Exploring Lightroom and Selective Black & White

I'm just a few weeks into using Adobe Lightroom and I am impressed by the power and flexibility of its tools. I find I'm getting more dynamic range and contrast from single RAW files, and powerful noise reduction without sacrificing much sharpness.

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Selective Black & White, but not the usual way

In the above photo, I took color out of just the flower and left the surrounding vegetation green and yellow. Very often, photographers strip the color out of the periphery, leaving only the flower in color. However, I liked the crisp texture of the petals, their shape and the play of light and shadow.

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One color to rule them all

Much of my ease and familiarity with using Lightroom so quickly is to the credit of Serge Ramelli, "a French photographer living in Paris". Serge hosts a biweekly podcast on YouTube for Lightroom, Photoshop and Photomatix. 

Buy my bundle of Lightroom 5 and my workflow training here: http://bit.ly/LR5Worflow Sign up for the newsletter and get the raw files for free: ======================================== http://bit.ly/SignupPhotoserge In this episode we will retouch 3 photos; the first is correctly exposed, the second is underexposed and last is overexposed. We do that in Lightroom 5.