Final version of Looking At Incense

The photo above was recently sent to me by a reader who requested a critique. He mentioned that when he originally shot it, he processed it with a black and white conversion. He sent me the RAW file, so let’s take a close look at this photo. By the way, the opening image is after I’ve finished processing it. Here’s the unprocessed original, converted straight to JPEG.

Original image

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The first thing I noticed was the name. Using a camera created name is never recommended for a variety of reasons. If your camera gives you four digit names, then once you make your ten thousandth photo, you’ll start repeating names, which will just end up confusing you in the future. If you plan to display your photo on a website, a descriptive name is necessary for good SEO practice. The best time to change the name is on import, however if you’ve already got a catalog full of poorly named photos, in Lightroom changing them in batch is as simply as selecting them and pressing F2. You can now enter a new name. Here, I’ve chosen LookingAtIncense. Normally I have a naming convention that I follow for my own photos, but as this one is not mine I’ve given it a custom name.

Renaming in Lightroom

Looking in the Metadata panel, I see that there’s no information here. At the very minimum, you should have your name, contact details, website and copyright information. Additionally, the image should have a descriptive caption and keywords.

Metadata

It’s now time to take a look at the image. The first thing I notice is that it’s out of focus. Normally, that would be enough for me to skip straight over it, but in this case, the unfocused nature of this image gives it a dreamy look that I actually think works quite well.

To the left of the frame you can see a baby being held. I find this a little distracting, so I’m going to crop it out. A different composition or shooting with a wider aperture (eg f2.8) would have meant a crop would not be needed.

Cropped and ready for processing

The image itself is underexposed. It was shot in RAW, so that gives us some leeway to adjust. Firstly, I’ll make a slight adjustment to the white balance, changing the temperature from 5050 to 4500. This is simply a creative choice on my part. I’ll add about 0.75 to the overall exposure. I’ll also adjust the black point to darken the shadows a bit. This makes the colors pop a little as it extends the contrast. As well, an increase in vibrance gives it a bit more life, and I’ll finetune the contrast by giving it a generic S-curve. The image is looking better now, but I’m still not happy with it. Let’s try it in black and white and see how we go.

Color Version - not bad but not great.

There are numerous ways to create a black and white image. I usually use a series of presets for them, particularly some of the film emulation ones in X-Equals Cold Storage package. For this post however I’ll do it manually. One quick method is to simply choose the Grayscale option at the top of the Basic panel. Here it is with the previous exposure changes I’ve made.

Grayscale

In the Split Toning panel, there is a color flyout that opens when you click in the color picker next to the word Highlights or Shadows. You have the option to choose one of the preset tones along the top, or select any custom tone in the color picker. Here, one of the preset tones seems to work okay, so I’ll choose that.

Split Toning

I’m reasonably happy with that, although there are a few minor changes to go. Moving back into the tone curve, I want to increase the contrast slightly. I select the Strong Contrast option with slightly deepens the S-curve. It’s a very subtle change, but just adds a little extra contrast. Next, moving back into the Basic panel, I add a little clarity to the overall image. I’d like to see more shadow in this, so I’ll push the blacks up to 45 to really deepen the shadows.

Final version of Looking At Incense

I’m pretty happy with this final image. It takes a slightly out of focus image, crops it to improve the composition then makes some exposure and tone adjustments to get a decent final photograph.

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