A Scenic World

If you happened to read the post from yesterday, you’ll see that in all the settings, I never once mentioned camera calibration. Quelle horreur! It wasn’t because I didn’t play around with those settings just as much as the others; on the contrary, the effects were so dramatic that I decided to devote an entire post to the camera calibration settings.

In yesterday’s post, I said that I actually preferred the “ghosty silvery” version with little color, and that’s the one I’m going to be working with today. Here it is, with the split-toning and vignetting added and with the default camera calibration settings:

There are 7 sliders under the “Camera Calibration” menu: Shadows, Red Primary Hue, Red Primary Saturation, Green Primary Hue, Green Primary Saturation, Blue Primary Hue, and Blue Primary Saturation. I like to play with all of them. And in fact, all the changes you see today will be made by ONLY adjusting the camera calibration settings.

First, let’s hit the “Shadows” slider. Just pushing it to +88 toward the magenta end makes a pretty dramatic difference:

Now THAT’s a vignette! But contrary to popular opinion, I’m not necessarily looking for the darkest look possible. So with that in mind, I’m actually going to go the other way with the Shadows and put the slider at -43. This kind of brings out the greens in stems:

Now time to go wacky with the color sliders. They’re all inter-related, so an adjustment to one tends to lead to an adjustment to another one, ad infinitum.

First try. Settings:

Shadows: -43
Red Hue: +5
Red Saturation: +100
Green Hue: -98
Green Saturation: +100
Blue Hue: +74
Blue Saturation: -24

Second try. Settings:

Shadows: -38
Red Hue: +74
Red Saturation: +100
Green Hue: -14
Green Saturation: +29
Blue Hue: +26
Blue Saturation: +12

Those are subtle differences, but hopefully the format of the blog allows you to see how the petals in the second version pop more in the second one.

Now let’s get really crazy.

Settings:

Shadows: -38
Red Hue: +74
Red Saturation: +100
Green Hue: -14
Green Saturation: -62
Blue Hue: -69
Blue Saturation:  +12

How’s that for a fine romance?

The Blue Primary channel is where you can really make some magic happen.

Taking the settings above, I made only one change. I moved the Blue Hue to -100:

Now we’re working with golds.

If we move the Blue Hue to the other direction, to +100, we get this:

Quite a difference, eh?

Now let’s put the Blue Hue back to where we started (-69) and play with the Blue Saturation slider. The starting value is +12. If we take it all the way to -100, this is what we get:

That’s quite a heavy background we’re working with now, and even though this shot was taken with ISO 200, it suddenly looks very noisy. Taking the Blue Saturation slider to the opposite end, to +100, gives us this:

This made me wonder what would happen if we made the Blue Hue -100 and the Blue Saturation +100, since the results were so similar when we changed each value by itself. The result?

Now, time for some full disclosure. While I was writing this up and playing with all those sliders, I realized that I really liked the above version but that it needed some modifications. So I went back and played with EVERYTHING – the white balance, the basic tone, the individual color settings, etc. This is actually how my post-processing process works: one change leads to more and more and more until I have it exactly the way I want it.

So all the settings in this post and yesterday’s are kind of moot, but the basis of the settings is still the same.

Anyway, this is what I ended up with in the end:

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 at 5:49 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.