Post Processing - Telling a Story
When writing a story, or even a term paper for school, I was asked, “But what is it you are really trying to say?” Your library of photos that you took contain in them potential stories to tell. So for me, I use Lightroom, not Lightroom classic, so all of my images are in the cloud. In order to find an image I keep my library orderly: all of the images are in albums and the images I know I will never use are deleted! How do I know how to keep an image? I TRUST my feelings about it. For example this image of corn. I really wanted to delete it. That is what the rational part of my brain said. After all it’s only corn on a table how boring! Now this corn was on a table in Villa deLeyva, Columbia! And the corn kernels didn’t look like something I would see in Iowa!
Before picture that my gut wouldn’t let me delete.
So what was the story here? This wasn’t a commercial farm operation? Things are done more with human labor than machines? Possibly the corn was organic, not grown with pesticides? In a visual story, you don’t know the answers. The visual story is meant to provoke and think. So the story was these kernels and how the ears of corn looked on the table. Nothing else. Simple. The more you can simplify an image, the more likely it will attract attention and people will be forced to look.
I took this shot using my small Sony RX-100 Mark 5. Didn’t pay much attention to the focal length. Just wanted to fill my field of view with the cobs. I had my camera set so I knew I would get a focused shot (correct autofocus settings etc).
Then when I stepped into Lightroom and found this picture and decided on my story, I skipped all other slide bars and settings and went straight to the Point Curve Tool. I did exactly what all my training said not to do! The reason I did this was to push all of the dark tones, as many as I could, to black, and then to come out of it gradually to the lighter tones of the corn! In this way I gave a lot of visual weight on the corn kernels and the cob. Lightroom Training by Tony and Chelsea Northrup have a great explanation on this tool, but they also try to warn you about using it. I think it is a wonderful tool, and I absolutely encourage you to use it.
By taking a good sharp picture, and then later during image selection, understanding my story, I made only three types of adjustments in Lightroom:
Point Curve Tool. I pushed more than half of the image to black!
Specific color luminosity settings. I changed orange, yellow, and green only.
Image softening adjustments using clarify (down) and texture (up).
There was no noise reduction or sharpening adjustments!
This final edited image required only 3 adjustments! No sharpening!!
