Welcome to a new Friday and here I am editing. I have been homing my still life skills again and found some Litchi to have some fun with. The set up was quite simple. I used my window as a main light source and reflected the light back on the opposite side to soften the shadows. I had a white back drop with a white plate and a white table.
With this image the first thing I wanted to do is add some gradient adjustments at the top and bottom to burn in these areas and give the image a lighter appearance.
I then went back to my normal procedure and reduced the noise and made basic lens corrections.
I moved on to tonal adjustments raising the exposure slightly to brighten the image and improving the contrast. There is a lot of white detail in the histogram, so I lowered the whites slightly as well as lowering the blacks. I also darkened the shadows and the highlights to add a bit more detail to the midtones. Clarity I lowered this to reduce the midtone contrast and adding a slight glow to areas of midtone highlights. I then added contrast to the image.
I wanted to make a curves adjustment to boost the whites even more creating the feel of a high key image.
Now the light toning is ok, I moved onto the colours and the saturation. I went to the HSL panel and increased the saturation of the litchi colours. I also adjusted the hue slightly to make them a little redder.
After raising the saturation on the litchi it actually highlighted some other areas of the image like the base of the plate and the reflections on the plate. I used the adjustment bush to reduce the saturation in these areas but not remove it totally.
Zooming in I noticed some small flecks from the flesh of the litchi on the plate that I missed when composing the shot. I used the spot removal tool using the cloning function to clone these flecks out.
I really like the way the contrast forces the attention of the viewer to the litchi. I was contemplating using a darker plate but the white has really worked well. The high key feeling curve really helped add contrast to the fruit while brightening the whole image.
What do you think of the image and the way I went around editing it. Let me know using the comment box below.
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