Hello! Below is a gallery containing the first of three sets of photos from the Atlanta Botanical Garden that I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO.
Other photos from the Garden are here: Atlanta Botanical Garden category. The work I’ve been doing to reprocess millions and billions of photos (possible exaggeration!) from my photography archives is documented here: Flickr Reboot.
Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!
There are two galleries below: the first includes a set of images from a woodland swamp in northern New York, and the second contains the before and after versions of the same images, showing the differences between the original and final versions processed with Lightroom and the Nik Collection.
For the first two images, I tried to emphasize the detail of the beaver cuts on the tree trunks, while still conveying the aged, worn smoothness of those cuts. My approach to the third image was to highlight the pair of trunks topped with moss by adding green saturation and increasing focus and lighting on the trunks to separate them from the background.
With the wider angle images of the swamp, I started by treating them as low-key photographs by significantly darkening the backgrounds. As you can probably imagine from looking at the before images in the second gallery, the gray in the backgrounds — once darkened — would give the scene a heavily shaded, foreboding appearance. Not a bad look overall, and I may still do a set like that. But then I thought it might be interesting to try something else: convert the images from scary-swamp to happy-swamp by intensifying the colors and creating high contrast between the water (and the thick, green algae on the water’s surface) and the twisted deadfall throughout the scenes. The result, I think, suggests a greater sense of standing at the edge of the swamp, with the eye tracking from the greens in each foreground to the depths of the swamp and the trees in the backgrounds. The intensified saturation and contrast also brings out many more colors present in the images that weren’t evident in the original photographs.
I included the last four images from the same area just because I liked them. What photographer can resist a colorful clump of fungus (with a big bug in the middle!), some bright red leaves, and an old Ford truck partly buried in the woods?
Select the first image below to begin a slideshow, then skip to the second gallery if you would like to compare the before and after images.
The gallery below contains the fourth (and final!) set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.
The previous sets of orchid photos for this project are here:
Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4)
Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4)
Orchids Collection (Set 3 of 4)
So what’s next?
I figured out a slightly awkward way to extract file names from Flickr albums, put them in a document to create a text list, then copy and paste the list into Lightroom to filter my photo library. By doing that, I found all 1200 original images and have them organized in Lightroom Collections which I’m consolidating by subject, culling to remove images that I don’t want to rework, and adding some newer photos I took but never processed or posted anywhere. To keep the project interesting, I think I’ll take on subjects of a different kind: photos of Oakland Cemetery (because of the art and architecture of the site, the research I’ve done on its history, and the stories I can tell) or Zoo Atlanta (because … animals!), so I’m going to jazz up a couple dozen examples from these two subjects then decide which one to dive into. Stay Tuned!
Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!
The gallery below contains the third set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.
The first set of orchid photos for this project is here: Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4). The second set is here: Orchids Collection (Set 2 of 4).
Many of the photos in this set (and the fourth and final set I’ll post tomorrow) were taken in lower lighting than those in the previous two sets. I was able to compensate for the darker conditions (and additional grain in the photos) by softening and darkening the background with contrast filters in the Nik Collection Color Efex Pro tool, then increasing center brightness to emphasize the flowers as focal points. As a last step, I used Sharpener Pro — selecting specific sections of each flower using control points available in all the Nik tools — to accentuate detail.
Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!
The gallery below contains the second set of orchid photos I’ve completed for my Flickr Reboot project — using Lightroom and the Nik Collection by DxO to develop and enhance originals taken at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
I’ve been documenting the project and my workflow using this category: Flickr Reboot.
The previous set of orchid photos for this project is here: Orchids Collection (Set 1 of 4).
Select the first image to begin a slideshow …. thanks!
