Lotus Photography Comps and Fiddles

11:58 AM Learning , Lotus , Photography 0 Comments

I've been working more on my automotive photography, studying the masters like Ryan Jouhari, and Retutpro on Youtube.

I would say "it's complicated," and it is, but it's also fun. I don't know what it is about car photos that are more fulfilling to me than fashion - maybe it's the ability to pump the clarity up to stupid levels and still have it look amazing. Just like fashion, though, you can easily over-do the editing, so I have to find that balance.

Here are a couple recent edits. I went back through my Lightroom archive for photos I thought I could do better on. Most of my previous photos need to come up in the shadows *so* much, and are way too yellow (not purposefully, though, like the "vintage" one below).


Before is on the left (after Lightroom edits). After is on the right. Here's the out-of-camera:


Yikes.

For this one I cleaned up the background a lot, enlarged and straightened the car, picked out the highlights and darkened the glass with a Soft Light layer, and did some colorwork for that vintagy feel (along with some knicks, scratches, and splotches for an old-photo look). Here's the final:


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Second experiment, using many of the same techniques. Starting off with this photo after Lightroom edits:


Then cleaning up the background to remove the power poles, fence, red curb, road dirt, and all those construction stakes. I also used the Soft Light layer to darken the glass and pick out the highlights on the body and wheel. This makes a surprisingly big difference:


Last bit - colorwork with a Color Dodge layer in brown, and the tiniest bit of cross processing with a Curves adjustment layer. I had some hotspots from my Lightroom edit I went back to fix. Here's the final:


Getting there...