Kane’s before and after

For my project, I will be taking some of my photos in nightclubs so I wanted to get to grips with bringing detail and colour out of darker images. For this task, I used a Cannon 550D with a kit lens to take a landscape shot of Briggate and a portrait shot of a friend outside one of the University of Leeds buildings.

I edited my photos using Adobe Lightroom as it’s what I’m most comfortable with using and is an industry standard when it comes to colour editing in photos.

I edited the portrait first, increasing the exposure to counteract the darkness and dropping the highlights to reduce the contrast. I also increased the colour temperature slightly to give the night a warmer feel.

For the landscape, I began by increasing the exposure and decreasing the highlights as before. Then, I isolated the sky and darkened to give a greater appearance of night and lightened the buildings to give them more detail.

I also increased the saturation to give the building colours a slight neon effect, simulating the neon of a nightclub, but balanced this out by lowering the vibrance, making sure the muted colours in the image weren’t also increased, preventing the image from looking cartoonish.