about two girls'...

A pro-photo takin' team. That's us, Amy and Danielle. We run this photography shoppe. We're based in Central Virginia, but we'll travel. Just about anywhere. We shoot portraits, teach workshops, write tutorials, and chit-chat about us. You'll find all that right here on the blog.

{Two Girls' is new for us. We have both run a photo biz on our own, but after working together on several weddings last year, we just clicked. So, we decided we wanted to shoot together all the time, and that's what Two Girls' is all about. Two friends doing what we love to do for you! It's gonna be awesome.}

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    • A Before and After

    I thought I’d do a quick before and after edit to show how I typically edit my personal pictures. This is just a simple clean edit to polish the picture. The most important thing is to start with a good image straight out of the camera (sooc).

    Lucas’s room gets pretty nice light these days around 11-1pm. I know that I want to be close to the window, but not right under it so I placed him on his play mat that was about 3-4 feet from the window. I also like to place my subject at a 45 degree angle to my light source because it gives a nice soft shadow and definition to the face. With Noah, it’s practically impossible to make sure I’m at a good angle, but since Lucas will sit still for a minute before taking off it’s sometimes achievable. I shot down on Lucas so that I would be sure to get really nice catch lights in his eyes. You can see my diagram below of my set up. Disclaimer, I just got a Wacom table for Christmas so I’m still learning how to use it to write properly and make straight lines. :)

    So here is the resulting sooc image.

    So for my edit I did everything in Lightroom but you can do the same thing in Photoshop using ACR (Adobe Camera Raw). I first warmed it up a little bit by adjusting my white balance to daylight. I also chose to brighten it up with a slight brightness adjustment. I chose to use a brightness adjustment rather than an exposure adjustment because exposure increases your highlights and I didn’t want to blow any of his skin. Brightness will adjust your midtones but not your highlights and that’s exactly what I wanted to do. I upped the contrast just a tad and added some clarity. The last thing that I did was go under my tone curve and pull the darks up a tiny bit to make the shadow across his face just a little softer. Then I exported the photo into Photoshop where I resized it for the web and then did an unsharpen mask on it to sharpen it just a bit. And here is the resulting image.

    Just a clean, quick edit. Perfect for our photo album. If you have any questions leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to answer!

    Amy

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