On my post called ‘Vintage Happiness‘, I got such a great comment from Sandy M. It said:
“I love the vintageness of these photos, goes great with vintage cameras! I have the hardest time figuring out if a photo would look better in color, b&w, brightened, more vintage, sepia, it’s soo hard!”
Sandy, you bring up such a great point. How is one to know what direction to go when editing a photo?
Sometimes, I set out to take a photo with the finished product in mind and I know exactly what I’m going to do with it. For example, with the shots in ‘Vintage Happiness’, I knew that they were going to be vintage and that I wanted to use Florabella’s Vintage Actions. It all started with the actions, actually. I wanted to play with them and that inspired me to take the shots with the vintage cameras.
But you’ll see in the post, there are a couple B&Ws. How did that happen if my plan was to go creamy-vintage? The first step in my workflow is Lightroom. In LR, I play around with presets to see if anything inspires me. And, Sandy, that could be a great springboard for your creativity. Just click the presets and if you don’t feel inspired, reset the photo and click another one! You’ll see your photos in a way you never imagined them in your own head and that can spark amazing ideas.
Back to my workflow…while in LR, I happened to hover over the ‘Liquorice’ preset from One Willow’s Retro Candy presets and this shot of Jack (which was actually just a test shot) popped out and blew me away. I rarely just settle on one preset. I usually then take the photo into Photoshop for some layering or textures, but I swear, this preset was all I needed (I slid the vignette slider to add the vignette).
Like I said, I took these photos to be vintage on purpose, using vintage props. And props can inspire you in amazing ways. But when you don’t have anything in mind for your photos, playing around with presets and actions like I mentioned can open a huge box of possibility you didn’t imagine.
And if you’re not on Flickr, GET ON FLICKR! Check out the photographers I follow on Flickr and follow them too (add them as a ‘contact’). Their work inspires me to the max.
