A Scenic World

Disclaimer: I started with a preset I had already made and then tweaked it substantially to arrive at the settings below. So what you see does not reflect my workflow but rather how the individual settings arrive at the finished product. If you’d like to see my actual workflow, have a look at this post.

I held an informal poll yesterday to see which version of the twelve variations of my self-portrait was most popular, and version #7 won handily. This was one of my favorites as well, and the reason I didn’t use it was twofold. First, it was very close to the same settings I used a year ago when I had my face painting done at the same festival. And second, the one I chose complemented my matching shot much better. But as promised, I’m providing the preset I made from the settings of the winning shot, which you can download here (feel free to pick up the other ones as well!).

Here’s the original picture, with the crop and some background darkening already applied:

The most dramatic difference was one I’ve touted here again and again: white balance. If your subject has light-colored eyes, as I do, then leaning heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum will really make those eyes pop.

I did adjust the camera calibration as well, which worked in tandem with that custom white balance to bring out the colors I wanted: namely the blues and greens. Interestingly enough, the way to do this was to completely desaturate the green and blue channels and emphasizing the red channel.

The dramatic contrasts were achieved through pushing the sliders under “Basic Tone.” The exposure was increased by nearly 2 stops, blacks were pushed to the max, recovery was pushed to the max, and a bit of fill light was added. And as you can probably guess, contrast was pushed to +100.

Since so much was done with those sliders, the actual tone curve is pretty pedestrian (for me): Highlights to +10, Lights at 0,  Darks at -17, Shadows at -50.

The color settings were where this photo really came together. Overall, I set the vibrance to -100 and the global saturation to -26, but as always, I played with the sliders of each color to achieve exactly the effect I wanted. As you can see in the photo above, we’re primarily dealing only with aquas and blues. Those were very carefully tweaked to provide the hues we end up with.

The secret to the “silver” look is to add a tiny bit of gold back to the photo, if the photo doesn’t already have some in it. This one didn’t, since it was all blues and greys, so I added some split toning in the form of golden highlights and shadows. A bit of a vignette completed the look:

And there you have it! The winning look, as chosen by various forum members and visitors to this blog:

Yesterday I went to the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire, a perennial favorite of the inhabitants of Gainesville. As always, I got my face painted. And as always, I took a moody shot of it :) When I started doing the post-processing, I just kept coming up with different ways to accentuate or enhance various aspects of the photo, most based on presets I’d already developed, but with big twists that really seemed to work. I literally had to make myself stop using the computer last night so I could get some sleep.

So  here I offer twelve different ways to post-process the same photo. I also offer the following: if you choose to vote for your favorite, I’ll post the preset for download for the version that garners the most votes.

Let the fun commence!

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I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a meet-up of some Ovation enthusiasts at a friend’s house. For those who don’t know, Ovation guitars get little respect today, but at one time they were THE guitars for performance. The guys who gathered to show off their gear and show off their skills reminded more than a little bit of some of my Pentax enthusiasts :)

I plan on doing a separate post for the guitars but in the meantime, someone asked me how I processed some of the photos taken at the event of the actual people. So I pulled out Lightroom and broke it down. Watch the magic at work!

Original:

This shot was taken with the K200D and the FA 77/1.8 at f/5.6. The room was quite dark, so I pulled out my too-seldom-used AF 540 FG-Z flash and bounced it off the opposing wall and from the ceiling to light up the participants. It looks fine as is, I think (I had good models to work with!), but I figured I could make it look a bit more dramatic to match the blues the guys were playing.

A quick white-balance change to almost all blue (2476) and all green (-150) results in this :

I know this seems crazy, but bear with me.

The next thing that I usually change is the camera calibration settings. For this photo, we’re going to extremes:

Tint: -62 (toward the green end)

Red Primary: Hue +100, Saturation -100
Green Primary: Hue +2, Saturation -100
Blue Primary: Hue +36, Saturation +100

This results in the following:

Next is the Basic tone. Exposure was raised almost 2 full stops, but highlight were recovered completely. A bit of fill light was added, and the blacks were pushed a bit:

The actual tone curve is surprisingly minimal: just a small bump to the Highlights (+7), no change to Lights, a slightly larger bump to Darks (+31), and then +29 to the Shadows:

The real work is handled with the colors. We’re going to push overall vibrance to +21 and lower the saturation to -69. Because we have created what looks like a cross-processed image, we’ve actually ended up with a photo that is made almost completely of greens. So greens are what we’re going to concentrate on. By adjusting the saturation and the luminance of only the greens, we can control how the light seems to hit our subject’s face. In the instance below, the greens’ luminance is pushed to +100. Since I used these settings for a multitude of photos that had many different colors, I adjusted the other colors as well (even though they don’t affect this particular photo).

Now to just add some split-toning (hue: 60, sat: 20 for the highlights; hue: 34, sat: 15 for the shadows) and some vignetting:

If you want, you can get the exact settings from the preset I made called “Ovation People” by clicking here, or head over to my Lightroom presets page to get that one and more!