Finally have an excuse to learn Lightroom

Hello All,

I purchased lightroom 4 a few months ago with the intention of making it my summer project to start learning how to edit photos to get the most out of my gear. This is definitely an area that I have skimped on in a big way. Well, I have been slacking, but I was just given a good excuse to knuckle down and start learning.

My girlfriends father has boxes and boxes of old 35mm film from when he did photography back in the day. We got him a joint birthday present of a photo slide scanner, so now we have a whole bunch of digital photos that their family are just eating up and enjoying thoroughly. She helped him scan them for fathers day and She posted them all. While it hasn't seemed to bother any of her family since they were still getting a sentimental kick out of the photos, a whole bunch of them have shown up with glaring color issues (see attached). I just know there has to be some way to make these images look more pleasing, and a lot of them are great pictures otherwise.

Any suggestions on any good tutorials / places to start on learning how best to deal with this? Specific suggestions on these photos, while welcome, are not really what I am looking for. I want to start to get on the track of learning how to do this on my own.

As always, thanks in advance for all the great help and advice everyone on this forum gives.


-Rick

Hmm, interesting, are you looking for Lightroom "training" in general, or for specific stuff on retouching scanned photos, or...?

Two very good sites that do offer comprehensive training for LR as well as Photoshop and other related things are Lynda.com and KelbyTraining.com, but I don't know about sites dealing with your specific "job".

tonylong wrote in post #16049975
Hmm, interesting, are you looking for Lightroom "training" in general, or for specific stuff on retouching scanned photos, or...?

Two very good sites that do offer comprehensive training for LR as well as Photoshop and other related things are Lynda.com and KelbyTraining.com, but I don't know about sites dealing with your specific "job".

Yeah i have access to all of lynda.com through my job. More like a starter guide to color correction is what im looking for.

Just to change the "White Balance" and the colour should look more 'real'

I'm not very good at PP, but I played around with the 2 files in LR. The second shot (Christmas?) came out pretty decent with using the WB dropper and then tweaking a bunch of stuff.

The first shot was a nightmare for me, and it still looks bad. There is so much red, and I couldn't get the skintones to even come close to looking very natural. I can't get rid of the green/blue tint the skin seems to have. I attribute it more to the negative (slide) aging then anything else.

If you want to turn image editing ok on, I'll put them up so you can have a look.

Start with youtube. There are some great intro videos up there which help you learn about all of the basic features. Lynda is great but it's really slow and I find it too detailed. Just start with the youtube guides, go through a few intro steps and you should have a good feel about it within a few hours.

One suggestion: If the software that came with the scanner allows the output of Raw files, choose that instead of jpgs. If it doesn't, consider buying software from Silver Fast or Vue-soft. The color correction will be much better and easier in LR with Raw files.

KirkS518 wrote in post #16050393
...

The first shot was a nightmare for me, and it still looks bad. There is so much red, and I couldn't get the skintones to even come close to looking very natural....

Desaturating the reds in Lightroom in the HSL panel seems to help.

Rimmer wrote in post #16051050
Desaturating the reds in Lightroom in the HSL panel seems to help.

I tried that, but it seems to have made their skin (particularly the man) a greenish/blueish. Adjusting HSL in the greens, blues, and/or aquas then made the woman's dress and some of the BG weird. But, as I said, my PP skills are pretty shoddy. :/

Just added image editing OK

Here are my attempts just playing around with sliders and white balance. I'll start checking out some videos.

after reading your post i remember seeing this.... looks like you might get a few good tips out of it...

http://petapixel.com …cert-photos-in-lightroom/

redrocket wrote in post #16051783
after reading your post i remember seeing this.... looks like you might get a few good tips out of it...

http://petapixel.com …cert-photos-in-lightroom/

Hmm, definitely looks very intriguing. I'll have to give some of those steps a shot. Thanks!

Ok, here are my attempts from last night. See what I mean about the skin tones on the party pic?

Rick - great job on the group/party pic. I just couldn't get the skintones even close to that.