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My sister asked me how come my photos so nice colour, what setting I use for my camera and if I use flash or not. It is hard to explain in words, so I have decided to write a small and simple tutorial here.
After discovering Lambency, my flash photography results have changed entirely. Flash no longer harsh and everything seems to be very natural even for indoor shots. I no longer scared of using flash, and no longer having the problem of “fake” flash type of photos. I have blogged about Lambency before, which you can read in the link below:
As to where you can get the Lambency diffuser, visit:
If your original photos are already of very harsh flash result, then editing will be very difficult. Not everything can be corrected in post processing, so try to get things RIGHT on the first place.
Now…let’s have an example of an original photo that I took (with correct flash + Lambency used):
The photo was taken indoor at my father’s house, with Nikon SB-800 flash + Lambency, Nikon D200 DSLR and Tamron SP 17-50mm F2.8 Lens. The original photo is already quite nice colour I would say, so not much post editing need to be done to improve it. However, I still prefer to add a little bit of extra contrast to boost up the colour, so here’s what I did using Paint Shop Pro program (my favorite jpeg photo editing software):
Original photo (resized):
CURVE – this is one of the most important command in photo editing to change the bright and dark area of a photo. You want dark to be darker, and bright to be brighter.
As the skin stone is already correct, so I skipped the colour temperature part. If you resize your photo, then your photos will become software, so Unsharp Mask (USM) is needed in the last step of every photo editing steps. Yes, always put USM as the last step.
USM
Let’s compare the before and after photo side by side:
Original photo (resized):
Edited photo:
As I always edit using my old Dell D800 notebook, resizing become my first step always. Photos are only meant for web sharing. If for printing purpose, then I won’t do the resizing part but will still add a little bit of USM at the end of the editing process. You don’t need to master every commands or tools in PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro in order to edit your photos, just a few useful commands will do.
Ok for now…hope this is useful to some. 🙂
Extra examples
Original (resized):
Edited:
Thank you.