TCampbell
Been spending a lot of time on here!
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2012
- Messages
- 3,614
- Reaction score
- 1,556
- Location
- Dearborn, MI
- Can others edit my Photos
- Photos OK to edit
Since your profile is marked as "Photos ok to edit" I did a very easy & quick adjustment in Lightroom.
The first thing I noticed was how bright the image was at the top vs. the bottom. Lightroom has the ability to apply a neutral gradient tint to an image. You an press the 'M' key or you can find the icon just below the color histogram in the 'Develop' module. There's a row of icons used to crop, spot removal, red-eye correction, and the next icon over (a rectangle) is the gradient filter.
To apply the filter you click-and-drag across your image starting at the area you want to be greatest effect and dragging to the area to be least effect. So I drug the filter from top edge to bottom edge (and you can go beyond the edge. You can also reposition the filter later if you don't like it's position.
Having applied the filter, you can now use the adjustments (within the filters box). E.g. grab the "Exposure" slider and and slide it a little left and you'll notice it darkens the top the most and has very little effect at the bottom. BTW, you can adjust any control within the box (boost contrast will increase contrast more at the top, but do very little to the bottom.)
Press the "close" at the bottom of the box to commit those changes (if you want to change it again later, click the Gradient Filter icon again, but notice there's a dot in your image (representing this particular filter). Click that dot to activate the gradient filter you previously applied and you can make more changes. You can also apply more than one gradient filter to the same image (you'll notice each one gets it's own "dot" in the image.)
Next up... I thought the image looks a bit cold. Images look a bit better when shot near the "golden hour" so let's just cheat and warm up the image a bit. The white balance slider in Lightroom will initially be at the "0" position and you can go from -100 to +100. I grabbed the slider and played with it until I was happy I had removed the cold blue tones and left only the warm tones. This happens to be a +20 adjustment on the white balance, but if you think that's too much you could try +10 or +15.
This image (and several others) have a lot of potential.
The first thing I noticed was how bright the image was at the top vs. the bottom. Lightroom has the ability to apply a neutral gradient tint to an image. You an press the 'M' key or you can find the icon just below the color histogram in the 'Develop' module. There's a row of icons used to crop, spot removal, red-eye correction, and the next icon over (a rectangle) is the gradient filter.
To apply the filter you click-and-drag across your image starting at the area you want to be greatest effect and dragging to the area to be least effect. So I drug the filter from top edge to bottom edge (and you can go beyond the edge. You can also reposition the filter later if you don't like it's position.
Having applied the filter, you can now use the adjustments (within the filters box). E.g. grab the "Exposure" slider and and slide it a little left and you'll notice it darkens the top the most and has very little effect at the bottom. BTW, you can adjust any control within the box (boost contrast will increase contrast more at the top, but do very little to the bottom.)
Press the "close" at the bottom of the box to commit those changes (if you want to change it again later, click the Gradient Filter icon again, but notice there's a dot in your image (representing this particular filter). Click that dot to activate the gradient filter you previously applied and you can make more changes. You can also apply more than one gradient filter to the same image (you'll notice each one gets it's own "dot" in the image.)
Next up... I thought the image looks a bit cold. Images look a bit better when shot near the "golden hour" so let's just cheat and warm up the image a bit. The white balance slider in Lightroom will initially be at the "0" position and you can go from -100 to +100. I grabbed the slider and played with it until I was happy I had removed the cold blue tones and left only the warm tones. This happens to be a +20 adjustment on the white balance, but if you think that's too much you could try +10 or +15.
This image (and several others) have a lot of potential.