Fix Your Dead Sony ZV-1 Photos (Part 2)
In Part 1 I rescued a set of badly backlit ZV-1 photos using RAW files, subject masking, and a handful of light adjustments. If you haven't read it, start there: this post picks up where that one ends.
Because correcting the light is only half the job. A technically correct photo can still feel like nothing.
This is the part where it gets a mood.
Correction versus colour
These are two separate jobs and treating them as one is why a lot of edits go sideways.
Correction is fixing what the camera got wrong: exposure, shadows, white balance. There's a right answer. You're aiming for true.
Colour is the part where there's no right answer. It's a choice about how you want the photo to feel. Warm and nostalgic, cool and clean, sharp and modern, soft and grainy.
Do them in that order, always. Preset first on a broken photo and you're just tinting a mess.
Light corrected versus the filmic preset
Put the two versions side by side, and the difference is clear.
The light corrected image is brighter with true tone. The blue is blue. The water reads accurately. It's a good photo, and if that's the look you want, you're done.
The filmic preset version is grainy with warm yellow tones. The sky goes hazy and pale, the whites go creamy, everything lifts and softens. It stops looking like a digital photo and starts looking like something scanned off film.
Neither is better. They're different answers to the same photo.
What the preset is actually doing
Three things, mostly:
Grain, which is the biggest one. Digital files are clean to the point of feeling sterile. Adding grain back gives the image texture and immediately reads as film to the eye.
Warmth in the highlights, which pushes yellow into the bright areas and gives that late-afternoon glow even when the light wasn't quite that generous.
Lifted blacks, which stop the shadows from going pure black. Film never had true black. Faded shadows are a big part of why the filmic look feels soft rather than punchy.
Why the preset still needs light correcting.
Here's the thing that trips people up. A preset applies the same adjustments to every photo you drop it on. It doesn't know your subject was in shadow. It doesn't know your exposure was two stops under.
So if you drop the filmic preset on an uncorrected file, you get a dark photo with grain on it. The preset did its job. The photo still needs the correction, and skipping it doesn't make it go away.
Fix the light, apply the preset, and you get the version I posted. Whether you correct before or after is genuinely up to you: I tend to correct first because it's easier to judge the mood on a photo I can actually see, but plenty of people apply the preset first and adjust underneath it.
The preset is the last 20%. The correction is the 80% that makes the 20% work.
The Final Roll
Correct the light first. Add the mood second. Do it in that order and almost any photo is recoverable.
It's just photography, not rocket science.
Grab the free Lightroom guide above: it walks through everything from both posts, step by step. And once you're editing less to fix problems and more to add character, the ZV-1 Settings Guide in the shop is what gets your files closer to right in-camera.
xo Steph
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