In your video, you use the tone curve as a replacement for contrast, and I understand why you did that. But is the tone curve interchangeable with the highlights and shadows slider? Thanks…
Hi Jacob, thanks for the feedback – the Lightroom tone curve is not the same as the highlights and shadows controls. The tone curve is primarily used to adjust any tonal value, or multiple tonal values from black to white, including the white and black points. It can not be used to recover clipped highlights or shadows. The highlights and shadows sliders CAN be used to recover clipped highlights and shadows, and also works along a very narrow band that can not be adjusted the way the tone curve can (no target adjustment tool for example). So while both can create a smilier look, the function differently and have different purposes depending in your image and needs.
Hope that helps!
RR