Before & After - Show us your edits

[evikne]

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Have you rescued a failed photo or just unleashed your creativity? Let's see your photos before and after editing!

A couple of ways to do it in Lightroom:

1. In the Develop module, hit the "Reset" button and export the image. Then jump back one step in the History palette and export again.
2. In the Library module, right click on a photo and select "Create Virtual Copy". Then right click on this copy and select "Reset". Then select both and export.

Before: Two colorful benches.

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After: I have lowered the exposure a bit (-0,40), added some vibrance (+15) and clarity (+15). Then I selected the benches (Auto Select Subject, plus some manual brushing), inverted the mask and removed the colors from the background. Finally I cropped to 16:9 format.

Edited December 25, 2022 by evikne

[evikne]

Before: A common problem when I photograph people is that the light falls from the wrong angle and causes the face to fall into shadow. As usual, I exposed for the highlights: the lower part of the dress.

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After: The exposure is unchanged. But I have raised the Shadows (+50) and Blacks (+30), and removed Vignetting (+30). Then I brushed in a mask in her face and raised the exposure here quite a lot (+1,80) and lowered the contrast (-100). I also copied and pasted the WB values from a WhiBal reference photo to achieve the correct white balance.

Edited December 25, 2022 by evikne

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[Al Brown]

I consider this prolly my best work ever. Two weeks in Photoshop and some After Effects as well. Lots of puppet warp, remodelling and tons of time spent in adjustment layers.

BEFORE:

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AFTER:

 

[benqui]

vor 1 Stunde schrieb Al Brown:

I consider this prolly my best work ever. Two weeks in Photoshop and some After Effects as well. Lots of puppet warp, remodelling and tons of time spent in adjustment layers.

BEFORE:

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AFTER:

 

Al you made my day! And you are a very professional Photoshopper!!!

[elmars]

Interesting! I would like to see some before - after from others. Here are two from me.

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[elmars]

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[evikne]

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2 hours ago, elmars said:

Interesting! I would like to see some before - after from others. Here are two from me.

Thanks for the first serious reply. I was a little afraid that the whole thread would disappear in a joke. 😄

[elmars]

I hope to see more too.

[tom.w.bn]

Stood for two hours in the cold to capture the light trails of cars driving along this building. Every Image was a 60 second exposure and I started when I heard cars coming from the left. The low light trails of the normal cars were a bit boring. Then this bus came and stopped in front of me at the bus stop. Exposure was finished and I immediately started the second exposure (long exposure noise reduction was off). The bus moved on and completed the circle with low and high lights and left the clearly visible bus front and bus sign in the image. 

In the raw converter I set both images to the same colour temperature and exposure (+0.5). Exported 16 bit TIFFs and loaded them into Affinity (the great photoshop alternative that costs almost nothing). Copied one image on top of the other image as new layer and set blending mode to "lighten". This only keeps the lighter pixels of the two layers. Blending of the lights was good but the blended clouds did not look nice so I decided for one sky to keep and masked the other sky out in the 2nd layer.

Did some repairs of the asphalt, contrast and levels correction and 16:9 crop.  Made a 100cm Alu-Dibon print (Alu + Acrylic cover) which looks really nice.

Camera: Pana S1 + Elmarit-M 24.

 

First image

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Second Image

Result

 

[evikne]

29 minutes ago, tom.w.bn said:

Stood for two hours in the cold to capture the light trails of cars driving along this building. Every Image was a 60 second exposure and I started when I heard cars coming from the left. The low light trails of the normal cars were a bit boring. Then this bus came and stopped in front of me at the bus stop. Exposure was finished and I immediately started the second exposure (long exposure noise reduction was off). The bus moved on and completed the circle with low and high lights and left the clearly visible bus front and bus sign in the image. 

In the raw converter I set both images to the same colour temperature and exposure (+0.5). Exported 16 bit TIFFs and loaded them into Affinity (the great photoshop alternative that costs almost nothing). Copied one image on top of the other image as new layer and set blending mode to "lighten". This only keeps the lighter pixels of the two layers. Blending of the lights was good but the blended clouds did not look nice so I decided for one sky to keep and masked the other sky out in the 2nd layer.

Did some repairs of the asphalt, contrast and levels correction and 16:9 crop.  Made a 100cm Alu-Dibon print (Alu + Acrylic cover) which looks really nice.

Camera: Pana S1 + Elmarit-M 24.

 

First image

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Second Image

Result

 

Thank you for a great story and a great picture! Very cool!

