Shoot and Edit: Week 3 Part 2

I got such great compliments on this photo over the past week! Thank you so much.

I decided not to follow Ashely's great tutorial this week and kind of did my own thing just using Lightroom at first then I did use CS5 for the black and white conversion (which IS in her tutorial) and the text.

I have never used Lightroom's watermarking capabilities, but iheartfaces.com has a tutorial about it up right now, so hopefully I will have some time to go check that out!

Here's my original shot + text of course.

 For the edit, in Lightroom:
I basically wanted to decrease the yellow in the street lights, denoise, and crop.
Beginning at the top of the editing panel (1) slightly increased my blacks (2) increased clarity +24 (3) lowered my vibrance & saturation just a smidge (4) selected the yellow in the color panel, desaturated almost all the way and increased the luminosity to about +10. I then repeated this on Orange but not as severely - just until the lights were more of a white. (5) In the noise panel, I raised the luminosity and details almost all the way. I usually don't do this that much, but since it was pitch black out there was a lot of noise. (6) went back up to Sharpen and increased it just a little (7) cropped to my liking.

I like how just shortening the photo makes it look so much wider and really brings the lights to you. I also like the original crop because of the lights in the distance look.
I then went into CS5 and added my text.

In CS5 I (1) added a Black and White Adjustment Layer (I think I used the Yellow Filter).

Then, (2) decreased the opacity just a little. 

I started to post the screen shots of the panels in Lightroom, however, I decided to go to sleep instead! If anybody wants me to do that I definately can - for this or the next edit! As, I noted in Monday's post I'm a big Lightroom fan! =) Thanks Ashely and Jill for another great week!