Serge Ramelli – inspirational Lightroom post-processing

If you’re looking for inspiration in terms of new ways to post-process your raw photo images, I commend to you Serge Ramelli, ‘a French photographer living in the beautiful city of Paris’, as he always introduces himself in his bi-weekly YouTube broadcasts. He has certainly shown me how to get the maximum detail and conjure impressive effects from my image data. This is the episode that got me hooked:

I was seriously impressed by how he used Lightroom to transform a rather dull-looking evening scene into a one that positively glows. With over 120 photography, Lightroom and Photoshop tutorials to his credit, on topics ranging from landscapes to architecture, portraits to printing and much more, he has covered a lot of ground.

To complement his broadcasts, Serge makes the raw files he processes on screen available for download to those who sign up to his email list, enabling them to practice on it at home. He also regularly releases more in-depth paid tutorials. I bought one a while back about Lightroom 4 and found it very useful.

The best value option, if you can run to it, is the Photoserge complete package, which gives you download access to everything he sells – tutorials, Lightroom presets and sample files – for $340 (about £200) in one of his periodic 40%-off sales. Although some of Serge’s zipped archives are very large, the physical video files they contain are yours to keep once you have downloaded them; you don’t subscribe for a fixed period to watch online, as with some other tutorial providers.

Incidentally, I can vouch for his refund policy, since I took the plunge with the complete package a day after buying his long-exposure course and then asked for a refund on the latter, briefly explaining why. This he duly gave without quibble.