During the shootout we realized that one of our lenses got "foggy".
In old film days, this would have been a session terminator. We decided to continue the session at the risk of re-doing it in another day. Definitely not a disaster...
This post is actually a free Lightroom tutorial for rescuing foggy photos.
The original foggy photo looked like this:
Lets start working in Lightroom
A quick glance at the histogram reveals most of the problem - no shadows:
The first step will be to add some shadows with the Blacks slider in the Basic tab:
Actual values might be different with other photos. After darkening the Blacks, you might need to increase Exposure.
What about some color?
To change the general "look" of the photo I chose Leica M8 out of PSKiss Cross Camera Color Profile pack for my camera. I found out that this color profile was best for this session.
I switched to the Camera Calibration tab and picked Leica M8 from the Profile menu:
Fine Tuning Colors in Lightroom
The color profile I chose, changed the pink color of her Dancer's leotard. In addition, I don't like the "plastic" appearance of the greens of this photo, so some fine tuning will be necessary. To do so, I switched to the HSL tab and fixed the Hue of the Reds:
The next step was to desaturate the Greens, the Reds ans the Oranges:
Actual values might be different with other photos
Final Tone Curve Adjustments in Lightroom
To give the image its final tonal range, switch to the Tone Curve tab and adjust the curve.
In this image (as in many others...), I used the "button" next to the curve area so I could click and drag on the areas I wanted to adjust and let the curve move by it self:
Local-contrast with Clarity
For the "final touch" I decided to increase local-contrast using the Clarity slider in the Basic tab:
The Final Image
