In which I have excessive Lightroom fun with a simple photo of some leaves.
This photo harvested on a visit to the VanDusen Botanical Garden, one of Vancouver’s nicer things.
The way it came out of the camera. Under a bright
cloudy sky,
the white balance (as expected from Fuji X-cams) is exact;
they
looked just like this.
I thought the fun of the picture was mostly in the geometry, so why not try it in B&W?
This is Lightroom’s built-in “B&W Contast High” preset, the contrast softened a little with the Tone sliders, and a bit of grain for texture.
But at heart I’m a color kind of guy. I was thinking of how I might improve the color, and to get ideas I looked at some of the Fujifilm vintage-film-look presets. OMG VELVIA!
No judgment on this one, just that Velvia selection.
Every other time I’ve tried to use it the results felt garish.
I wasn’t entirely persuaded by the monochrome version, but figured maybe there’d be a nice stopping-place halfway down that road.
Tried to find a halfway point on the color intensity, both with saturation sliders and by adjusting the balance, and (something I rarely do any more) bumped the Clarity slider a bit.
But in fact I’ve noticed that with vegetation shots, negative clarity is often a winner. So let’s go all impressionistic here.
The trick is negative clarity along with considerable contrast crankage and a little color softening. True to reality? Not in the slightest!
Photography is a nice hobby. Photo processing is a related but distinct pursuit; and its own reward.
