A Broken Christmas

A Broken Christmas
Originally uploaded by jezza323

I took this shot to enter in my workplace monthly photo comp in Decemeber. The theme for the month was "Broken". Being Christmas time I got into the spirit and broke some tree decorations.

I was trying to capture a decoration in the process of breaking, but unfortunately my timing was never quite good enough. This was the best of the lot though, which I took just after it had broken.

There was a LOT of work in Lightroom 2.5 to complete this photo. The key to doing large area Adjustment Brush work like I did in this photo is to use a LARGE brush, and the Auto Mask feature. Don't be too tempted to use a small brush to get in between things. If you keep the centre of the brush in the right spot, the Auto Masking will take care of the rest!

A before/after comparison in Lightroom

Shooting and PP Details as follows:

• White Nylon backdrop
• Pentax K200D body, firing onboard flash
• Pentax SMC "A" 50mm f1.7 lens @ f22
• Tripod to mount the camera, and a cable remote to fire it
• Sunpak flash with optical trigger and home made diffuser, placed directly above, and slightly behind the subject
• Shot in Pentax RAW (PEF)
• Import into Lightroom 2.5
• Applied large area of adjustment brush to make background more white, area and settings shown below
• Minor basic edits to improve contrast and colour in the broken pieces, shown below
• Edit Detail settings
• Export to JPG For Web