{Gear}

• Canon 5D {main camera}
• Canon 7D {pullbacks}
• 70-200mm f/2.8 L IS {main lens}
• 50mm f/1.2 {pullbacks}
• Lenshood – yes
• White reflector

{Settings}

• All shot in AV mode between f/2.8 and f/3.5
• WB – Auto
• Format – RAW

{Editing}

• Images culled in Lightroom
• All colors edited in Lightroom {no Photoshop! Doesn’t happen often, but I set myself a challenge}. B&Ws edited in Photoshop 4.
• Processing started with One Willow Presets Timeless Collection {‘Lyric’} and then tweaked for each shot, including dodging/burning on all images. Black & whites in Photoshop with Florabella’s ‘B&W Film’ from the Luxe II collection of actions. That little ditty always makes my heart sing!
• Poses inspired by Skye Hardwick’s posing guides

{Pullbacks}

Janie asking to see how mine were looking. A really useful part of shooting together - comparing composition.

Shooting with Janie - due to speckling from the sunlight and the trees, we were waiting until the moments she walked into the clean shade before hitting the trigger.

Posing with Emily - love the look on her face :)

I love these little shacks in the playground. This wasn't in shade, but it was so overcast that there were no problems. The catchlights are from the sky while the reflector kept her face evenly lit. This is ideal for me. I'd rather still have natural catchlights when using a reflector.

There are all these little lean-tos in the forest and I knew they'd be a good place to shoot. Gave us more options than just static posing and Emily had somewhere to place her hands and arms.

Daniel showed up shortly after we started shooting Emily. So here we are photographing him where he decided to plunk down on the path. I like to keep the parents behind me because when the interract, it keeps them looking in my direction.

Pretty straightforward portrait.

{Before & Afters}

LOVED the look on her face and chose this shot out of many because of it. When I was at her house helping to choose wardrobe the day before, I instantly pictured this shot when I saw that adorable hat. It frames her face so well and her little whisp of hair in the front is adorable. I wanted it to be one of the few B&Ws of the session because it's all about her eyes & soul here!

This was shot in full-on sunshine with no shade. Was just a perfect moment, really. Edited with lots of dodging & burning to make her stand out from the background as much as possible.

Slightly straightened and then edited with the One Willow presets mentioned above. The one I used for the whole session was 'Lyric'. This is my favourite shot of the whole session. Mostly, though, because of the 3 layers. The foreground in the doorway, the window behind her and then trees with juicy bokeh behind that. Makes it very interesting to me.

This is my second favourite image from the session. I love the jewel tones.

Daniel's images were processed with a different preset from the same collecion but I wanted his session to appear warmer. I did my best to remove the pole behind him, although I must admit I did lose patience for the whole idea. I should've been more mindful of what was in the background.

This little area of woods is amazing and the shots needed very little retouching. Although I minimised his red cheeks in some of the shots, I liked them here because he was smiling so big.

This is probably my favourite from Daniel's session. Straightened and recomposed, but still kept the dead-center composition because I think it says "this is me" and I use it at least a couple times in every session. As nice as a 1/3 or off-center composition feels to look at, a centered composition feels bold and rebellious for me at times and I love it here.

You can get the most out of your experience with LR by learning some of the keyboard shortcuts and clickables which you may not already know exist. Here are my 10 favourites:

{Keyboard shortcuts}

1. Before/After - To toggle back and forth between your before and after while you’re editing, hit the \ {backspace} key. This can help you stay grounded and not go overboard in your editing.
2. Dim the lights - If you want to dim the lights in LR while you’re editing, hit ‘L’. This will remove the distracting panels around your image so you can view it alone on a black screen.
3. Painting – While you’re painting with the adjustment brush, press the ‘O’ key to see a red map of where you have painted. This will prevent you from bleeding over into areas you didn’t intend on painting. Especially helpful when retouching skin around the eyes & mouth.
4. Switch Back - If you’re in the develop mode editing and you want to quickly jump back to the library grid of images, hit ‘G’. And then press ‘D’ to go back to the develop module.
5. Info – To quickly view the info about your image {like the settings you used to shoot it}, press ‘I’

