Portfolio Post-Production

While I said in my previous blog post that actually taking photos is my favorite step of the creative process, I'd consider post-production to be the most satisfying step, because you finally get to see your creations come to life and show their true potential.

I usually don't drastically edit my photos in Lightroom. I just play around with the basic correction sliders because images that are overproduced just isn't my style, and I feel it hampers the effect of the original image.

For my basic photo, I simply edit aspects that need to be changed (shadows, highlights, white balance, etc.), then increase the contrast to give it my own street photography-esque style. I also may change the texture and clarity sliders if I feel the image could benefit from it.

The original photo...

...and the final photo. Notice the increased contrast and higher clarity.

Since my portfolio is based on street photography, I tend to edit my photos in grayscale, since the genre was popular at a time when color cameras weren't widely used. For this particular portfolio, I'll only keep the color if I believe it's crucial to the image. The image above, for instance, would lose quite a bit to it if I made it black-and-white. But for most photos, dropping the saturation and rising the contrast works just fine.

The original image...

...and the final grayscale image. As you can see, nothing was really lost here from removing the color.
I also adjusted the crop slightly.

Sometimes though, I decide a photo deserves some special treatment. There are some photos where I want a certain color to stand out, but the colors around it are bland and somewhat detract from the main color I want to emphasize.

This is where things get interesting. For a scenario like this, I like to create a certain effect in Lightroom where I desaturate everything but the target color. I either do this through the saturation sliders in the HSL/Color tab, where I slide every color but the desired one to the left, or use the adjustment brush for more complex/multiple colors. This creates a really interesting effect that I've come to love. It really helps the color and, as a result, the image to stand out so much more.

I know I already showed these photos in my last blog, but I feel this is the best example of this effect in action.
Doesn't it just look so much more interesting?

 Like I said, I love the satisfaction I get when fine-tuning my photos to exactly how I want them. If I get a great subject or really good composition but, say, the white balance is off or the shadows are too dark, post-production in Lightroom lets you fix these problems and more to make your photo just a bit better.