From Clicking to Creating

This weeks From Clicking to Creating, will be a two for one. I was too busy last week while in Teton NP to even think about getting a post together. So, you get double the goodness today.  :-)

Last weeks Dogwood 52 week challenge was From Below in the composition category. The idea was to get at least 2 feet from the ground, and shoot up, or out. Torrey was my fabulous model for this one. I will say, it was much easier to shoot like this with the articulating screen on my D500. I’m getting too old to bend weird. Lol. Such a fun angle though.

The 2 Lil Owls last week was Shadow. I shot this the first morning we were in Teton NP. Walking on the river in the early morning is my all time favorite.

This week in the Dogwood 52 is to do a product shoot, like if you were putting something in a catalog. I have to say, the creative shots I have seen in the group this week are amazing.

This was my original idea. It’s a wood bowl that Al made, that I had to photograph anyway.

Then we went to car show on Saturday, and I took this photo of a hood ornament on a Pontiac. I love this image, and felt it would be better for this particular week.

The 2 Lil Owls this week is Scattered. How about scattered rain showers over the Tetons.

For the Lightroom tips this week, I want to cover the sharpening, and noise reduction tools. The combo of these two can make such a difference with an image. They can be used together, or individually depending on your image.

(click to enlarge)

This is a perfect example photo for both these tools. I generally shoot with a fairly wide open aperture because I like the shallow depth of field. Depending on the light, sometimes the background can be “noisy” and I want to reduce that, and maybe also sharpen my subject. This Mountain Bluebird needed a little more sharpening in my opinion. I am what they call a pixel peeper, but I have to be if I’m going to print my photos. Especially larger prints.

The process for sharpening the bird, and not degrading the background into a huge noisy mess is quite simple. There is a “masking” slider in the sharpening tool. If you hold down the ALT/OPT key and start sliding this masking slider you can see what areas are going to be sharpened. I can’t take a screen shot, and show this at the same time, so trust me on this one. Your image will appear black and white, and were the white is, is what will be sharpened. If I tried to sharpen the whole image, my nice fluffy background would get really noisy. So I make sure my mask is just the bird.

Experiment with the other sliders too. The radius and detail sliders make a difference in the sharpening. Lightroom by default will apply sharpening of 40% upon import.

Once I have my bird sharp, I still want to apply just a little noise reduction so the background is smooth. Again, I notice the noise because I am zooming my image in to check it for print quality. If I was only going to share it online, I might not worry about it. If you press the ALT/OPT key while moving the noise reduction slider, you can get a better view of what is happening.

The final result is pretty good.

These two tools can help if your image is a little soft, or noisy. They can’t work miracles and fix an image that is out of focus, or just plain blurry.

Ok, what has everyone been creating these past 2 weeks?