I took this shot to enter in my workplace monthly photo comp in Decemeber. The theme for the month was “Broken”. Being Christmas time I got into the spirit and broke some tree decorations.
I was trying to capture a decoration in the process of breaking, but unfortunately my timing was never quite good enough. This was the best of the lot though, which I took just after it had broken.
There was a LOT of work in Lightroom 2.5 to complete this photo. The key to doing large area Adjustment Brush work like I did in this photo is to use a LARGE brush, and the Auto Mask feature. Don’t be too tempted to use a small brush to get in between things. If you keep the centre of the brush in the right spot, the Auto Masking will take care of the rest!
Shooting and PP Details as follows:
- White Nylon backdrop
- Pentax K200D body, firing onboard flash
- Pentax SMC “A” 50mm f1.7 lens @ f22
- Tripod to mount the camera, and a cable remote to fire it
- Sunpak flash with optical trigger and home made diffuser, placed directly above, and slightly behind the subject
- Shot in Pentax RAW (PEF)
- Import into Lightroom 2.5
- Applied large area of adjustment brush to make background more white, area and settings shown below
- Minor basic edits to improve contrast and colour in the broken pieces, shown below
- Edit Detail settings
- Export to JPG For Web
