A Scenic World

First, in case you want to skip all this, you can download my newest preset by clicking here.

I’ve said time and time again that all the steps I write here in my tutorials aren’t anything like what I actually do, and now I can prove it!

Original Photo:

I took this photo of a snowflake flower (or “Leucojum vernum” as fellow photographer Gerry Winterbourne informed me) the other day with my settings at their usual: low contrast, low sharpening, slightly underexposed. I definitely wanted to punch it up during post-processing, but none of the presets I had were quite doing the job. Then I happened to scroll over “Red Dragon” (protip: it’s available under the “Lightroom Presets” tab) and I thought “This is just what I want, except without all that red and yellow!” So I started to play.

Here’s how the photo looked with the “Red Dragon” preset:

I told you: lots of red there. All that color cast you see above is done with split-toning, so my first step was to get rid of all of that. I set both the split-toning highlights and lowlights to 0.

That was almost exactly what I was looking for, but I decided to make a couple of tweaks. First I adjusted the luminances and saturations of the yellow and green colors to get the following:

Next I adjusted the curves so that the petals popped more. In this case, the highlights were increased all the way to +100 (take that, conventional thinking!) and the highlights were increased to nearly the same amount.

Next I pushed the global saturation a bit:

A slight change to the camera calibration emphasized the original tones even more (honestly, I don’t remember when I did this step):

And finally, I went back to split-toning and added a bit of golden highlights for a slightly more mysterious, emo look (although in retrospect, I think I might like the “cleaner” version above):

And there you have it! The story of a preset, from conception to graduation :)

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 10:59 am 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.