Taken with Nikon D40 in Salt Lake City on July 6, 2008. Aperture Priority Exposure, 55mm, 1/30 sec f/5.6 (shot of foot), 1/25 sec f/5.6 (shot of hand), ISO 200, Nikon Raw Format. Edited in Lightroom 2.0 Beta.

See Jordin Taylor on a black background and before and after

A few weeks ago Julie and I did a mini photo shoot of Jordin Taylor (the daughter of Julie’s sister). The goal was to get some shots of Jordin with her dad (Jake) playing with her toes and some other cute baby pictures (hands, feet, skin). Jordin was very good and we had a fun time taking these pictures. See the rest of the photos here.

After importing the photos into Lightroom and backing up the originals on a second hard drive, I removed all the color from the photos with the grayscale conversion tool in Lightroom. I really love the feel of black and white photos for baby skin and for other tender and intimate photos so it was an obvious choice here. For the photo of Jordin’s foot I increased the exposure about 1/3 stop and increased the contrast by 40%. The photo of Jordin’s hand needed about 1/4 stop of exposure and about 5% increase in the blacks.

I decreased the red and orange tones to soften the skin texture. In the black and white world of Lightroom the saturation sliders work by adjusting the colors of the original color photo effectively changing the contrast, lighting, and density of specific color. This is similar to using a color filter while shooting black and white film – except that I have complete control in post to feed my creative drive! Because red and orange are very common skin tones (usually showing up as splotches and blemishes), slightly decreasing the saturation of those colors provides a softening effect on the skin tones in the black and white photo; conversely, increasing the saturation of those colors creates very hard and rough skin tones.

I put the two photos on a mat and overlaid Jordin’s name in the Print module of Lightroom and exported the photo as a high quality sRGB jpeg file. I hope you enjoy this photo and please remember to enjoy yourself behind the lens. You are in control so be creative. I’d love to hear what you think about this post so please leave me some feedback. Cheers.