Before & After - Show us your edits

[lofercan]

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I wanted to strengthen the vanishing point!

[evikne]

33 minutes ago, lofercan said:

I wanted to strengthen the vanishing point!

The composition is much better this way. Kudos to you for not going for the simplest solution.

[lofercan]

Hace 1 hora, evikne dijo:

La composición es mucho mejor de esta manera. Felicitaciones por no ir por la solución más simple.

Thank!

 

[evikne]

A very quick and simple edit. I just let LR automatically find the subject, and inverted the mask. For the mask I sat Saturation, Sharpness and Clarity to minimum, and Contrast to Max. Then I cropped the image and assigned the RNI profile Kodak Portra 160 v3 faded.

Before:

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After:

Edited June 19, 2023 by evikne

[evikne]

In the highlights, the M10 doesn't have many reserves to draw on, but in the shadows there are plenty. I exposed for the highlights, which resulted in a very dark foreground.

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With the M10 color profile in LR, I can raise the exposure/midtones a lot without burning out the highlights and dig out myriad details in the shadows. I increased the exposure +3 EV and auto-selected the sky (I manually brushed in the sea too). On the sky/sea mask, I sat exposure to -0,50, highlights to -100 and saturation to +50. That was all, and I think the result was much more natural than any auto tone settings or HDR, from just one image. It's very similar to what I perceived with my eyes.

Edited July 25, 2023 by evikne

[evikne]

The same method works at least as well on portraits, with a very natural result.

Before:

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And after – heavy raising of exposure, plus bring back sky:

(M10 with 35mm Summilux pre-ASPH v2)

Edited July 26, 2023 by evikne

[evikne]

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Here I use the same technique as above. This portrait captures a slightly strange expression, but I like the technical result. I exposed for the highlights, which made the image very dark. Then I lightened the entire image (+1.5 EV) so that the foreground looked normal. I sat the automatic black-point, but not white-point and added some contrast and vibrance, and I assigned the white balance from an ExpoDisc reference shot (big difference!). Then I added a mask for the sky where I lowered the exposure a little, and sat Whites to -1, so that the sky no longer had any burnt-out pixels.

I don't like using Shadows and Highlights sliders in LR so much as this often gives a strange and artificial HDR look. Here I only use the Exposure slider, which I think gives a much more natural result.

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[Olaf_ZG]

@evikneWhy would you underexpose in camera and then correct exposure in post? Wouldn’t that be similar to exposing correctly in camera?

I do understand underexposing and correcting the blacks only with curve or blacks/shadows.

What I dislike about underexposing in camera, is when culling, I cant judge the faces good enough, so it takes more time to cull.
 

please note that my question is not a critique, I am just curious regarding workflow.

[evikne]

51 minutes ago, Olaf_ZG said:

@evikneWhy would you underexpose in camera and then correct exposure in post? Wouldn’t that be similar to exposing correctly in camera?

I do understand underexposing and correcting the blacks only with curve or blacks/shadows.

What I dislike about underexposing in camera, is when culling, I cant judge the faces good enough, so it takes more time to cull.
 

please note that my question is not a critique, I am just curious regarding workflow.

Thanks. I wouldn't call it underexposing, just exposing to save all the highlights. I probably forgot to say that this technique is for my M10, where almost nothing can be retrieved from the highlights in post. With another camera you could perhaps expose for the midtones and then retrieve from both ends of the histogram, but with the M10 everything must come from the bottom, and there is plenty to dig up. 

In this case, I probably could have exposed a little brighter to begin with, but I wanted to be on the safe side.

[hansvons]

1 hour ago, Olaf_ZG said:

What I dislike about underexposing in camera, is when culling, I cant judge the faces good enough, so it takes more time to cull.

I totally see that. Another way to do what @evikne does is to raise ISO considerably above what one considers base ISO. That way, the editor app shows you the regular image, but you have added 2-3 stops headroom in your highlights. The trick is not to go beyond the invariant part of th sensor’s ISO range. With the SL2-S that's ISO 6400, if I recall correctly. The M10 sensor’s invariance ceiling should be lower, eg ISO 1600/3200.

With the M10, I’d set ISO to 800-1600 and have the camera do its exposure thing. In the editor the image should look bright, perhaps even overexposed, but the highlights should be fine when bringing down the exposure slider. The result should be the same as if I were exposing 2-3 lower but have the ISO set to 200. 

