Exercise 23: Selective processing and prominence

In selecting an image already taken I have revisited Exercise 19: A single figure small. The post processing described here has been done in Lightroom against raw files with the resultant 'developed' images exported as jpegs.

Here is the image as it was originally posted and with post processing to make the small boy in the bottom left corner stand out by increasing the brightness:

From OCA People and Place Photos

Here is the same image without any brightness adjustment:

From OCA People and Place Photos

And finally with a negative brightness adjustment to reduce the emphasis:

From OCA People and Place Photos

In each case the difference from one image to the next is not huge but is enough to give a perceptible difference.

Such edits can be done in a variety of ways and with various packages, perhaps the most obvious choice being Photoshop. In my case I base my initial post processing on Lightroom, only editing in Photoshop if I need the extra capabilities (e.g. I find layers very useful when composing album and book pages). I have used Lightroom version 3 but similar local adjustments are available in version 2. The first step is based around painting a mask over the area to be adjusted, here the mask is shown in red overlay:

And then the desired adjustment is applied, in these cases varying brightness, this shows the slider set for the increase as per the first image in the set:

This was the final exercise in the course, with two assignments now remaining.