Digital Lady Syd’s Rule No. 10: Use What You Know!

Just thought I would remind everyone that you do not have to keep changing every workflow to incorporate that new technique into it. Sometimes it is better and faster to use what you know, especially if you are just doing a little processing of an image. That is exactly what I did on this image. I like this image of the Tower of London because you can a little boy peaking out at the sidewalk and the Thames River. There is also part of another little boy in the guard house. So much going on in London!

I really wanted to do a black and white, and it looked good with a slight sepia tone on it, but when I took this image into Topaz (see sidebar for website link) Black & White Effects 2, my Sunny preset brought out the colors the way I liked them. In Lightroom there was just the regular slider adjustments going on (see my How to Use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) or Lightroom 4 Quickly blog) and the Upright Adjustment was also used to straighten the image out (see my Lightroom 5′s New Upright Adjustments Section blog). Once in Photoshop, I went into Black & White Effects and just applied my preset, that’s all – for all the settings for this preset, see my Sunny Preset for Topaz Black and White Effects blog. (This is one of my favorite presets for the program.) Did some clean up on a New Layer. Then created two New Layers, a Darken and a Lighten layer, set to Overlay for dodging and burning (see my The Best Dodging and Burning Technique! blog link). That was it.

As you can see, I really do use the techniques I present. Everything in this blog is what I normally look at when post-processing an image. Hope it gives you ideas on how to do your images too!…..Digital Lady Syd