I often have people ask me how I achieved a certain shot.  Now I will be honest – some shots take a lot more work in the editing than others!   But I thought I would do a little before and after of an easier one to show you what I did for a shot.  I’ll try and do this a little more often.  It’s fun!  🙂

For the first, shot, a picture of Jane and Brian whose GORGEOUS couples session I shot Saturday evening out at Colt State Park.  The technical details:

6:05 pm, D700 with my Tamron 90mm lens

ISO 100, f/3.2, 1/500

Behind them was open air fields with the bay and sky.  I wanted that gorgeous golden sunlight that was surrounding them.  In terms of composition I positioned myself so that they were in the bottom corner of my frame and the sun was in the top right corner. I wanted a lot of what is called negative space in the shot (part of the frame that doesn’t really have any detail) to give it the feeling of peeking in on a moment between the two of them.  I shot more into the sun because again, I wanted that flarey-goldeny-glow.  It wasn’t directly behind them, but it was to the side and behind them.  I didn’t want any details behind them other than the tree to give the shot some quiet intimacy.  Their positioning was all them.  All I did was tell Brian to sit on the wall 😉  It’s just about waiting for the right moments that you see.

On the left is the SOOC (straight out of the camera) version, on the right, the finished version.  What I did is below the photo.  Honestly, when I opened the file, I didn’t want to touch it at all because I loved it.  I loved the haze, the everything.  But I decided it needed just a little bit of “finishing” to it.

In my RAW window, I brought down exposure -.10, recovered a little bit of detail and brought down the brightness by about 15.  I could have adjusted the white balance there but I chose to save it for photoshop.

Then I brought it into photoshop.  I ran my normal workflow action which uses levels to bring up midtones and bring down shadows, then a screen layer at 30% to brighten it up a little along with a slight defog to give it a little more clarity.  It also runs a vignette around the edge of the photo.  Once that was done, I used a color balance layer to add some warmth to it.  I added yellow, a little bit of red and a smidge of magenta.  Did a very slight s-curve, ran an unsharp mask and done!  Less than two minutes of editing from start to finish.