Kid at Canada Day.

Process

I was asked if I’d explain my process now and then. Here goes!
This will be very geeky.

I spent some time on Canada Day wandering around taking pictures of people. I was using a Canon SX10-IS. I like to use it in crowds because it’s less conspicuous than a DSLR. It has a huge 20x zoom lens, 28-560 mm equivalent. It shoots 10-megapixel jpgs. (Other than that, I use Nikon DSLRs.)

I liked the picture of the little girl with the painted face. I decided to crop it square. I’m of the opinion that every picture benefits from being cropped. Often I think square is the best crop.

Then I applied a preset in Lightroom 2 that boosts contrast and brings out details.

The preset is one that I made myself. You can try it if you want. Here are the main settings:

Enhancing the details like that also exaggerates noise and skin blemishes, so at that point I sent the picture over to Photoshop.

In Photoshop I applied Imagenomic Noiseware Pro, which I have installed as a plugin.

I like the look of a flat, painting-like surface, so I usually use extreme settings in Noiseware: maximum everything.

This screenshot shows the original picture on the top and the noise-reduced version on the bottom. You can easily see the difference in the little girl’s cheek.

Other things I commonly do in Photoshop:
-Straightening perspective on buildings.
-Cloning or painting out unwanted details. (I’m no Photoshop wizard, so I don’t do much of that.)

I used to use Unsharp Mask in Photoshop for sharpening, but I’ve become convinced that the sharpening tools in Lightroom are actually better. If Lightroom had noise reduction as good as Imagenomic’s, and perspective adjustment as good as Photoshop’s, there wouldn’t be much reason to go to Photoshop at all.

When I was finished I saved the picture back to Lightroom as a TIFF.

In Lightroom the TIFF is stored and displayed next to the original picture. Lightroom is completely non-destructive; you can always go back to the original shot, no matter what you have done to it in the meantime.

At that point I was satisfied, so I exported the TIFF as an 800-pixel square jpeg and put it up on my blog.

I’m not sure. I admit that I’m not convinced of this crop, but I don’t mind it including a suggestion of who the little girl is talking to.

Maybe it should include more of the woman, including the straps. That wouldn’t work in a square crop, and it would change the picture more than I’m prepared to do right now. And I definitely can’t have those legs growing out of the little girl’s head.

This crop puts the little girl’s face almost dead-centre, and I find my eyes keep shifting around a bit, trying to find a place to rest, so that’s one reason I think it isn’t quite right. But for now I’m satisfied with it.

Thanks for your comment Tom, I appreciate it!