Reply To: Something to past the time (most recent shoot)

[cameraclicker]

I thought the 7D had a pop-up flash?  You can probably pop it up, set it to 1/4 or 1/2 power and fill shadows?  Or, you can get some 20 X 30 foam board white on both sides to use as cheap reflectors.  I went through the scratch & dent bin at the local craft store and picked up a bunch for $2.50 each.  If you can find black with a mat finish, those are useful too.

Lightroom is a photo organizer that has a raw converter attached and can do some basic editing tricks and printing.  If it is all you need, that’s great.  I didn’t get along with the demo of LR3 and don’t want it to organize my photos so I don’t use it.

You have colour casts.  And, you have some very deep shadows.

It would be so convenient if we could just drop photos into this stream, in the mean time, check out:

Before       and      after

For those of you following along later, “Before” and “after” will probably only be available for a little while, after which they will get cleaned off my server to recover the space.

If you like “after”, it was opened in Adobe Camera Raw and the eye dropper was used to get white balance using her teeth.  Then the white balanced version was layered over the original, in Photoshop CS5, and a mask was used to keep the original background and the white balanced girl.  On the new layer, some blemishes were cleaned up with the band-aid tool.  Then some sharpening was applied but the blur tool was used to take some luminance off the background.  It was converted back to 8 bits and saved.

If I were starting with the raw file, I would check the lens correction check boxes, perhaps add some noise smoothing, adjust white balance, look at highlights and shadows and perhaps adjust Exposure, Recovery and Fill Light, and straighten the image if needed.  Then pop it into Photoshop to clean up any blemishes, crop, resize, sharpen.  Except for the blemishes part, it only takes a few minutes.  Skin can take a bit longer depending on what needs to be done.

You can shoot a grey card or use an Expo-disc to set custom white balance, then that white balance will come into DPP or ACR with the file and your white balance will already be correct.  Or, the lazy way I usually use, shoot in auto white balance and pick a neutral object to set white balance with the eye dropper tool.  If you are shooting in changing light or only taking a shot or two, this method works well.  If you are shooting a lot of images in the same light, setting white balance in the camera will give a faster result with uniform white balance, which you might prefer if you are going to print 50 shots for a wedding album.