This installment of my Before and After series will deal with one of my indoor Cutting Horse photos and what processing is required to bring the best out of my images.
Starting with the RAW image, we can see that the capture was good but the image its self suffers from a little under exposure and colour shifting. Considering the shot was taken using hotshoe flashes at a distance of +/- 50' in an enclosed barn, its a very good start. But we can improve it.
First thing we do is clean up the White Balance and any colour casting. In general, this image didn't have any localized colour casts from the building lights, so a global White Balance change was made to clean up the image. I typically use the subject skin tones as an indicator how well the white balance adjusments are effecting the image.
Next we bring up the Exposure slighly, add some Fill Light as well as fine tune the Black Points. The most important issue is to try keep the image as realistic as poossible.
Additional adjustments to the Clarity, Vibrance and Saturation are made to enhance the image and give it life. All adjustments are done in Lightroom, a photo managment software by Adobe. Here is a screen shot of the basic adjustments done on the image to deal with White Balance and Exposure adjustments.
We then make some final adjustments to the Hue, Saturation and Luminance settings to enhance elements in the image. Here we see a slight yellow casting has been removed which then brings up the warmth in the ground colour as well as improves and adds pop to the blues in the clothing.
Another Lightroom screen shot showing the the settings used in the Hue adjustment for the colour cast.
A final crop for compositional purposes, in this case maintining the 2:3 ration of the orginal file size and we have our finished photo.
Final Image: