I posted about an hour ago this picture Carrot.

I haven't done a talk about a picture in a long time but here is a quick one here.

At FCN 2012 I did a lot of photo screw ups. Some of it was caused from destroying my 17-50mm f/2..8 lens. I lost the lens I expected so I decided to take another one out. I took out my all purpose 28-300mm Tamron. This is a great walking lens. This was not the lens to pull out - I had much better choices with me.

So not only was that not the greatest choice I also had some other bad choices. I bounced the flash a lot. Even though I have a powerful flash the ceiling would absorb enough and the bounce back was too much. So I should have not done that but use a bounce card or a soft light box over the flash.


The camera was locked at iso 800 with a 1/60 so the camera dropped the lens DOF as low as possible. Not only that but iso response is different on the range. I really like this lens for it range but once it hits 800+ it starts to add some artifacts I don't care for which are exaggerated if you don't hit your exposure right.

The picture on the left of course is craptastic taken picture. Again screwed up.

But I like the pose I liked it enough plus the carrot makes me smile.

Since I still like the picture I know I had some play with the picture. I took it in raw so I will be able to do something. so I fired up lightroom and did the first thing I do in my work flow - I went through my presets of camera settings. In lightroom I made a whole series of camera setting presets so I can have a starting point. Most of them have auto color and exposure setting but flipping through camera modes and a few other tricks to give me a new starting point.

I previewed my presets until I found something "useful" and was satisfied it was a good starting point.

I then pushed the exposure up to 1.7. To get my camera to take that picture in real life in that exposure you would have to drop it down to 1/20 of a second or pushed the iso up to iso 2,500. Which in this setting and that lens would be a possible disaster. Even though I take in raw - raw gives you a 2-3 extra exposure range - it still will add some corruption/noise to the picture when you push around exposure. So I did some extra work to get rid of random pixel corruption and I was ready for the next steps.

So next I redid the white balance and decided to play with the colors until something I like. I did some extra saturation, but more importantly I pushed up the shadows to pull more detail out of the fur. I then cropped it. The crop I choose was to eliminate some white space but I still want to give that background so people knew it was from FCN without a question. It still wasn't done yet - so now this is where the fun really begins.

WHile I could of done this with brushes and a few other tricks in lightroom it would of took longer and may not got 100% the effect i wanted. So I rendered and moved it into photoshop. From there I decided I need to make the background go away to be less distracting - the background as it stands now has some random artifacts and just bad colors. Not that good. So I decided to simplify the picture to some great effect. I actually like that so I posted a variation of that with the bunny also simplified here.

I then worked on a layer mask to separate the bunny and the background. Once I had that I played around with the contrast and put a few extra highlights and I then put some details by doing some sharpening techniques. I mixed a few elements from the original I pulled from lightroom.

And then I did some final touch ups because i moved up the exposure pretty hard, and did some extra things in photoshop I gathered some new noise. So I cleaned that up and eliminated some of the reflections. and then I posted it tada done.

That pretty much took me 20 minutes to do in between bites of pizza. I'm not 100% happy with the picture. It's a little TOO sharp for me. But I wanted the contrast in it. I could help it out and correct it but I don't want to spend more than 20 minutes on the picture.

Mind you It would of been a better picture if I just took it right with enough light the first time :)

Anyways hope that gives you some ideas what I did and yes I don't take perfect pictures but I try to recover the ones I like and I hope it was a good recovery for you :)