A Scenic World

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!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 7:28 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.