First of all, I am by no means a professional photographer. I've got a basic Canon EOS Rebel T6 / EOS 1300D and complemented it with a 50mm objective.

I enjoy playing airsoft for a hobby, which is little more than grown people, dressing up in military gear, playing "cowboys and indians" with plastic weapons (no weapons highlighted in this post as per the community guidelines).

Others might call it tactical simulations - in either case, fun is fun and makes for a lot of interesting photos.

Here is one of my latest shots, a portrait of an airsoft player shot in a flat color profile.

Lightroom before / after - image 1 - student project

I have previously been using Lightroom to enhance the quality of my pictures, and ever since I've seen tutorials on color grading been trying to achieve more cinematic type of pictures - enhancing oranges in highlights and adding teal to shadows, increasing contrast etc.

Sometimes the result would end up ok, other times it looked worse coming out of Lightroom than what went in.

This is what my previous Lightroom knowledge allowed me to achieve.

Lightroom before / after - image 2 - student project

Not bad, but not really controlled. A lot of the parameters in Lightroom I really didn't know how they worked in any real sense, but just by having watched online guides and experimenting with Lightroom I somehow managed to get to results I was resonable satisfied with.

Having watched the course here on skillshare from the fundamentals to the advanced I've begun understanding what stuff does and started making more adjustments with intent rather than blindly experimenting.

So I decided to go back to one of my previous photographs armed with some new-found knowledge and recreate the post-processing; not by the actual end result but rather the intended end result.

Lightroom before / after - image 3 - student project

The result being more colorful and vivid, less blue shadows and a more balanced exposure. Its not that dramatic of a difference, but still the result is a lot better and more guided by intent than luck. Thanks for a great course!

Lightroom before / after - image 4 - student project

David Frendin

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