[evikne]

35 minutes ago, hansvons said:

I totally see that. Another way to do what @evikne does is to raise ISO considerably above what one considers base ISO. That way, the editor app shows you the regular image, but you have added 2-3 stops headroom in your highlights. The trick is not to go beyond the invariant part of th sensor’s ISO range. With the SL2-S that's ISO 6400, if I recall correctly. The M10 sensor’s invariance ceiling should be lower, eg ISO 1600/3200.

With the M10, I’d set ISO to 800-1600 and have the camera do its exposure thing. In the editor the image should look bright, perhaps even overexposed, but the highlights should be fine when bringing down the exposure slider. The result should be the same as if I were exposing 2-3 lower but have the ISO set to 200. 

Interesting. Maybe I should try this one day. Even though I feel very comfortable with the way I do it now.

[hansvons]

4 minutes ago, evikne said:

Even though I feel very comfortable with the way I do it now.

I find your results absolutely convincing. Why change a winning horse?

---

When shooting digitally, I mix both approaches. I have my SL2-S set to ISO 800 and the light meter to highlight protection. When looking at the histogram in the EVF, I can often adjust the exposure to the brighter side with the safety net of enough headroom in the highlights. That way, the images look slightly underexposed in the culling process, but the appearance is bright enough to give a good enough idea of the content. Also, the editing process is more straightforward because the image is correct in its brightness distribution from the beginning. 

That said, the M10 is not the SL2-S. I read (and saw) that it tends to overexpose.

 

[Olaf_ZG]

A before and after from a recent portrait. The before is basically unedited and also unposed. The edited version has been modified with a lut, and some burning/dodging as well as cleaning up.

 Before:

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[Olaf_ZG]

After. Sl2, sl lux, windowlight plus reflector.

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[evikne]

29 minutes ago, Olaf_ZG said:

After. Sl2, sl lux, windowlight plus reflector.

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Wow, did you edit his pose too? 😄 Just kidding, great editing job.

[SrMi]

On 7/25/2023 at 3:19 PM, evikne said:

In the highlights, the M10 doesn't have many reserves to draw on, but in the shadows there are plenty. I exposed for the highlights, which resulted in a very dark foreground.

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With the M10 color profile in LR, I can raise the exposure/midtones a lot without burning out the highlights and dig out myriad details in the shadows. I increased the exposure +3 EV and auto-selected the sky (I manually brushed in the sea too). On the sky/sea mask, I sat exposure to -0,50, highlights to -100 and saturation to +50. That was all, and I think the result was much more natural than any auto tone settings or HDR, from just one image. It's very similar to what I perceived with my eyes.

The clipped highlights do not look good. I would use Content-Aware fill to replace the clipped area with clouds.

[evikne]

7 minutes ago, SrMi said:

The clipped highlights do not look good. I would use Content-Aware fill to replace the clipped area with clouds.

Thanks, that was a good idea. The clipped highlights have annoyed me a bit. The sun was right behind the clouds.

Edited September 1, 2024 by evikne

[Lee S]

On 7/25/2023 at 11:19 PM, evikne said:

In the highlights, the M10 doesn't have many reserves to draw on, but in the shadows there are plenty. I exposed for the highlights, which resulted in a very dark foreground.

 

 

 

With the M10 color profile in LR, I can raise the exposure/midtones a lot without burning out the highlights and dig out myriad details in the shadows. I increased the exposure +3 EV and auto-selected the sky (I manually brushed in the sea too). On the sky/sea mask, I sat exposure to -0,50, highlights to -100 and saturation to +50. That was all, and I think the result was much more natural than any auto tone settings or HDR, from just one image. It's very similar to what I perceived with my eyes.

 

Wonderful edits and thanks for sharing evikne, I find them interesting. Good to see what the M10 is capable in the shadows. 

[LocalHero1953]

An extreme emergency edit from the Q2,
I was in Edinburgh for the festival, but this group I knew found I was in the city and asked me to take some photos of their rehearsal. I would not normally use the Q2, and certainly not a 28mm lens. They had appalling lighting that only illuminated their feet, and the lighting tech were fiddling with the colour balance.
Edited mainly with (a) Lightroom Denoise AI (b) a linear gradient mask intersected with a 'subject mask' (c) specific lightening and shadow lifting with face masks.

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[evikne]

23 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

An extreme emergency edit from the Q2,
I was in Edinburgh for the festival, but this group I knew found I was in the city and asked me to take some photos of their rehearsal. I would not normally use the Q2, and certainly not a 28mm lens. They had appalling lighting that only illuminated their feet, and the lighting tech were fiddling with the colour balance.
Edited mainly with (a) Lightroom Denoise AI (b) a linear gradient mask intersected with a 'subject mask' (c) specific lightening and shadow lifting with face masks.

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An amazing result! Thanks for sharing!