[dpitt]

Christmas eve in low light. Leica M9 at ISO 160 with Summilux (II) 50mm (1986), shot manual mode at 1/30 so that it would underexpose about one stop. Lots of movement because of the dog who tried to get her attention, so focus was even harder than normal. Distance 1,2 m approximately.

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Processed in Darktable 4.0.0 with  fast flow profile of Aurélien Pierre, and smal adjustments to lighting, local contrast and crop  resulted in the , the B&W was done with one click on build in color calibration-ILFORD Delta.

All this took me less time than writing this down.
Which one do you like best? Color or B&W?

Edited December 27, 2022 by dpitt
Issues with file format

[evikne]

13 minutes ago, dpitt said:

Which one do you like best? Color or B&W?

Thanks! I like both, maybe I prefer the color image by a small margin.

[evikne]

This is one of my "most edited pictures" and one of the few times I've actually visited a place with a picture in mind. The time of day (the blue hour) was also planned. Otherwise, most of my photos are spontaneous and unplanned.

We visited a graveyard to make this halloween picture. It was very cold, so my daughter wore woolen clothes under the suit. I took two pictures in a hurry, and then we ran back to the car (RF focusing in the dark wasn't very easy). I exposed for the little lamp in her hand (manual mode as always), but the faint light had almost no effect on her face. So I had to brush in a mask where I lifted the exposure (+1,40) in her face (more to her right side than the left). I also changed the color temperature (+15) on this mask to match the warm light from the lamp. I think the result was pretty natural, almost as if the light came from the little lamp.

Finally, I cropped the image and adjusted the WB according to an ExpoDisc reference shot.

Before:

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After:

M10 with 35 FLE, f/1.4, ISO 1600, 1/60 sec.

Edited December 27, 2022 by evikne

[dpitt]

5 minutes ago, evikne said:

This is one of my "most edited pictures" and one of the few times I've actually visited a place with a picture in mind. The time of day (the blue hour) was also planned. Otherwise, most of my photos are spontaneous and unplanned.

We visited a graveyard to make this halloween picture. It was very cold, so my daughter wore woolen clothes under the suit. I took two pictures in a hurry, and then we ran back to the car (RF focusing in the dark wasn't very easy). I exposed for the little lamp in her hand (manual mode as always), but the faint light had almost no effect on her face. So I had to brush in a mask in her face where I lifted the exposure +1,40 (more to her right side than the left). I also changed the color temperature (+15) on this mask to match the warm light from the lamp. I think the result was pretty natural, almost as if the light came from the little lamp.

Finally, I cropped the image and adjusted the WB according to an ExpoDisc reference shot.

Before:

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After:

M10 with 35 FLE, f/1.4, ISO 1600, 1/60 sec.

Great! Maybe 1/3 stop less pushing on the face would also work and look more natural to me. I like that you edit for natural look even though the camera can not capture it as we see it.

[erudolph]

I was photographing birds and had a Sigma 150-600 on the SL2.  My wife told me there was a sunset I should go see.  I ran out of the house but it was almost over.

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[hansvons]

@evikne, nice thread!

I use two Leica cameras, the SL2-S and a pair of R6.2. For reportages, I use the SL2-S with the 24-90; for portraits in colour the same camera but preferably the 50mm Summilux R; for portraits in B&W Delta 400 and the R6.2 with the same lens (I'd use an M6 and M lenses if I weren't using R glass for video and if focusing through a ground glass wouldn't have been part of my professional life.)

Postproduction and editing have been a constant for me for the last three decades. The first 15 years, it was the transfer of cine film to video (telecine) and then the same thing digitally, including still photography, which is relatively new to me in my professional life. I mention this because my past experiences define my workflow today: fast pace, no experiments, consistently the same results that satisfy my working style without further thought (I never check shots with the back screen. When in doubt, I shoot another one). I want repeatability for consistent quality without endless editing and eye fatigue.

That's why I created my personal camera profile for Capture One. This profile mimics what typically cine print films deliver for the projection (I used cine-video conversion LUTs from Kodak). The gamma is pretty steep; the blacks sit at 0, and the whites at 255, with a gentle roll-off to desaturated overexposure. The colour is well saturated, emphasising juicy shadows, which are a wee bit on the colder side. Likewise, I created for B&W a camera profile whose gamma mimics the graduation of Kodak 5222, a conservative, old-school emulsion used for many film classics. These profiles automatically set the overall grading approach. From there, I only lift shadows if necessary, adjust exposure or bring down highlights if applicable, and, most importantly, set the WB. But I never worry about colour, contrast and whatnot because everything is predefined. 

