PRACTICAL SKILLS

ALICIA DUTTON - 29.04.2021

To edit the photos of Alicia, I used my usual editing software - Lightroom & Adobe Photoshop.

The first thing to do was sort out the photos and narrow them down to the best few. This took a couple of hours as there were 501 and I was planning on only finalising around 30.

Once this was done, I had to set on an editing style to use. As there are many different lighting setups used, I wasn’t able to use just one preset – I had to make drastic changes to the settings depending on the lights. This was due to them being different colours – therefore requiring different white balances, hues, and colour grading.

I started off with presets I already have saved from previous shoots and seeing if any of those worked. Presets are pre-saved editing settings you can set up to make your editing process a lot faster and ensure you have your own style established.

In these photobooth-style photos, I held an orange colour-gel over the lens to give the orange film effect. I used two different presets to edit these. The one on the left was just a classic ‘35mm’ style one I have used previously on photos where I’ve used the colour-gel, and the one on the right was a film one I usually use on outdoor photos.

I felt like the first photo was too ‘boring’ and the orange too bright, however when I turned down the saturation to try to lower the orange it didn’t look great. I duplicated the photo and put a different preset on to see if I could improve the photo. The next preset worked a lot better and added lots of cool colours to the photo. I sent both photos to Grace to see what she thought and she also preferred the second edit.

I copied these settings and pasted them on photos with the same lighting (purple and green). This preset worked on all of these too and I only had to make a few small adjustments on them (shadows, highlights & exposure). However, I wanted to see what other ones looked like just in case they worked even better. I duplicated one of the photos and put my usual 35mm preset on it and made a few small tweaks, however it didn’t look as good so I decided to stick with the original one.

Next up were the mirror photos. These weren’t planned – I only thought of the idea in the studio – but I’m really pleased with how they came out. I used the same preset as the previous ones, but it didn’t work as well. I then used a different one for red lighting (as the original lighting was very orange) and this one worked a lot better. I did experiment with changing the shadow hue to red to give a warmer feel to the photo and sent this to Grace, who preferred the one without.

For the red photos next to the light, I created an entirely new preset as none of the saved ones work due to how intense the red is in the photos. Red is a hard colour to edit, and I’m happy I was able to create a preset that perfectly captures the light without being too harsh. I used the Point Curve to mattify the shadows dramatically, and also add in some green to help balance the image.

With the behind the scenes photos, I used an entirely different editing style. I wanted a ‘classic’ feel to these, and love how black & white studio photos look. Therefore, I decided on the ones with white backgrounds to be in black & white. I also increased the grain to give them a 35mm feel. The ones with coloured lights did use the presets used above, but only as the black & white preset on these didn’t give the same feel.

FLOWVERS @ OLD CHAPEL STUDIOS - 02.05.2021

I bought my laptop to the shoot so was able to start editing inbetween songs. Whilst there, I used a 35mm black & white preset I already had from a previous shoot with a different artist. I knew I was going to create a new colour preset for these photos, but couldn't do it until I was home as there was a lot of light in the room, affecting my view of the photos. I was able to sort through most of the images at the shoot. This involved me rejecting the blurry/out of frame photos and narrowing down the pictures to only the best ones. I ended up taking over 1000 photos and got them down to less than 200.

Once I was home, I took off the black & white preset and created a new one especially for these photos. I wanted a 35mm-style preset with a blue and red shadows. To do this, I made basic edits to the exposure, contrast, shadows, highlights, whites and blacks, and then used the tone curve and carefully adjusted each one (tone, red, green and blue) until I was happy with how the photos looked. I edited the white balance and used the colour grading tool to emphasise the blue and red shadows and saved this as a preset. I then applied the preset to each photo and made small adjustments like exposure and highlights as the lighting changed throughout the day. I decided to put the 35mm black & white preset back on a few of the photos as I wanted to give them a 'classic' look and felt they would look a lot better in black & white. The band love black & white photos too, so I knew they would be happy with this.

Once this was done, I saved them in a low resolution and sent them to Flowvers to get their opinion. Once they looked through the photos and confirmed they were happy with them, I saved them in a higher resolution and sent them over to their manager using a WeTransfer download link. I shared a few on my Instagram and received high engagement and positive feedback from my audience.