A Scenic World

Freckles have to be one of my favorite facial features. So when I saw that one of the bridesmaids in a wedding I was shooting had them in spades, I was thrilled. Of course, the venue wasn’t ideal for classic portraiture, but I had to use what I had at my disposal. The room where the bridal party was getting ready was lit by one bulb planted squarely in the center of the ceiling and one blind-enclosed window. Because the groomsmen tended to gather almost right outside this window, we could only barely open the blinds at any given moment, meaning the light slanted steeply downward. In short, it was a low-light situation where I couldn’t capitalize on the direction of the light at hand.

But luckily I had the FA 31/1.8 with me, so I boosted the ISO to 400 and counted on it to do its magic.

I took one photo before she started posing for me (read: big smiles), and this is it:

The lighting, as I mentioned, was uneven – her torso and shoulder are much brighter than her face, but I figured I could fix that in post-processing; the important thing to me was to get her face correctly exposed so that I could bring out those freckles when the time came.

For the “classic” post-processing I ended up with, I actually changed very few of the original settings. The white balance (which was on “AUTO” for the camera) stayed the same; the basic tone elements – exposure, recovery, fill light, and blacks – also remained the same. I actually decreased the brightness and the contrast, which led to this slight difference:

The tone curve is where things start to go drastic. I set the Highlights to +90, the Lights to +100, the Darks to 50, and the Shadows to -57. The curve created is a deep falloff, with a crazy photo to prove it:

The idea, though, with trying to create a dramatic photo is that sometimes you have to use dramatic settings. Once we tone down the vibrance a bit (to -7) and the saturation (to -15), the photo already looks better:

As you can see, the blue dominates the photo, but there are two other important colors – red and orange. They comprise the majority of her facial colors. By adjusting the hue, saturation, and luminance of each of those colors, we can pinpoint precisely what we want to stand out (in my case, the freckles!).

I changed the hue of “Red” to +100, which is going to give it an oranger color. I like the look of slightly desaturated lips, so I adjusted saturation to -5. Then I brought up the luminance to +17 so that the red bits are a bit brighter:

Most of her skin is “Orange,” though, so by playing with those same settings, I’m really going to affect the overall photo. I set the hue toward the red end of the spectrum to -38. Next I desaturated it to -69 and brought the luminance all the way up to +100:

Now to get rid of that sea of blue. I left the hue the same and desatured to -57 and kicked the luminance up to +57 for the “Blues”:

So all those edits and a couple of tweaks with the yellow and aqua result in this:

Because so much of the color is gone, I like to add a bit back by adding split-toning. In this instance, I went for a gold highlight (Hue: 48, Saturation: 32) and a peach shadow (Hue: 39, Saturation: 17) with the balance between the two skewed toward the shadows (to the tune of -49).

A vignette pushed nearly to the max provides dark shadows around the edges.

I’m still not a fan of where the light is falling, so I decided to use a couple of the tools provided by Lightroom 2 – namely, the gradient and the brush.

For the first gradient, I reduced the exposure by nearly a full stop (-.90) and the brightness to -60. I also kicked up the clarity a bit to help alleviate the softness brought about by the shallow depth-of-field. I pulled the gradient up from the bottom-right corner.

For the second gradient, I actually increased the exposure to +.70 and pulled it directly from the right toward her face. The idea was to mimic light that would have been coming directly from an uncovered window rather than that downward light I had to deal with.

Next to the brushes. I ended up using five different brushes: one for the left side of her face, two for her hair, and two for her eyes. The key to using brushes is to pay strict attention to the feathering and to the flow.

For the first brush, I wanted to darken the left side of her face and bring out those freckles (disregard the settings. Lightroom doesn’t like having screencaps made of it). For the settings, I set Brightness to -20, Contrast to +30, and Clarity to +75.  I had the feathering set to almost its maximum and the flow set toward the minimum. That meant I had to make multiple passes over the areas I wanted to affect the most, but this way there would be no tell-tale lines between brushed and non-brushed.

For the second brush, I wanted to bring out the details of the curls in her hair. Once again, I painted with a large brush set to lots of feathering and little flow. I used the “Erase” function with similar settings to make sure I didn’t accidentally brighten her face.

The third brush complemented the second; it specifically brightened the crown of her hairline where the hair sweeps back.

Next it was time to work on the eyes. They looked a little muddy to me, so I brightened the white portions by increasing the exposure and brightness.

And finally, to really make them pop, I used another brush where I focused mainly on the irises to increase the exposure, the contrast, and the clarity.

And there you have it! If you’d like to download this preset, click here or head over to the Lightroom Presets!

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:

I’ve always thought that purple flowers were one of the hardest photos to process. Almost any deviation in post-processing results in odd-looking, supernatural, or ugly flowers. I’m sure there’s a technical explanation involving color gamuts and sensor capabilities, but in the end, I just want to be able to play with my photos of purple flowers (and blue, and violet, and lavender, and all the colors in between) the same way I play with all my other flower photos and not end up with some technicolor monstrosity.

So yesterday I hit on a pretty nice approach in Lightroom that I’d figure I’d share here.

Here’s a photo of some of my favorite weeds I took last week:

A small white balance change towards the blue end of the spectrum results in this:

A few quick edits to some of the Basic Tone settings gets us going further down the path I want to go. To wit, I pushed the exposure to almost a full extra stop (+.73), added some highlight recovery, and pushed the blacks just a tiny bit. I also kicked up the brightness to +57.

Playing with the tone curve by pushing the Highlights to +36, the Lights to +33, the Darks to +38, and taking the shadows all the way down to -100 gives us this:

I think that this is actually quite a lovely improvement to the original, and all done without touching global saturation or tweaking any of the individual colors. But let’s face it: this isn’t quite my style, so I am going to touch saturation and tweak all the individual colors.

First, I’m going to pull the Vibrance down to -7 and the global Saturation down to -15 – hardly rebellious moves, to be sure. It’s in the individual colors’ settings that I’ll really achieve the look I’m going for.

I desaturate almost all the colors to -100. The one exception is Blue. When we changed our white balance, we changed what colors the flowers were, and while they started out a healthy Purple, they’re now skewed toward the blue side. By changing the Blue Hue toward the purple end of the spectrum and keeping some saturation, we can get a very similar color for the flowers that we started with. And for extra pop, we can set the Blue Luminance to +100.

I made quite a few adjustments to the luminances of various colors as well. For instance, a lot of the background was made up of Greens and Aquas. I adjusted the Green Luminance to +62 and the Aqua Luminance to +79.

All those changes took our photo to this:

Quite a dramatic difference, eh? I actually like this ghostly silvery look, but by bumping up the saturations of the Blues and Purples, we can get that color of the flowers right back without introducing anything else to distract from the blooms:

A bit of split-toning highlights added (Hue: 60, Saturation: 15) and some minor vignetting (Amount: -48, Midpoint: -27), and we end up with what I think is quite a nice photo: