From Clicking to Creating-Week 9 of 2018

Week 9 already for the year. February is about over, and then on to Spring. I hope you guys are enjoying this series, and finding it useful.

This week for the Dogwood 52 the prompt is Forsaken, in the creative category. When we went to the Cloud Museum, I kept my eyes out for something that would be good for this week. There were a lot of things that appeared forsaken there, but I really like this stack of old steamer trunks. They look like someone forgot to take them on their trip, and they have sat forgotten for years in the desert.

I processed this photo with a preset that I have in lightroom. I have a bunch of presets, probably more than I need, but they can be fun to play around with when it comes to photos like this.

This is the original image.

There are some presets that come preloaded with lightroom, and when you are in the develop mode, they are listed on the left side. I have collected a bunch of presets over the years. Some free, and some I’ve paid for. If you find presets you like they are easy to import into lightroom. Sometimes when you download a preset from the web, it will be in a zip file. Unzip the file and take note of where the file is so you can find it. In lightroom right click were it says User Presets. I tiny box will pop up with an option to import. 

Click import and find the folder with the presets. Open that and select whatever presets you are importing. You can do more than one at a time if you want. They will be organized alphabetically under User Presets. This image has no presets applied.

This is a cool fuzzy black and white preset I like called Lonely Holiday.

The little preview box in the upper left will show you the preset changes when you hover over each one. If you do click the preset, and don’t like what it did, simply hit CTRL/Z (I think on mac that is command/z) and that will undo what you did. That works with everything in lightroom too by the way.

Another example of what a preset can do in one click.

If you want to rename the preset, right click the name, and a menu option box will pop up. I’ve done this on a few, to have them make more sense to me. You can also edit further if you want with the sliders on the right. You don’t lose that ability with a preset.

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The 2 Lil Owls this week is Bokeh. I really like the softness and color I got with this shot. Bokeh is achieved with a shallow depth of field or large aperture, and some diffused light or small amount of light in the background. Sometimes bokeh, and shallow depth of field get confused for each other. Regular shallow depth of field, is simply just that, a blurry background that is achieved with a large aperture..(small f stop number) with no light to create the little round bokeh lights in the background.

This shot is just shallow depth of field.

Both effects are wonderful, it just depends on what exactly you’re after in the photo.

What have you guys created this week?