Wrapping up the Cook Family Photos

Whew!  Thanks again to the Cook family for giving me their time and letting me practice on their familiy.  It’s been a week, and I finally just blew through it and finished the edits on the Cook family photos.  We ended up with some good ones.  I’ve already got a Niu family to start working on… :)  Yep, it is the Niu family’s portraits.  Here are some of my favorites of the Cook Family. 

I learned a lot about my own work flow with this shoot.  First of all, I tried to edit and treat way too many pictures.  I really should have paired it all down to a manageable amount first rather than trying to rip through them all.  I ended up with 100+ edits and 5 different colors treatments.  

I wanted to save each picture in several different color treatment, but savings each picture in each color was taking forever.  I finally figured out that in Lightroom I could select 100 pictures and create a virtual copy.  Then it would already have the new 100 copies selected and I could use Auto-Synch to apply a preset to all the 100 new copies just created.  Soooo much easier than trying to do one at a time.   Bada boom, bada bing.  Watch out though when leaving Auto-Synch on and having 100 photos selected.  I learned the hard way not to remove the selection and ended up changing many pictures in ways I didn’t want too.  Thank good ness for Ctrl-Z (undo).  I really need to sit down for Photoshop session with Leah and see her techniques and work flow again now that I’m getting some practice under my belt.

I’ve also been using my collections a bit more to try and organize edits versus originals, color treatments, etc.  I’m not sure if I’ll stick with this flow or go with using flags, stars, and colors to distinguish them.  Time will tell. 

In Photoshop I learned more about cloning.  I learned to save a tone of time in masking off areas using the quick selection tool.  This made it much easier to clone grass right up to them rather than sitting and blending all the edges by hand.  Another big learning on cloning was in using the pattern stamp and alternating the rotation, scale, etc. of what I’m cloning to make it more real and help eliminate repeat patterns. 

One last thought.  I need to learn to get the right amount of smile.  It’s easy to invoke a big grin, but sometimes I loose the eyes when the smile is too big.  I’ve been practicing closing eyes and then having them pop them open before I take the picture.  I still haven’t totally figured it all out, but I’m sure I’ll get there.