Part Two: “My Four Days in India”
I thought I’d pick up where I left off yesterday, with the remaining photos from my India Photo Book (I made the book on my last morning in Jaipur, but that was made a lot quicker by the fact that each night I would go through my images and make my “Picks” so I already had a folder with my favorite images all all ready to go, which makes the book-making process go much faster).
Post Processing
I didn’t have to do a lot of post processing on these, but they all got tweaking and sharpening in Photoshop or Lightroom. In particular, one thing I used a lot was a tiny bit of Highlight Edge Vignetting. Just a little bit in the Effects panel of Lightroom–I just drag the Amount slider to the left a little bit (as shown above) to darken the outside edges, and focus the attention away from the edges. Another thing I used here and there was Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro plug-in, in particular their Tonal Contrast preset. I normally didn’t apply it to the entire image—I would apply it, then hide the effect layer behind a black layer mask and then paint over parts of the image that needed more contrast.
I also increased the Clarity and Vibrance amount for some of the images, but overall it wasn’t anything fancy (it’s the same stuff I show in my live Photoshop World class called “Photoshop for Travel Photographers.”
Where’s all the HDR?
I’m waiting until I get back in the office (today) and I’m going to hand off some 5-shot brackets to RC Concepcion (who literally wrote the book on HDR post-processing) and let him have a go at it. I love the way he does his post on HDR images, so I hope to share those later in the week. And yes, I know…having RC process my HDR shots is cheating. :)
Next time, I’m building My Book in Lightroom 4
Now that Lightroom 4 Beta has a Books feature built-in, I’ll be doing my next book there, mostly because the layouts in LR4 are more flexible, so it opens lots of creative possibilities (see yesterday’s post where I showed the layout of the book in Lightroom 4. Worked even better than I expected!)
More Details on the Grid
Tomorrow, on “The Grid” Live (our weekly photography talk show), I’ll be talking about the trip, and some of the specific things I ran into photographically during the trip, so I’ll hope you’ll join us live tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4:00 PM ET at http://www.kelbytv.com/thegrid (or for the free rebroadcasts starting on Thursday).
Don’t forget to watch The Grid tomorrow at 4:00 pm. I’ll show some other shots, and we’ll talk about all sorts of stuff surrounding this. Thanks to everybody who gave me suggestions, helpful hints, warnings, and great advice before my trip to India. It really made a difference, and it was much appreciated! :-)