A Scenic World

I’ve had my converted-infrared camera for a year now, and I feel like I’m slowly coming to understand how to process the photos from it. It seems that most people swap the channels, but since Lightroom doesn’t have this option and I’m too lazy to get up to speed on any new software, I decided to work around that.

When I was asked to do a zombie-esque photo á la “28 Days Later,” I decided that the infrared camera coupled with my 35mm macro lens was just what I needed. I had the subject stand in a stairwell during the day,where his face was fully lit by reflected sunlight but the background was dark. I put the camera in Av and pushed the EV compensation to +1.3 and took this:

Doesn’t seem like much to go on, but I knew if I spent enough time, I could make this look like I imagined it should look.

The first step, as always, was to tweak the white balance. When I do that, I’m looking for a value that makes features or colors pop out or a nice balance of the colors or textures. For me, the colors don’t have to remotely match what they looked like or will look like – almost all the colors can be tweaked later. I ended up with a much bluer white balance than what I started with:

My subject has brown eyes in real life, but I knew from experience that dark-eyed people could be made to look as though they have light eyes with infrared, so I really wanted his eyes to appear blue. I played around with the color calibration at the bottom of the edit window in Lightroom until I had a happy marriage of colors and contrasts:

So already, we’re off to a running start. Next is to tweak the Basic Tone elements, so I pushed the exposure to +.19, added some recovery, threw in some fill light, and pushed the blacks all the way to 100. Because my infrared photos lack contrast, I pushed it all the way to +100 as well. Also, infrared photos tend to look a bit soft, so I maxed out the clarity as well.

For the tone curve, I pulled the highlights back to -33, pulled the lights back to -5, made the darks -17, and made the shadows -50. All in all, a very boring curve that’s more like a gentle slope.

For the colors, I did a general desaturation and then played with each color on its own. I didn’t want to fully desaturate all that blue because manipulating the luminance of the blues really made some areas, like the nose and cheeks pop:

The t-shirt in the bottom was really kind of killing the mood for me, so a vignette pushed all the way helped take care of that:

And then finally, I decided to use the split-toning to help create some of the skin tones I wanted the final version to have:

Now to the nitty-gritty. We’ll start with a graduated mask over the entire photo to increase the contrast and clarity even more:

Now on the brushes. I warn you, this part is pretty boring, but as you’ll see, the brushes are what make this photo.

First, I wanted to deal with the overall skin-tone.

The red on the left indicates where I “brushed” over the original photo and the values on the right indicate just what I was “brushing.” This brush was to desaturate that blue that was left over. Desaturating this way – with a brush – helps leave that luminance we adjusted back in the color section.

This brush was to darken some parts of the skin very slightly (exposure was decreased by -.2) and to soften the gradation between the brightest and darkest parts of the skin by reducing the contrast to -60. Once again, the clarity was increased to further emphasize those pores and crags in the face.

This third brush was used for one purpose only – to overlay a slight peach-colored tint for the skin. If you notice on the right, I changed the “color” of the brush to a very light tan.

Now it’s time to get into the eyes. There was STILL some blue left, so I desaturated the eyebrows and eyelashes once again.

The left eye was pretty heavily shadowed, originally, so I wanted to make it brighter but to still look realistic. I upped the exposure a half-stop and added a bit of contrast. Once again, I desaturated and pumped the clarity.

I ended up using the same exposure value for the right eye, but slightly more contrast and slightly less clarity.

The lips really looked dead before, so I tried to add a life-like color (actually, I originally made them blood-red, but the subject thought it looked more like lipstick that like blood, so I backed off). I also decreased the clarity here because I wanted the eye to draw attention more than the lips.

It’s probably difficult to tell at this size, but the hairs of the goatee really popped in the original, and since this was going to be printed at a pretty decent size (12″x18″), I increased the clarity of that area.

Finally, I got rid of any remnants of that t-shirt.

And so we ended up with a zombie:

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: