Pictures of You

The famous creative process!
For those curious about the digital photography steps, I present below my routine when attempting to create a certain style to my photos. 
The photos below were taken few weekends ago, it was a short session with my sister’s friend Elenea.
Well, let me first start saying that pregnancy shots are not my specialty, if I could even say I have one. My approach to these photos was very similar to what I would normally do in a portrait shooting. Right? Wrong? Who knows, what really counts is the client’s feelings about the shots.
So back to the topic, the creative process, shall we?
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The original photo is below. The first impression after looking at the photo below, is that some post-editing had been done to it. Yes and no. White-balance adjustment, saturation and tonal curve were the only tweaks applied. Also, it is important to clarify the use of (1) Vivitar 285 with a CTO gel, hence the warm (READ: orange) temp in the picture.

I actually liked the result, with minimum post editing, but I felt there was space for something more “shocking”, more RedLeather!
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After checking the color results comes, naturally, the black & white conversions! For B&W  i have two options: some presets in Lightroom or manually converting it. In the picture below, I manually did the conversion, mostly because of the sky: i wanted to recover all the sky, so i set the recovery to 100 and adjusted the rest of the exposure to my likings.

I think the B&W conversion turned out pretty well, with high contrast and good sky details. I'll definitely have to provide a few B&W,s but the pursuit for the right color continues….
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Below is a preset I have in LR. IT doesn't hurt to try it, it just wastes HDD space and bandwidth.

Not the look I wanted… at least not for a pregnancy shot.
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Here comes another preset, the famous “Sin City”. This preset actually I do use often, even if just as a start point to my own tweaking.

I kinda like the dress and background colors, but not the skin colors. I should’ve tried adding some vignette, but I decided to start on a new alternative.
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Here is my latest alternative. Funny how I wanted something “shocking” and at the end, I considering something very “normal”. Nothing wrong with that, actually nothing yet is defined. This adjustment was basically done manually, with the major difference being some Photoshop Blue-Filter application. Actually, this photo was edited in Photoshop instead of Lightroom.

I really like it, not so warm as the original, with better skin colors and nice levels.
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Same as before, but with some vignettes added to it.

Currently my preferred alternative. I don’t think yet I am done with it, but if at the end I decide for a more “natural” look, it will be something very similar to this.
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Here are the small versions side-by-side for better comparison: