Photography Workshops

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#29 Filters and Post: Great Photos are Made Not Taken

Rubin
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The original iPhone image, sitting in the park…

The B&W instagram filters offer reasonably subtle adjustments.

For more nuanced control and potentially dramatic adjustments there are more advanced tools; here i’m using Adobe Lightroom. (Lightroom MOBILE is free for Adobe subscribers) :

https://helpx.adobe.com/lightroom-cc/how-to/lightroom-mobile.html

A crude example to make the point; using Adobe Lightroom, I made the blues look dark, and the greens look light…

or conversely, here the blues are light and the greens are dark. These kinds of shifts allow me to make decisions about whether i want the church or people or some other elements to pop out or blend in.

The issue with filters is they are a general solution, and the BEST solution, if you care enough, is to be specific that in THIS photo you want THAT color to be light, and this other color to be dark (if you’re in b&w; there are equivalent controls in color) and it generally depends on the photo.

THIS EPISODE’S ASSIGNMENT

Filters. Either take a new picture or use one you have… see what different filters do to the image as you play with it. Clearly different images demand different filters, although it’s also nice to find a “look” you like, that perhaps fits you, and let it color many of your photos.

We are not, fwiw, pushing black and white - and we hope you’ll experiment with all sorts of color effects. Post what you made (and if you’d like, send us the original and let us play with it too!)

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