A Scenic World

I actually took a lot of photos at Hogan’s, home of great sandwiches and ice cold beer, but I had to use this photo as my matching shot since Mike was so kind as to provide a perfect background!

The photo started as a pretty standard snapshot taken under low bar-type lighting:

Surprisingly, the white balance didn’t get changed at all during the processing; instead, I achieved the greener look that you see in the final version by adjusting the camera calibration settings. I find that this can really fine-tune not only the colors we see but how much we see of them. To wit:

Red Primary:
Hue: +100
Saturation: -24

Green Primary:
Hue: -14
Saturation: -48

Blue Primary:
Hue: +31
Saturation: -81

These changes result in this:

Subtle changes, yes, but I wanted the tones to match my other shot.

Next step was the basic toning, for which I used the following settings:

Exposure: +1.71 (yowza!)
Recovery: 68
Fill Light: 0
Blacks: 48

Brightness: +32
Contrast: -50

Adding  a nice, sloping curve results in more details in the shadows and less prominence of the cheekbones:

Highlights:  -14
Lights: +67
Darks: +17
Shadows: +31

Now we can use our color tools to mitigate that ghastly orange pallor by slightly desaturating the overall photo and  almost completely desaturating the oranges and yellows:

By using a bit of split-toning, we can add the colors we want for the highlights and shadows back in (since I was going for a kind of vintage look, I used a hue of 65 with a saturation of 50 for the highlights and none for the shadows). Adding a bit of vignetting hopefully brings the focus more to the subject and adds to that vintage feel.

Finally, I used some localized brushing to take out the bright bits along the left edge and the pony-tail holder behind my ear:

And there you have it!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 18th, 2009 at 8:48 am and is filed under Lightroom Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.