{Clickables}

1. On/Off - My favourite button in LR is the on/off switch in the develop module. When you want to see you photo without the vignette you’ve just added or without the painting you’ve done with the adjustment brush, just toggle the switch that looks like this –> to turn the effect on and off
2. Area Picker – In the detail drop-down where you can do sharpening and noise reduction, there’s a preview square of your image at 100%. If you click this little guy –> and then move the mouse around your image to check out certain areas at a zoomed 100%. This will help prevent you from going overboard in your sharpening but be careful – pixel peeping can be misleading!
3. White Balance – When you’re choosing a new white balance for your image {more effective when the image is RAW vs JPG} clicking this eye dropper tool –> will allow you to click around on your image to change the while balance. Ideally, you will be looking for a shade in your image that it meant to be whitest white. Clicking on it will correct the white balance, but clicking on other shades or white or grey can give you some cool effects. It’s an easier way to change the temperature of your photo than using the sliders.
4. Curves – When in the tone curve area, you’ll see this little button –> When you click on it and then hover around your image, you’ll see the tone curve labels change between lights, darks and highlights. Instead of blindly dragging the line of the tone curve around, you can hover over the area in the image {exe: a dark area} and then click and drag up and down to alter the curve of that area.
5. Painting – When you’ve painted an area or added a graduated filter, that action will then be marked with a button that looks like this –> When you go back to the adjustment brush or grad filter mode, you will see your image filled with these black dots. When you hover over them, you will see the areas they represent highlighted in red. For example, if you did multiple brush actions on the eyes for brightening the iris, sharpening, darkening the lashes, there will be many little dots around that area. If you click the dot, you can then go back to the sliders in the adjustment brush and alter the effects you used on that brush. Or, you can click the dot and then hit ‘backspace’ to delete the effect altogether.

I love editing in Lightroom. When you get these little shortcuts & buttons in your memory, it can make your experience in Lightroom more fulfilling and give you greater control.

{Further Reading}

10 Objects you Didn’t Know could be Dragged, Clicked or Opened in Lightroom
Lightroom 3 shortcut cheat sheet {PDF}

What a great topic from Sandra in my Facebook discussion forum today! She was asking about how other photographers use Lightroom to edit their subject’s skin. This is a tutorial that shows how I use the adjustment brush and blemish tool to edit skin in Lightroom.

But what Sandra was asking about specifically was skin color. There are a few ways that photographers can approach this:

• Use the white balance slider to cool down the overall color temperature of the image. This will alter the yellowy/orangeness of the skin.
• In addition, if you have shot the image in RAW, you will have the ability to completely alter the WB setting with the drop-down WB selector. Shade/cloudy will warm the color temperature and tungsten/fluorescent will cool it.
• Sometimes, I go down to the color adjustment area and dial down the yellows or oranges to adjust too-orange or too-yellow skin. You could also try the red slider if your subject has had too much sun.
• The way you will have the most control is if you use the adjustment brush to paint on less saturation where you want it. Press ‘O’ while you’re using the brush to see where the brush is painting.

Once you’ve gotten the color sorted out, you can go to town on blemishes and retouching like in the tutorial I’ve linked for you above.

I’d love to know how y’all do it in Lightroom – let’s keep the discussion going below!

• Look at the images used as examples when buying. Were they taken outside? Then your indoor flash photos won’t get the same results. The results might still be spectacular, but not exactly the same.
• If you’ve seen a B&A, was the ‘before’ already a near-perfectly exposed image? Presets & actions need a well exposed image to start with.
• Check with the maker if they were created to work best with jpegs or raw.
• Presets and actions are very rarely a one-click deal. Every image is different and so these great little plug-ins for your photo editing software are just a foundation for editing.
• After running an action, go into the layers palette and tweak the resulting layers. Mask bits out and fiddle with opacities.
• After running a preset in LR or ACR, take a look at the sliders and educate yourself on what the preset has done to your image and change things to customize your result.

Actions & presets are an excellent (for me, must-have) tool to help you edit your images. I just think the most important thing to know is that they’re not meant to be one-click solutions for your photos but a springboard for your own creativity!

1. Open an image you want to edit. Remember that any changes that have already been made on that image will be included in the preset so start with a SOOC (straight out of camera) image.

2. After applying all the changes you’d like in your preset, go to the preset box on the left and click the add button:

3. You’ll get a box that looks like this:

4. Now, name your preset, choose what folder you want it to belong to. The checked boxes are what changes from the photo you want included in your preset. For example, if you cropped the photo but don’t want that included in the preset, uncheck that box.

That’s it! Have fun!

In the develop module, click B&W here:

LOL that’s pretty much it! Play with the sliders to adjust the colours which are, in theory, still in your B&W and don’t forget to play with the other sliders in the ‘basic’ drop down like clarity & recovery!

And as always, you can get FREE B&W presets from CoffeeShop and LightRoomKillerTips.com. These can just be a starting point if you want to create your own look.

A. Yes, when working with presets, you must do all the presetting you want and then tweak the results. When you click a preset, it makes the changes it’s programmed to make and disregards what you’ve already done.

Thanks for your questions everyone and keep ‘em coming to eh@elizabethhalford.com.

Q. “I’m loving Lightroom, but I fear all these photos are getting clogged on my computer, causing my computer to slow down. Plus, I’m not even sure I want to get into what a mess I’ve made of my picture files. I don’t really understand the whole folder/catalog/library system that Lightroom uses and I moved some folders and then it erased my edits.”

A. Rather than trying to write all this, I just made a video to show you how I import, export and keep everything where I want it so I can find it later.

Thanks for your questions everyone and keep ‘em coming to eh@elizabethhalford.com.