I want to start doing before & after posts every few weeks or so… I personally find them interesting, and I know other photographers do too. I think that it’s also good for my clients to see some of the work that happens AFTER the shoot.

I had a before & after post up earlier this week, but I took it down… so this is a retake. This particular photo is from one of the first portrait sessions I did. Sonja is a friend of mine, and we had so much fun with this shoot. It was around sunset, and the light was beautiful in color, but it was being filtered through trees (we were in a forest preserve), so I had to work to avoid “hot spots” where the light was coming through full-force, but also not underexpose too much for the areas of the photos that were in shade.

This is the original, or RAW image:

I always shoot in RAW, meaning that the camera does not alter the photo at all. Cameras, when shooting in JPG, tend to change the image slightly to make it more pleasing – it will sharpen the image, add saturation, add contrast, etc. Since every photo is different, I prefer to make my own decisions when it comes to photo tweaking (for this reason, I also always shoot in manual…call me a control freak), so by shooting in RAW, the camera doesn’t change anything… I change everything I want to in Lightroom and/or Photoshop.

I purposely underexposed this photo slightly as to avoid as many blown highlights as a I could and to also keep detail in the background. I knew that I could underexpose part of the picture, but later bring it back up in Photoshop.

This is the edited photo:

For this edit, I started in Lightroom and changed exposure, contrast, and white balance so that I had a good starting point. I also used the recovery slider to get back some of my highlights, and use the fill light slider to bring up some of the darker areas that I originally had to underexpose.

I then opened it in Photoshop, where I used a few actions to give it more of a “sunset glow” and to even out the skin tones a bit. Specifically, I used Redleaf’s Groovy & Foxy actions (at full opacity), and then their new Lightleak action, but I tweaked it so all the adjustments in the action, aside from the action coloring of the leak, were turned off. I finished off with one of my actions at 50% opacity, which is a vignetting action, but it creates a yellow/red toned vignette, instead of a black vignette.