Painting with Light

For about a year now I've used Photoshop Lightroom and have been impressed with what it has to offer. I've had a few occasions where Lightroom wasn't able to "fix" a photo the way I wanted it so I decided it was time to purchase Photoshop CS3.

The day after I purchased CS3 I stopped by my local bookstore and picked up a copy of Scott Kelby's book: 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. I'm a big fan of Scott's and really enjoy his books and podcasts. I'm only into it a few chapters and have all ready put it to use.

While visiting family in Idaho last weekend, I made a stop at the Mormon temple in Rexburg. After walking around in the freezing weather thinking I got some great shots I was disappointed when I viewed them on my macbook. My delima: the steeple was way to dark and any attempt to fix it in Lightroom was not successful. Bumping up the exposure to lighten the steeple would wash out the main building and any attempt to corrected the exposure for the main building would leave the steeple too dark.

 

 

 

I put one of Scott's 7 points tips to use: Painting with Light. He says: "Painting with light is the ability to control the light in your image, it fixes exposure problems and brings out the detail in ares that would have been lost... putting light right where you want it, but in a much better way than simply dodging and burning".

Using Smart Objects Layers and "Painting with Light" I was able to keep the main building exposed correctly and also have the steeple match the rest of the building. This book isn't the one and only for Photoshop but it gives you a glimpse into what Scott's workflow is and how he is able to produce some amazing shots.

Canon XTi * Canon EF-24-105mm f/4.0L lens * ISO 100 * 4 seconds * f/8.0