Louise Wilson

Link to Louise’s final piece.

After completing each of my shoots I began to post-process my images using Adobe’s Lightroom. Some of the images were edited a lot more than others, some required little editing, but overall I attempted to maintain a sense of consistency throughout the collection.

Increasing contrastclarity and sharpening all have a similar effect. They essentially make the image appear more defined, crisp and stark. This ends up making the image appear grittier, more textured and more ‘professional. Reducing the highlights helps regain information that is lost through over saturation of light, retaining more detail in the image. It also helps to balance the exposure of the image, so there’s not one area that’s significantly brighter or more saturated with light than the rest. Increasing the vibrance helped to bring out under-represented colours within the image, making the images appear livelier and more dynamic. Increasing noise reduction just stops the images from appearing to grainy, sometimes if you overdo it the image appears super creamy and soft. Because I wanted these images especially gritty I tried to keep noise reduction to a minimum.

Before beginning this studio I had never used Lightroom before and I had never post-processed any images. I was actually extremely intimidated by the idea of editing images, it seemed like a complicated and overwhelming process that I wasn’t particularly keen to get into. After beginning to use Lightroom within this studio I realised that editing images does not have to be hard and the benefits, when comparing before and after photos, are insane. Editing an image really allows you to maximise the beauty of an image and to ensure that the image on screen appears how you saw it in real life. I’m at the point now, where I’m using Lightroom almost everyday and there’s rarely a time when I post an image online or send it to someone without editing it using Lightroom first.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *