Camera’s View

Happy Birthday to the United States of America !

My ancestor originally came from France to New France in 1756 and his children and grandchildren were not part of the original founding and subsequent struggles of this nation. Then as many others, some of his decedents came to the United States during the late 1800’s seeking work and opportunity.

Here, they found that life of opportunity and it’s because of sacrifices made by them that I and my family enjoy the life we have today.

But if it were not for those in the image below and the many other men, women and children of that period, all of us who followed would not have had the freedom to pursue those opportunities.

Yes there have been many inequities on the journey and as a country we do have some faults.

However, we always seem to come together to resolve those issues peacefully and democratically due in part to the  principles of our Constitution and the Declaration of Independence made 232 years ago on July 4, 1776.

(image was capture in the rotunda of the US Capital during a recent visit, click on image for larger view)

Seems as if I just can not leave well enough alone.

I just returned from a two week trip around the beautiful state of Oregon and have been going over some of my images.

I no sooner got to an image of the Yaquina Head Light when I started to play around with it inside Adobe Lightroom to see what effect I could apply that would make it different than just another lighthouse picture that I captured before.

Anyways here is the results of the experiment -

(click on images to see larger view)

Original Image

And here is image with Lightroom adjustment applied

I created a Lightroom Develop Module preset that may or may not work on your images. The preset can be downloaded here -neutral-tones.

In the previous post I referenced a preset created for draining all colors except red.

It’s actually easier than you might think.

Here are two images of butterflies where I drained out most of the color.

Technique

In the Lightroom Develop module -

• Perform your desired tonal adjustments
• In the HSL/Color/Grey scale panel, select Color
• Drop all the saturation levels to zero except for the color(s) you want remaining. (you may also adjust the luminance and hue as desired)

In the top example I left Orange and Magenta and in the next image I left only Orange.

One issue I did run into was what to do with the extraneous hints of color away from your focus point ?

This would be easy to correct in Photoshop by making selections around the unwanted items and then to desaturate these items. Not as easy a task in Lightroom, until Lightroom 2.0 anyways, the only option is to clone out these areas, resulting in the image below.

Matt Kloskowski of the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips Blog, posted a new preset he calls “Sin City Look”.  Basically what Matt is doing is draining all the colors out of an image and leaving just the reds.

I did something similar  to this in a previous posting but I never created or saved a preset for later use.

Matt’s settings also seem to provide a much richer color rendering.

Here is a sample of a before and after image using Matt’s technique -

Before

After

You can get the presets from Matt’s Site by clicking here.

Beautiful night here in New England, so my wife and I decided to dine out at the Clam Box in Ipswich MA.

After consuming more fried food than we probably should, we headed to Ipswich Neck and Bay area to check out the ocean and views.

Here is an image I captured of Ipswich Bay looking towards the setting sun.

The image was first processed with Adobe Lightroom and then transfered to Photoshop to make some additional edits using Scott Kelby’s 7 Point System.