Happy 2011 everyone!
Still blown away with the power of Lightroom 3. Because, just learning a few things; you can rescue an 'unusable' picture, and make it a decent shot. Photoshop is a very powerful tool and you can do even more with it, but you have to know how to use it. The same thing happens with LR3, but at least to me; it is not as complicated as PS is. The multi layer deal alone, makes LR3 more user friendly (IMHO).
What I mean about 'unusable' is, that if you want to print that picture it will print with plenty of noise and overexposed. The one 'after' will not print perfect (due of the setting the photo was taken with), but considerably much better.
This JPEG (no RAW file made) picture was over exposed and taken with a Sony DSC-H3 (8.1 megapixels), an ISO of 3200 at 6.3mm with f/8.0 and 1/2000 sec. The very high ISO with daylight is what caused such noise (and the improper settings I gave the poor thing). You can see on picture 1 how my face is distorted. What I did to make it 'better' was: first I created a virtual copy (there is no need to do so, but I like to see the thumbnails of 'Before' on my strip when I am glancing over my library), I clicked un Auto Tone because that is the first thing I always do (if I don't like it, I reset it back) and 95% of the time I keep the result I get. I zoomed in on my face and on the black t-shirt to see the results of noise reduction. I used the Luminance noise reduction slide to +50 which was until the noise was mainly gone without loosing too much detail/sharpness. I bumped up the Clarity just 20 units. I always like to add some saturation, usually between 15 and 75 units depending on the picture or the effect I want to achieve. Something I like to do most times is to enhance the greens. Because any trees, mountains or grass look to me more comfortable and warm to watch if they pop on the screen either as foreground and/or background. Green Hue +25 and Green Saturation +50. Then I added some skin softener to my skin to make it look nicer but more importantly to fix any remaining of noise left over (very little though). I added some Iris enhancement to my eyes (just a hair) and +38 on sharpening (enough not to cause noise again). The final touch (which I did before the sharpening) was to add the PC Vignette 2 preset to shift more attention to the center of the picture.
And that was it! Here I am, no expert and with some corrections learned from youtube tutorials; I made this cool but almost unusable picture, a properly exposed and decent shot that will print much nicer in most commercial print sizes.
Hope you enjoyed this brief tutorial and once again: HAPPY 2011!
