Photo Thoughts: Jump for Joy

Jump!
Copyright © Ron Martinsen – All Rights Reserved

To see my camera settings for this shot, visit my Photography Notebook page for this image.

Step-by-Step

1. I cropped the shot in Lightroom and then exported it to Photoshop CS5 on my MacBook Pro. I then used Portraiture to fix up the legs and then the healing brush on both the legs and the grass to remove debris from a wind storm. All this was done on the 2nd layer so I could undo later if I wanted to. After this I brought the file back to my PC where I’m comfortable and edited the rest in CS4.
2. Next up I used Color Efex by Nik Software and its Sunshine filter to give it a little more sunny day oomph. The results were still a bit too strong so I used the Screen blending mode on the layer and set the opacity to 42% to cut down the effect.
3. I was pretty happy with the shot except for the dull background so I used Viveza 2 to add blue to the sky. I chose Viveza so I could use a U-Point control to quickly add the blue without impacting the whole shot like the Photo Filter would do. Despite this there was a little bit of color contamination of the white areas of the shot (i.e. shoes, shorts, etc…) so rather than using a bunch of U-Point controls I just quickly did a sloppy mask in Photoshop on that layer.
4. The tree was pretty black on the inner parts and the trunk was too dark so I just did a Shadows and Highlights adjustment on JUST the shadows using the advanced settings of 10, 25 and 36.
5. In a rare instances for me, I accepted the default settings of the Tonal Contrast filter in Color Efex as I thought it looked perfect for this shot. I did set the saturation to 0 as I thought this already had enough color and didn’t need more.
6. Lastly I did Scott Kelby’s Lab Color trick from the 7 Point System. At that point I was happy and thanks to the Tonal Contrast I didn’t need any more sharpening – imaging done.

Despite this shot being done at ISO 1000 I felt that the noise added more than it hurt so I didn’t bother using Noiseware on this one.

Total time spent editing: About 25 minutes.

Alternate Version

One thing I go back and forth on for this shot is the vignette I added in Lightroom. You can hover above to see the shot with and without. Despite what it does to the sky, I tend to prefer the one with the vignette to keep the viewers eye from drifting out of the frame. I suppose I could process it differently in the sky, but it just wasn’t worth it to me for this shot.