This is my daughter, shot at noon. She enjoys the remnants of a rave, a mixture of hangover and loathing of me when I asked her for a brief lens test shoot (the 50mm Summilux R that I received that day, shot at f 1,4). I use the SL2-S excellent highlight protection mode for automatic exposure at ISO 800, which creates a great foundation for editing, including a gentle texture (I only de-noise the colour part of the noise). I also don't sharpen my digitally acquired images.

The first image shows the Capture One default SL2-S setup with the correct WB. The second image shows my camera profile. The third is a clone of the second, but I lifted the shadows a bit and recovered the highlights. That's all that I needed to do to make myself happy. 

 

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[Gelatino]

On 12/25/2022 at 5:55 PM, Al Brown said:

I consider this prolly my best work ever. Two weeks in Photoshop and some After Effects as well. Lots of puppet warp, remodelling and tons of time spent in adjustment layers.

BEFORE:

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AFTER:

 

I would advise you not to hit the "reset" button.😂

[evikne]

14 minutes ago, hansvons said:

@evikne, nice thread!

I use two Leica cameras, the SL2-S and a pair of R6.2. For reportages, I use the SL2-S with the 24-90; for portraits in colour the same camera but preferably the 50mm Summilux R; for portraits in B&W Delta 400 and the R6.2 with the same lens (I'd use an M6 and M lenses if I weren't using R glass for video and if focusing through a ground glass wouldn't have been part of my professional life.)

Postproduction and editing have been a constant for me for the last three decades. The first 15 years, it was the transfer of cine film to video (telecine) and then the same thing digitally, including still photography, which is relatively new to me in my professional life. I mention this because my past experiences define my workflow today: fast pace, no experiments, consistently the same results that satisfy my working style without further thought (I never check shots with the back screen. When in doubt, I shoot another one). I want repeatability for consistent quality without endless editing and eye fatigue.

That's why I created my personal camera profile for Capture One. This profile mimics what typically cine print films deliver for the projection (I used cine-video conversion LUTs from Kodak). The gamma is pretty steep; the blacks sit at 0, and the whites at 255, with a gentle roll-off to desaturated overexposure. The colour is well saturated, emphasising juicy shadows, which are a wee bit on the colder side. Likewise, I created for B&W a camera profile whose gamma mimics the graduation of Kodak 5222, a conservative, old-school emulsion used for many film classics. These profiles automatically set the overall grading approach. From there, I only lift shadows if necessary, adjust exposure or bring down highlights if applicable, and, most importantly, set the WB. But I never worry about colour, contrast and whatnot because everything is predefined.

Thank you! Very interesting to read about your workflow. I have made some useful presets myself, but I'm not capable of creating my own camera profiles. Instead I've purchased the RNI All Films 5 Pro film simulation profiles for LR. And I've started a dedicated thread for such profiles here:

[hansvons]

The images below illustrate my workflow from B&W negative to digital positives. I don't scan but photograph my negs with my SL2-S and a 60mm Elmarit R macro. The images are part of a series I'm shooting currently for a social media campaign on the rewetting of peatlands.

I shoot mostly Delta 400. Why that's my preferred B&W film stock is worth a whole essay on B&W photography. In short, it works nicely in XTOL developer, which is environmentally friendly as it can get and delivers fine grain at roughly box speed without losing sharpness. Delta 400 has a pronounced red sensitivity compared to standards such as the Kodak Tri-X, which makes it very suitable for portraits as it is gentle to skin blemishes. Also, for a high-speed film, Delta 400 is relatively fine-grained and shows a resolution of roughly 3K, which is better than most other ISO 400 films I tested. 

That said, Delta 400 has a wide DR when exposed on the fatter side (I rate it at ISO 200-320) and thus isn't super contrasty out of the box, needing some gamma adjustments later in post. As for the SL2-S, I developed a camera profile based on what Kodak 5222 typically would deliver when printed for the screen. That profile gives me the consistent contrast I want. from there, I may lift shadows a bit or recover highlights. 

The first step is to invert the negative, flip it and put it into the right frame. Then I choose my 5222 profile, set the black and white point in Levels, lift the shadows and bring down the highlights if needed. With a delicate sharpening of the grain (I dive deep into the image to do that properly) I finish the editing.

 

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[hansvons]

9 minutes ago, evikne said:

I have made some useful presets myself, but I'm not capable of creating my own camera profiles.

I use 3DLUTCreator for that. It's outstanding software with quirks and a steep learning curve. But before I lose months of my life with editing, I gladly sacrifice a couple of days to streamline my workflow. Creating your personal camera profile is something only some people like. In the end, it means sticking to it. Otherwise, you are better off using presets and the traditional way of doing things. But for me, as I have a principal idea for my photography, I don't want choices but boundaries. That's how I function