What a good way to show off multiples than taking multiple shots of my multiple kids. This is by far the hardest thing for me as a mom, getting them all together. Something is usually wrong with the shot, one (or more) isn't looking at me, my focus is off or they are running out of frame. Here are three attempts of getting them all in one shot from last night. Can you spot what is wrong with these??
I took a chance and thought if Mr. Z was holding Miss V. she would sit still for a shot. It worked, kinda.
So anyway, getting onto part two of the Multiples, how I process multiple photos at once. I usually shoot in Raw so I upload the shots from my camera and import them directly into Lightroom before I do anything else. From there, I look at each one and pick a few I would like to process. The one think I love about Lightroom are the presets. I have a bunch that I toy around with. Some give me the real warm glow and some add vignette. I like the ones that reduce noise and up the exposure, cause even though I try to avoid it, I am still underexposing my shots. I also crop in Lightroom (usually keep the same photo ratio) so that when I choose the preset, if there is a vignette, it will be on the cropped in shot.
For the above shots I used three different Lightroom presets. I liked the initial look of these. Then I played with the WB (I haven't ventured into custom WB yet) and exposure. Sometimes I use Lightroom to do my noise reduction but othertimes I use my plug in later. Once I am done with the Lightroom processing, I send these to PS. In PS I either run an action to make the shot brighter or in some cases hazey (cause I like that look). I also play with the levels and/or curves to get the exposure just right. I add a contrast layer and sometimes a hue/saturation layer and then flatten. From here I run a sharpen and add my watermark. I will save the file as a copy of the original just incase I want to go back and re-PP. I also know that since I still have the Raw file and Lightroom does not change that, I can start from the beginning and do it all over again if I want to.
So that's my workflow for multiple shots. I am getting more pleased with my PP but its still a work in progress. Some days I think they all look great. Some days, like last night, I am not all that happy with the results. I am sure I will get in more of a groove and like my processing more and more each time I do it.
