Wednesday, August 31, 2011

The processing conundrum

As I was uploading proofs from a recent wedding shoot, I began to think about the difficulty of conveying different possibilities for each photo. Even if you create a sort of "look" gallery (which I should probably do), you still have think about tailoring the looks to the photos. Here is a brief example:

I liked this sweet moment that I took at an overexposed setting (which I like to do on closer shots sometimes because it tends to make very flattering skin tones), but darkened up for a more traditional look that you see above. As shot, the photo was a lot closer to that hazy sunny look I talked about in a recent tutorial. So, I exaggerated the effect and added a layer of yellow with an overlay blending mode to get this look:
Personally, my tastes are heading toward a very classic black and white:
Nothing is as timeless as black and white. And to further complicated things, you'll notice that my black and white example above was actually taken a second later, when the groom's arm was no longer bent. So far, you have three very different looks. Then you have to consider the effects of cropping:
An 8x10 crop takes away the white space at the top, like it or not.
A square crop changes it even more.
Or what if you wanted to change the crop, convert to monochrome, and do a romantic pink split toning effect:
Or you can crop it even tighter:
I've always been a fan of close crops, so I like this one as well.

The moral of this story is that making processing decisions can be as hard as taking the photo, and communicating the possibilities can be problematic. Which would you choose? If you were the client given nearly 500 proofs, how well would you do envisioning the possibilities?

2 comments:

Franz said...

the last version but a clasik black and white, like the first.

marc said...

good call. i agree.