Photo Editing

    This week we have switched to the topic of photo editing. While I have played around with some other photo editing softwares, I was completely new to Adobe Lightroom. It took some exploring and learning from online tutorials to understand what I was doing, but in the end, I'm very happy with the turnout of my edited photo. 

    For my photo, I chose the photo of a bowl of ramen I took in a restaurant last year. While the ramen was absolutely delicious, I feel that the photo did not do it justice. My goal was to make this bowl of ramen look as appetizing as it tasted. The first photo is the original, unedited photo, and the next one is the edited version.

    Most of the changes made to the photo was made by adjusting the lighting and color. For lighting, I slightly increased the exposure and made bigger increases in contrast, highlights, and whites to make the photo appear brighter. I decreased the shadow to make the darker colors appear deeper. For color, I increased the temperature, vibrance and saturation so that the colors looked warmer. I also decreased the tint so that the greens in the photo would be more vibrant. I did not make much adjustments in the "effects" section, except that I increased the clarity to make the lines more detailed. I also used the "geometry" function to tilt the photo vertically slightly, so that the angle of the bowl tilted more toward the viewer.

    After I had made these changes, it was time to crop the photo. There were some white spaces after I tilted the photo, so I had to very carefully crop out the white sections without cropping out too much of the photo. I also cropped out the top part of the photo so that the bowl is now at the center.

    So far everything had been fairly easy. Lightroom is helpful that it give you a preview of what each function does by hovering your mouse over the function. All you had to do was to slide the button to the right or to the left. When I came across the Healing Brush, though, I ran into some trouble. I wanted to use the healing brush to remove the tips of the chopsticks near the upper right corner, but I couldn't get the area to be covered in a way that does not make it obvious that some editing had been done. It took a lot of trial and error (along with some YouTube tutorials) for me to figure out how the Healing Brush worked. You select area you want to be edited out with the brush, which at first appears completely white (I panicked slightly at first because I thought I was erasing parts of the photo). After you select the area to be edited you choose another area of the photo to match the selected area. In my case, I chose a patch of the wood to cover up the chopsticks, so that it does not appear that the chopsticks are there at all. The final result is not perfect (there are still some small inconsistencies in the area), but this is the best I could do with my experience of photo editing.

    After experimenting a lot with the Healing Brush, the regular Brush tool became a lot easier to use. I use the brush to touch up on the egg yolk to make its yellow color more vibrant. I use the brush tool to "paint" over the egg yolk, then made adjustments on temperature, tint, contrast, highlight and shadows. The results are not as obvious since I already made those lighting adjustments to the entire photo, but it still gave me the experience of using the brush tool.

    Finally, I experimented with the gradient tool to see how I can improve the photo. Of all the platforms, this to me is the least helpful, as I wanted to have a uniform look to the final product as opposed to a spectrum of colors (for example, part of the picture is more color than the rest). I did use the radial gradient tool to make the center of the photo appear more saturated than the edges, but the different is not very significant.     

    The most helpful tool is definitely the lighting and colors, as those made the most significant impact on the final product. Once I figured out how to use the Healing Brush, that also became very helpful to use. The Healing Brush is one of the features that sets Adobe Lightroom apart from other basic photo editing softwares (such as editing features in Apple Photos) and makes it more powerful. I imagine this is the feature that a lot of photo editors would use to hide imperfections in photos (such as scars or pimples on people's faces).

    Even though I do not use a photo editing software on a daily basis as a music teacher, I still see programs such as Lightroom to be useful for editing photos for posters and websites to better promote the fine arts programs in schools. I can also use Lightroom for personal projects such as building my own professional portfolio.