Making A Not-So-'Snap' Shot
One blisteringly hot summer afternoon here in Tzfat, I got this shot of my grandson as he was tasting the parsley and basil in our herb garden. When the drip irrigation sprayer came on to water the parched greens, he reached over to take a taste of the water, too, getting this adorable pose:
Always shoot in .raw mode, when it's available, and always at the highest quality settings, and in .jpg mode, as well.
I edited "in-camera" - in this case, on the LG-V20 - in SnapSpeed for local eq adjustments including cropping (in this case in order to get his eye-line and finger smack on the "rule of thirds" right-hand upper third quadrant), opening up the shadows from the harsh afternoon sun and popping up the highlights a bit, minor tweaking to improve structure and sharpening, slight vignetting and brightening on his face to draw the viewer's eye, and finally, adding the logo at the bottom.
Then, after saving, I reopened the file in Lightroom Mobile to nudge up clarity and denoise.
Lightroom offers a bevy of B&W presets and near infinite tweaking options, so I edited a revised version to accentuate the black and white tonal range.
Over a succession of mobile devices, I've tried out and discarded dozens of editing apps, many of which are merely glorified Instagram filters, finally selling on the two noted above for their feature sets (primarily Lightroom's noise reduction, Dehaze, and overall slick "look" tweakability, and SnapSpeed for its "Photoshop-lite" - like warping, touch-up and titling abilities).
Comments, questions, and similar examples of your own work are welcome!
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