Today I thought I would forget about the camera and just show you what is going through my mind after I take the image (whew, this will be a quick post) :)

After I save the image to a specific directory on an external hard drive I load it into Lightroom. I use the “Add” image option so I do not physically transfer the file into Lightroom but instead just a small preview image loads and the bulk of the file stays on the external hard drive.

Why do I use this option ?

Because I installed 250 gb SSD’s in all my Mac’s and at that time they were pretty expensive (today you can pick ip 512 gb SSD’s for the same price I paid for the 256 gb drives). You can fill a 250 gb hard drive pretty fast with raw files so instead I leave the images on the external drives which have plenty of capacity.

This is one particular image I will use for the purposes of this post and it is straight out of the camera.  In this case I used a Nikon D300 camera at 1000 ISO and the photo was taken at the “Little Italy” section of Boston’s North End.

As you can see this photo was taken at night and with the mixed type of street lighting and floodlights in the photo I really don’t think I should even waste time with trying to get the color balance correct. Also take notice that although this image was only taken at 1000 ISO it was also taken with a camera that is old by todays standards.  It was a fantastic high ISO performer back in the day but the grain looks pretty coarse compared to a more modern camera.

This is basically the same image with a little bit tighter cropping applied.  For the sake of this post I will save some time and just skip to the next step because sometimes I will sit in front of the computer screen and crop 20 to 30 times and see if I like the image any better.

Being I will not get the color balance correct I converted the image to black and white and I think its starting to look a little better.  The lights seem too hot for my liking and I will have to adjust them a little.  The lights are pretty close to the edge of the image so I have an idea on how to fix them.

On this version I cropped the image a little bit more and applied a frame to give it a little more finished look.  There is still something not right about this image so I will work with it a little more.

This is the final image and the difference between this and the previous image is that I applied a medium vignette (which also took care of the lights also by toning them down a little).  I also brought the black levels down ever so slightly and applied the watermark in the lower right of the image.

This will end the “You asked for it” posts and I had a blast writing them.  I hope you enjoyed them.