Matt & Carla: Willy Street, Madison

Did an engagement photo shoot this past Saturday for a friend of mine on Willy Street near the Mother Fool's coffee shop. Matt and Carla wanted something a bit more "urban" and the brick walls on either side of the shop provided a colorful backdrop. I was using an on-camera flash with a light diffuser, with 2 off-camera flashes powered by PocketWizard FlexTT5's. Matt and Carla were standing in the shade in this picture, but is was a relatively sunny day. I thought that I would comment a bit on my post-processing work flow to show how I get results from the images I capture.

Canon EF 50mm f1.2 Lens shot at f/8.0 a 1/50th of a second, ISO 100.

Original Image:

This was taken almost immediately after starting the shoot. I don't like how centered they are, so the first thing I did was add additional rotation to accentuate the fact that she's on her toes, and crop the image down so they fall on the right 3rd of the image. I use Adobe Lightroom to modify the white balance and tone of the image, and then export to seperate folder.


Import into Photoshop and Run Actions!

Next, I open the image in Photoshop CS4. One of my favorite actions, is Totally Rad's Technicolor Dream World. Sometimes I will run this action in batch mode and modify the entire folder of images automagically. There are a few other actions that I use on a frequent basis, but for this image, I was pretty happy.

Final:

I re-imported the image back into Lightroom, and perform a few small tweaks. I add a little extra vignette, check the clarity, and reduced the saturation of Red in this image. Since we were outside on a pretty cold day, they both had more red in their ears and faces. I think that removing this and changing it to more of an orange tint makes the skin tones look more natural. I use the clone stamp tool, or whatever it's called in lightroom, to fix some blemishes, and I'm done! Honestly, with all the power of Lightroom and Photoshop, I could spend countless hours tweaking just one of these images, and get many different results.