Anatomy of a winning photo

I was shocked and thrilled beyond words this morning to see that my photo of Twizzler WON the I ? Faces kids photo contest! What an honor, considering all of the incredible photographers who entered this week. Hello! There were 258 entries!! CandyMan was very proud of me when I told him, although his first question was, “What did you win?!” Um, I won recognition and a cool badge that I can post on my blog with honor and pride. :) Too bad there was no money involved.

I had a few requests to explain how I processed this photo, so I went into Lightroom this morning to see just what I did to make this photo stand out.

Here is the SOOC (straight out of camera) shot, taken in August of this year during the last day of summer camp. It was hot, hot, hot!

Ok–so are you ready for my secret? I use Adobe Lightroom (I still use 1.4) and Kelsey Smith presets for almost every single picture that I import from my camera. I only open up Photoshop for the big ones. The photos that need a little extra work. I find Lightroom a whole lot easier, and certainly faster, than PS and it is sufficient for the majority of my pics.

(PS–in case you missed it, Click Kelsey’s name above to be magically transported to her Flickr group, where there are links to all of her amazing free presets).

So with this photo, I started with Kelsey Smith preset called “Eye Pop.” It made Twizzler’s eyes pop, for sure, but there was something lacking in his skin tones. So I played around with contrast and color and luminance….a LOT. Here’s what I did until I liked what I saw:

In the end, this is what the histogram looked like. Probably not what you typically want a histogram to look like, but I like the picture, so who cares, right?

Lightroom. My hero. A photographer’s dream. The perfect photo doctor.

It probably took me 5 minutes from start to finish to tweek this picture. So from this:

To this, in 5 minutes……
PS–speaking of photography, I am contemplating starting a little weekly blog carnival on the weekends (with Mr. Linky) where participants can link up and share their week’s favorite capture. I would love to see everyone’s favorite shots each week. I’ve been thinking about it since starting my Project 365. No prizes, no contests, just good, fun sharing. Is anybody interested in playing along?

About Lolli

Lolli has written 3740 post in this blog.

I became a mom in 1996, and in 2005 I had my fifth. Yes, 5 kids. In 2007, this blog was born (my 6th baby that will never grow up) and I've been sharing recipes, photography tricks, parenting tips, and everything in between. (Formerly Better in Bulk)

About Lolli

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