Before / After - Almost Monday

Drag

THE STORY

his one is a look at how powerful editing software is today. As with most arena shows, the lights were changing a lot and I was constantly changing settings to try to account for them. When I took this photo, I had no idea that the color was so jacked up because I have my in-camera previews set to show me monochromatic images. I have little, if any control over the white balance of my images while shooting because the lighting changes so often. So instead of seeing color previews that would have probably caused me to discard this image, I use monochrome because it allows me to see the worst case scenario where I can't get close on the color adjustments and make it black and white. This allows me to focus solely on the things I have control of while I'm shooting, focus, exposure and composition.

THE EDIT

After importing the photos from the show into Lightroom, I went through a cursory culling to narrow down the images I was going to edit in the first pass. That’s when I saw how jacked up the color was in this image. Luckily, because I had seen the black and white preview on my camera, I knew I could save this image because the detail was still there.

I applied my base black and white preset, which significantly lowers the black levels and shadows, increased the contrast, and makes some pretty drastic adjustments to the clarity, texture, and dehaze settings. Next I made a few minor tweaks to the exposure and highlights to even even things out a bit.

For my black and white preset, I usually have to do some heavy tweaking of the presence settings (clarity, texture, and dehaze) based upon the photo and the look I’m going for. I will say, don’t be afraid to push these to the extremes. Sometimes it can really bring an image back from the brink. For this one, my clarity and dehaze were jacked up pretty high to bring back the details in the very bright parts of the image.

One last thing to know about editing a black and white image is that even though it’s not color, there are still white balance settings that affect the image. Setting your temperature and tint before converting to black and white to get it as close to normal skin tone as possible will give you a good starting point. Then when you convert it, you can try moving the sliders around a bit to see how they affect your image.