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The other day I was browsing through some older images in preparation for a printing workshop I was going to be presenting. My main goal was to find images that were suitable as sharpening and color correction examples, so I didn’t have anything in particular in mind. I ran across a folder of images shot a few years ago at Badlands National Park, when the digital camera I had with me was a Kodak 14n. If you’ve never used the Kodak, it’s an excellent studio camera with a 14MP full frame sensor. It isn’t, however, such a hot choice for landscape work where you have little control over lighting. Needless to say, looking at the first image here, I wasn’t thrilled with the results. But being a bit of a pack-rat I decided to keep the images for some future use.

I know that Lightroom is capable of some pretty amazing adjustments, so this seemed like a good image to play around with - after all, it wasn’t much to start with, so all I’m out is a little time.

To start out, I raised the color temperature to about 5400 to remove some of the blue cast. Next, I moved down to the Recovery and Fill Light sliders, pulling these all the way up to 100. Now, I experimented with the Blacks and Exposure settings, adding quite a bit of Black (84) and dropping the exposure by .33. This gave me more depth and added much more detail into the clouds. From here, I fine tuned the Recovery and fill Light adjustments, ending up with Recovery at 100, and Fill Light down to 56.

Things are already looking much better, and I’m getting detail I didn’t know I had from the image. But, there are still some problems, the most obvious being a color cast that needs to be corrected. Here’s one area that I absolutely love in Lightroom. The targeted adjustment tools make it so easy to correct otherwise difficult problems. For this image, I wanted to reduce the greens, so I I clicked on one of the green plants in the lower left corner with the Saturation target tool, lowering the Yellow by 47 and Green by 51.

The final step in Lightroom was to use the Clarity (+72) and Vibrance (+8) adjustments before opening the image in Photoshop CS3. I’m sure you noticed the extensive dust in the source image (another weakness in the Kodak - it’s like a dust magnet). Lightroom isn’t up to this kind of spot removal, so I did the cleanup in Photoshop with the Clone and Spot Healing tools.

The end result is something I’m actually very pleased with - there was much more in this image than I realized, and with Lightroom I was able to make these adjustments in about 15 minutes. I guess the moral of this story is to hang onto some of those marginal images. As your editing knowledge and the capabilities of your software increase, you might find a new set of images.

The final step was a print. I did this one on Innova FibaPrint Ultra Smooth Gloss to keep as much of the fine detail as possible. The end result is very nice indeed.