The weather wasn’t as fine as originally expected therefore we changed our days before planned program from landscape photography on top of the Fellhorn mountain (2038 m.) to two workshops in the Adobe Lightroom:
Workshop #2: Color or black/ white – when to decide for which variant?
Workshop #3: The digital dark room – step by step development of RAW files in Adobe Lightroom.
Yes, for sure, I use Lightroom for a longer time period to catalogue my photos, to crop them, to check if automatic white balance and automatic tonal value adds more value to them but I never developed a workflow on my own from A to Z. In the first step only one workshop was planned but It worked so well that we decided to change from top of the Fellhorn to the Lightroom valley. And this regardless the weather change from 2 degrees with rainy snow to 5 degrees with sun & powder snow on the top of the mountains! Hard decision. We were completely enthusiastic about the possibilities and results of a standardised workflow in Lightroom that we preferred working in house with drawn curtains 😉
Our trainer was Maike Jarsetz from Hamburg who just finished her new XXL-book on this topic:
‘Maike Jarsetz‘ digitale Dunkelkammer: Von der Aufnahme zum Bild – Bildbearbeitung mit Photoshop und Lightroom’ // Release Date: 22. October 2020 // Price: 49,90 € // publishing house: dpunkt.verlag
As an overall summarization we had two strong core findings:
- There is no need to decide in beforehand if you want to develop your photo in black/white or colour. Take your photos in RAW format, start your digital workflow in Lightroom or Capture One or Photoshop and during your optimization work with the photo it appears out of the given structure and data if this works better as a cool black/white or a strong colourful photo.
- Do not underestimate the ultimate power of a standard workflow. Create your own workflow to speed up your post production time, save templates for 3 to 5 working steps (starting with f.e. white/black optimisation, general preset Adobe powerful) which you prefer anyway for all of your photos and then go from general to handmade detail optimisation on pixel-peeping level. A bit more sharpness here, a bit darker over there, some green over there. Ready! Save relevant work results in between, because sometimes you loose your path and get too euphoric about playing with the ‚optimisation slider‘.
A pair of results of the digital dark & lightroom workshops:
Decision went to colour development:
Decision went to black/white development:
Recommendation: Do not miss next year’s Oberstdorf photo summit 2021 with the spectacular evident title ‘mountains’!
(c) Fotogipfel Oberstdorf 2021
projektkladde - ein illustriertes magazin von sven 