Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Revisit Old Photos to Find Something New

This weekend my primary hard drive was full and I couldn't import any new photos until I did some house cleaning and purged my system of a few gigbytes of bits. So I began by opening Adobe Lightroom and started looking through my many folders and thousands of images trying to decide what could be deleted to free disk space.
After about an hour of browsing and numerous photos removed I came across a series of images from Chirstmas 2007 which were taken shortly after I pruchased my Canon 40D SLR camera. One photo of my son Austin kind of stood out. There was nothing exceptional about it but I just loved it. So I put my house cleaning project on hold, swicthed from the Lightroom Library module into the Develop module and started working on the image in hopes of bringing out the best qualities while hiding the rest.
Below is the orginal RAW image straight out of the camera with no processing. After looking at the image I wanted to draw the viewers attention to his cute little face peeking out from behind the Christmas tree. As you can see the rule of thirds was not used since his face is planted sqaurley in the middle of the image. I also didn't like the group of people seated behind him becuase it was distracing and didn't add to the image. What should I do?
Original Image
I began by cropping the image to remove as much of the group of people as possible without chopping the top or side of his head. This resulted in a closer view of his face and reveled the typical skin blimishes you'd expect to find on a child. So I grabbed the Spot Removal tool and removed those unsightly spots. I next turned my attendtion to the colors and used the Vibrance slider to pump up a little color and I also lowered the Contract to soften the image. I'm pretty pleased with the end result. What do you think?

Final Image