Hey y’all! Welcome back. It’s been a minute. Summer called for a solid month of traveling then I headed back to my university for a little over a month of summer school with days filled with classes from 10am-5pm. But it required more outside time than I had anticipated.
Anyways! I’m back with a new post to let you know that good lighting isn’t necessarily key to a good photo. While it can make for a better photo, you can definitely work with what you have.
The picture above is definitely way too dark. If you were to give me this picture around this time last year I’d say it definitely wouldn’t make the cut. But, using Lightroom all I had to do was use a preset I’ve created to lay over all of my more recent pictures that makes the picture more lively.
Using Lightroom is super easy through their app. The essentials you need to grab for edits would definitely be adjusting the contrast and highlights then going to the colors to adjust specifically. To me, skin tone is important for my feed to be coherent. I stopped using apps like VSCO or Instagram filters and only using a single filter for every photo I posted and started focusing on just making sure my skin looked fairly the same in each picture. Then I usually use clarity to sharpen the picture and give it an HD look, following I’ve been making colors more vibrant. Bluer blues, redder reds, and greener greens. When adjusting my skin tone I use the orange color specifically since it seems to be my skin tone and I’ll lower the hue a few notches, keep around the same saturation to keep it more realistic, and increase the luminance for a little glow.
Little details you can focus on are further sharpening buttons and jewelry for detail to make the picture more crisp and whitening buildings and other clothing articles that are white. I also brighten the picture a bit since I like brighter, lighter, and more vibrant photos now versus my old editing style of more faded and muted colors. (That old tumblr aesthetic… rip.)
Lately I’ve been liking the closer headshot look for pictures when not focusing on my whole outfit so I just zoom in a bit when my friends take it too far out for my liking.
Overall the key is having a picture with consistent lighting, whether it be good or bad lighting. Dark pics CAN work. Just slap it into Lightroom. The whole editing process takes anywhere from three to ten minutes depending and taking the pictures ranges from 5seconds to 3minutes tops when I’m in public places.
khirstyn 