Title • after the rain #2

While Rhowan may be the current queen of drama and posing in our household – see my last post if you're not sure what I'm talking about – it would be fair to say that Harmony has a slight edge when it comes to looking cute :)

And if you're interested, the original is here:

.../archives/after_the_rain_2.php

Most of the time, when I'm processing an image I have a clear idea about how I want it to turn out. In this instance though I struggled a bit as I couldn't decide whether to go for black and white or colour. In the end, mostly because I liked the contrast between the towel and her skin tones, the colour version won out.

On a related note: take a look at the difference between the towel (over her right shoulder) in the straight version and the final image. As you will probably notice, a lot of the detail is missing in the straight shot as a consequence of the fact that the highlights in the red channel were clipped in the original exposure. Fortunately though, clipping in one channel can be compensated for by either dropping the exposure (as you convert the RAW file) or by lowering the saturation. In this instance I used the second method, and partially desaturated the image using the Channel Mixer.

Other than that, the post-processing was relatively straightforward and followed most of the techniques in my Portraits: part one tutorial; i.e. I used a couple of masked curves to adjust the tonal balance of the image and another masked curve to add some light to her eyes.