Post-processing Software Improvements

I haven’t been out for a couple of weeks due to weather and other commitments. Instead I have been working on updating my Lightroom Collections.  In the past I have been pretty slack about adding my bird images into collections, however in the last week I have been through the last three years worth and they are all in their own collections now by species. Slow laborious work but definitely worth it.  Now I am going through each collection (which includes many images I should have culled) and finding some treasures. Lightroom had some updates recently and while I did the updates, I didn’t bother to read what the improvements are.  Today I found out!  I was playing with the image below and wondered if I could lighten the bird a bit with a radial mask, but when I looked for the familiar icon it was gone.

Instead I found one for masks and when I clicked on that I got a short tutorial. Yes I actually watched it and can’t believe how easy it was to turn a trash image into something I would be happy to print and put on the wall. I asked Lightroom to ‘select subject’ and it did exactly that!  No messy edges, no pieces of branch, nothing to tidy up.  I was able to lighten up the bird without the rest of the image changing and I have to admit I was a little gobsmacked. Who knew all that detail was there to be found! (See the image below).  I am sure there will be a lot of Lightroom users out there who are laughing at me right now, but I have never really done much in Lightroom other than sort my images.  Most of my processing is done in Photoshop.  That said, I am always keen to learn something new and I have to thank Adobe for this update as it has made this type of work very easy!