I made this image while on a quick, self-guided tour through an old church and palace. At the time, this was one of those shots where I set the camera, brought it up to my eye and pressed the shutter - no bracketing, no adjusting the frame, just this one.
As I sit in Frankfurt during a long layover, I realized some quick Lighroom adjustments that yielded a tone-rich scene that I hadn't attempted before. By default, LR makes auto brightness and contrast adjustments (50% and 25% respectively) to every image. This is bad. Any automatic algorithms a software program makes to images deprives the creator of personal control. Set them to zero. The only way I found to make this a default setting is to add it as a preset in the left-hand frame in the Develop module. Then, during import, this preset can be applied to all images as they are rendered into the library.
Next, with the brightness and contrast subdued, I boosted the Clarity slider to 100% and found the result was a deep black in the window frame while leaving smooth mid-to-light gray tones in the background of the stone wall and thatch-roofed house. The clarity adjustment was followed by a slight increase in sharpness (the new Adobe Camera Raw 6 is amazing and sharpens as good as, if not better than using the Photoshop High Pass method - it can be downloaded as a LR plugin and works fine - however, Raw 6 will NOT work in Photoshop versions prior to CS5).
Finally, I applied a preset I made that warms black and white images (Hue 61, Saturation 3) without looking too sepia.
That's it.
Canon G11, ISO 200, 1/200@f5.6
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