I think I've committed myself to a "selective color" experiment this month with black and white. I'm trying to learn some fun tricks with LR5, and for the past few days, I've been taking the Vibrance slider in "Presence" down to nil and then going into the color areas and lifting back out the predominate color's saturation.
When I'm taking a shot, I'm looking for dull backgrounds (or on the grey, white, black scales) that have some color that pops out. Today is a relatively sunny day and the sky has some fast flowing cloud formations. So, where you see purple now, there was blue. Instead of using the sliders like I have, I decided to employ the "radial filter" and target an area so I can then continue editing the sky to pull out the drama. All trial and error, but I rather like it. I love the purple as it pops with just a hint.
I see why working in RAW makes a huge difference these days too as I have so much more flexibility in the editing.
@mzzhope haha, you are the theme/challenge queen Hope! I'll tag it, but I'm not sure it works. We'll see. Sorry I have been so absent. Lots going on and I'm just taking one day at a time.
Nicely done. Well done for going Raw. Yes it invariably means a bit more time in your work flow but the latitude it gives you to rescue shots is just amazing. If you haven't used the graduated filter tool yet, you haven't lived!
@steampowered Thanks so much for the link! I have so much to learn, but this year is the year to do it now that I have manual settings on camera down (and some new lenses to play with). @rvwalker I have found that my workflow is less now that I concentrate on an image being taken well enough before the processing. I do find that I can make some corrections I couldn't when using JPEG (or at least it seems less of a headache in RAW with LR5). I'm also really trying to take less photos now and work with the one I want to for the day! With birds, of course, that is not always possible.
