A Scenic World

I had seen these railroad tracks on my first day in Richmond (when I was stupid enough to not bring my camera), and luckily my wonderful host had no problem taking me back there to get some shots. I had no idea that I would be even MORE lucky to have a train come by in the two minutes I stood there, but when it did, I snapped away as if my camera had 20 FPS. One photo in particular jumped out at me as having all the elements come together perfectly. Unfortunately, the weather was particularly lackluster that day, and it shows in the original:

As I was scrolling through my presets, a little-used and rather bizarre little preset I made some time ago seemed to fit nearly perfectly with a bit of tweaking. The preset is called “Gentle Hardcore,” and I remember making it over a year ago and not using it since:

I set about doing the tweaks. So here’s each step, broken down by Lightroom’s distinctions:

First, a white balance change. I always shoot in RAW and always leave my white balance set on AUTO because it’s the easiest thing to fix in post-processing. A slight bump to the warmer side of things can almost always make a world of difference. In this case, the preset also moved the white balance toward the magenta range:

Next up is the basic toning. This includes Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. In this case, the exposure and brightness were both increased a bit, recovery was used extensively, a bit of fill light was added, and the blacks and contrast were pushed moderately:

It looks like a super-poorly-processed photo from 1978, no?

Next up, we have the tone curve. Conventional wisdom says to go for an “S” curve. Mine looks more like an alpine ski slope. Go for broke.

Next we have the color treatment. I always change the default view of the color screen so that I can see each color listed separately and affect the hue, saturation, and luminance of each color as I want. So mine looks like this:

Being able to finely adjust each color means that the photo looks like this after they’ve all been tweaked:

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I love adding split-toning, so this one got a big dose of mustard highlights and slightly rosy shadows:

It wouldn’t be a picture from me if it didn’t have a vignette, so that was duly added, although not to its full force:

Now here’s where the real magic for this photo comes in, I think. I like the picture above, and I could have easily left it there and been mostly happy. But by playing with the camera calibration settings, I was able to pick apart how each color interacts with the others. My calibration menu ended up looking like this:

And the photo ended up looking like this:

And that’s exactly how I wanted it to look. I spent 6 hours in airports and on planes to get to Richmond; spending an hour playing with all those sliders to get this look definitely seems justified to me.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 14th, 2010 at 10:00 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.