Starting Fresh

     So it is still very much feeling like new year for me. I know it is February, but since I spent most of January in America travelling and then coming home and being jet-lagged I am still very much in the "new year" mindset. It has been a long time since I posted on this blog. The last few posts have been me sharing interesting artsy things I have found and it feels like a very long time since I did anything super creative! 

     Time really starts to fly when you finish university, it has been over 2 years now and I have decided to get motivated and take some time to focus on getting my skill set back up and focusing on learning some new things. I have had an account with Lynda.com for a long time now, they have a huge range of tutorials on all manner of design/marketing/software subjects. 

     So the first thing I have decided to focus on is photography. I have always been interested in photography, most of my experimentation has been as a self taught amateur with a lot of make shift tools but I just bought myself a new camera lens and wanted to try it out.

     I have taken two courses so far, one on Colour Correction in Lightroom and one on Low Light photography, both focused quite heavily on fixing White Balance in images after they have been taken. To start practising I also watched day one of a 5 day photo challenge which started with a challenge to go out searching for interesting light and see what you can come up with.

     These images include a couple I took of some flowers in my house when I first got the lens and the rest are from a walk I took all around Stoke Park Estate in Bristol. When walking around i tried to focus on finding areas where the light was bringing out highlights on leaves and trees.

     Ok so here is a little picture of my workspace on Lightroom. One of the biggest things I learnt on the Colour Correction course is how to use the Eyedropper tool to fix White Balance. Clicking on a neutral gray area of the image with this tool lets Lightroom know how to balance all the colours out if there is any kind of colour cast. Aside from some shadow and highlight edits the edit above was done in One click! I can't believe I have wasted my life fiddling around with colours when it was this easy...

     Now the outdoor images were much more of an issue as there wasn't any kind of neutral gray area of the picture to use as reference. I did most of these edits based on the histogram, pulling the temperature and tint sliders up and down until the colours moved to the right place. 

     Now as someone who has spent the last 8 years using artistic license rather than actual colour science I have to say I am feeling a little skeptical about this. The image above was colour corrected to the one on the right, but i much prefer the left hand image straight out of camera. It is safe to say you can follow the science all you want but this won't always make an image you like, it is worth moving away from rules every once in a while if you prefer the artistic outcome.

     I think the biggest things I got from this course are interpreting histograms, knowing how to use different tools to change the histogram data and also using clipping measures to stop blowing out shadows and highlights. I will definitely combine these skills with my own artistic eye, but I feel happy in the knowledge that I know a bit more about the colour science. 

     Here are some of my favourite images from todays edit: