Before & After | Rescuing a “stinker”

I love to take pictures but I have to say I love the post processing work just as much if not more. I do all my pp-ing work in Lightroom and Photoshop. The goal is to color correct all of my RAW images in Lightroom first and then pull certain images in to Photoshop if I want to add any special touches to them. I’m learning how to get the hang of perfecting my color correction edits in Lightroom so that they may not need anything extra in Photoshop, but I’ve only been doing this for a relatively short while so I’m still learning as I go.

I like to add these “special touches” in Photoshop using actions, specifically Totally Rad Actions and Sheye Rosemeyer’s Eye Candy Actions. Though all of these actions are outstanding, I’ve found that I only use a handful on a consistent basis and I try to use them judiciously so they create more of a subtle effect than something that looks crrrrazy overdone. If you go back through this blog, you will find my experimentations with editing styles and….let’s just say I’ve changed my mind about a few things. I’m sure that in another 10 months from now I’ll have an even better handle on how I want my images to look.

Recently, I revisited some older images that I took last November and found this one in particular of my beautiful friend Karen that I wanted to fix. I had dismissed it before thinking that it was a lost cause and I didn’t even give it a chance. Well, I thought I’d see if anything could be done to it and this is what I came up with. The first image is the absolutely abysmal, straight-out-of-camera (SOOC) image compared with the edits I made in Lightroom. The Lightroom image looked okay but still too dark and orange-y for my tastes. So I took that image into Photoshop to see if anything else could be done to level it out using a few of my favorite actions. I think I fixed it! It’s a pretty drastic overall before and after but it’s not too shabby. ??? Usually, if I’ve totally botched a photo like that SOOC image, I’ll just move on to a better one because I frankly don’t have the time to make deep edits like this one. But it is still fun to see what can be done to fix little gems that you may have forgotten about.

In case you have any interest, here is the order of actions I used from first to last:
Carnivale Color at 15% – Eye Candy Actions
Claire-ify at 50% – TRA Actions
Pool Part at 10% – TRA Actions
A Vibrance reduction later at -15

If you want, tell me what you think about this!