Fresh off of a trip to Comicon I started pouring through the 300+ photos I took on the trip, and I was immediately frustrated with how flat my pictures felt. These were shots of heroes and mutants, Star Wars & X-Men, and they were just plain boring to look at. I've been following the Flickr account of a guy by the name of Stu Maschwitz, and I'm head over heels for the color, drama, and storytelling in his stuff, and I've been wondering how he manages to consistently get there.
Besides a boatload of skill, he's also an experienced VFX artist/director, as well as the father of the DV Rebel movement. Or at least he wrote the book on it. Well, I found a post of his that raved on and on about Adobe Lightroom and it's photo manipulation tools. Well, when the guy who developed Colorista and Magic Bullet Looks raves, I tend to follow his lead.
And he was dead on. Lightroom really is amazing, allowing you to twist and bend RAW photos to your will without destroying them in the least.
While I'm most certainly too heavy-handed right now in my vignetting, cropping, and color correction, it's gotten me stoked about picture-taking again. Check out my Flickr account if you want to see more. I'd appreciate any comments you've got.
9.07.2009
Photo Monkey
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2 comments:
I've noticed a similar thing with Adobe's Camera Raw plugin, though I haven't used Lightroom, so I can't accurately compare the two.
I love playing with photos in Camera Raw.
but, isn't hellboy RED?
long ago I worked on a printing a photo. I was attempting to pull up contrast or make something snap. whatever it was I worked on the print in the dark room for an hour. I think I did 10 attempts at least. at some point I was pretty happy with it and showed my teacher. he pointed at an area, "that's supposed to be white." he was right. I spent another hour fixing that problem.
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