A Scenic World

Disclaimer: I started with a preset I had already made and then tweaked it substantially to arrive at the settings below. So what you see does not reflect my workflow but rather how the individual settings arrive at the finished product. If you’d like to see my actual workflow, have a look at this post.

I held an informal poll yesterday to see which version of the twelve variations of my self-portrait was most popular, and version #7 won handily. This was one of my favorites as well, and the reason I didn’t use it was twofold. First, it was very close to the same settings I used a year ago when I had my face painting done at the same festival. And second, the one I chose complemented my matching shot much better. But as promised, I’m providing the preset I made from the settings of the winning shot, which you can download here (feel free to pick up the other ones as well!).

Here’s the original picture, with the crop and some background darkening already applied:

The most dramatic difference was one I’ve touted here again and again: white balance. If your subject has light-colored eyes, as I do, then leaning heavily toward the blue end of the spectrum will really make those eyes pop.

I did adjust the camera calibration as well, which worked in tandem with that custom white balance to bring out the colors I wanted: namely the blues and greens. Interestingly enough, the way to do this was to completely desaturate the green and blue channels and emphasizing the red channel.

The dramatic contrasts were achieved through pushing the sliders under “Basic Tone.” The exposure was increased by nearly 2 stops, blacks were pushed to the max, recovery was pushed to the max, and a bit of fill light was added. And as you can probably guess, contrast was pushed to +100.

Since so much was done with those sliders, the actual tone curve is pretty pedestrian (for me): Highlights to +10, Lights at 0,  Darks at -17, Shadows at -50.

The color settings were where this photo really came together. Overall, I set the vibrance to -100 and the global saturation to -26, but as always, I played with the sliders of each color to achieve exactly the effect I wanted. As you can see in the photo above, we’re primarily dealing only with aquas and blues. Those were very carefully tweaked to provide the hues we end up with.

The secret to the “silver” look is to add a tiny bit of gold back to the photo, if the photo doesn’t already have some in it. This one didn’t, since it was all blues and greys, so I added some split toning in the form of golden highlights and shadows. A bit of a vignette completed the look:

And there you have it! The winning look, as chosen by various forum members and visitors to this blog:

Yesterday I had a splitting headache and a chest-rattling cough, and the last thing I wanted to do was pick up my camera. So most of the day, I curled up in bed with the lights off and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” playing on the laptop. As it got closer and closer to midnight, I knew I had to take my two shots for the day, so I decided to do a TLOTR tribute shot, one that I knew would be easy for me: a macro of my eye (I know, again, right?) and a close-up of the beautiful gold letters on my friends’ deluxe box set of the DVD. The twist would be that I was going to process my eye photo to look as much like the Eye of Sauron as possible.

Because I really, REALLY didn’t feel like expounding any effort, I used only the relatively weak overhead light as my light source, which meant I needed to get as close as possible to it. So I knelt on the bed right underneath it and held the camera right next to the light. The hardest part was keeping my balance on the soft mattress and keeping my hand steady for a 1/60th of a second shot with the K200D+D-FA 100mm combo. I took a few shots and finally got one that I deemed good enough.

So this is what I started with (this is cropped down from the original):

It’s a little underexposed and not as sharp as it could be, but hey, a photo’s a photo, right? At least until we start this heavy-handed processing ;)

The first step was to convert it to a contrast-laden, highlight-pushing black-and-white:

The next step is to add some split toning. In this case, the split toning will serve as the base for the other edits made. A strong dose of mustard-yellow highlights and blood-red shadows start us off in the right direction:

Then we start with the brushes. For the first brush, I put the settings to Exposure -.6, Brightness +25, and Contrast +87 and brushed over the entire frame:

The second brush was for the iris only. You can see the parts affected here (the red color indicates the bits I brushed):

The settings were as follows:

• Exp +.80
• Brightness -75
• Contrast +100
• Clarity +100
• Color: Gold

The outcome:

I used a third brush to paint around everything but the eye to make the background black by setting the brush’s settings to Exposure -4, Brightness -200. I also added a touch in the center of the eye to get rid of the reflection from the light in the pupil:

And there you have it! The Eye of Sauron in five easy steps :)

Want to know how I processed my day 150 shot? Read on! Want to grab the lightroom preset? Skip to the end and download :)

First, we start with the original. It’s going to look pretty bland, as there really wasn’t a lot of contrast in the sky or the ocean:

By changing the white balance to a bluer temperature, we start seeing the colors that you’ll see at the end:

Frequent readers will know that I love to change the camera calibration settings, and with this one, I made quite a few changes. To wit:

Red Hue: -79
Red Saturation: no change
Green Hue: no change
Green Saturation: -67
Blue Hue: -93 (toward the aqua end)
Blue Saturation: no change

These changes resulted in this:

I did some pretty drastic things in the Basic editing. I increased exposure and brightness by almost a full stop, applied +100 recovery, a tiny bit of fill light, and pushed the blacks to +39 and the contrast all the way to +100:

Likewise, the tone curve has some interesting values. Highlights were increased to +48, which led to blowing out that strip to the left in the clouds but also gave some texture to the upper clouds; Lights were increased to +12; Darks were increased to +40; and Shadows were decreased to -67, making for a very dark photo indeed:

Next, a few color changes are going to go a long way toward lessing that aqua tint. First, Vibrance and Saturation are both going to be decreased a good bit. Next, I manually decreased the saturation of every color except blue. I changed the hue of the blues in the photo toward the purple end of the spectrum to combat that aqua and increased the saturation of just the blues:

There was no split-toning or vignetting added to this photo, so for once we get to skip that step :)

The true magic for this photo happens when we add the localized edits. First I did a little burning in that bright cloud on the left:

Granted, that’s not much of a difference, but it was something was bugging me. But take a look at what happens when we add a gradient from the bottom of the photo to the horizon. The gradient increases exposure by +.70 and lowers the contrast of the area by -100:

Pretty cool, right? The hardest part here was knowing that all that detail could be recovered from such a dark photo, but remember that all that darkness was added – the original photo was well-exposed and retained a good bit of detail. It would be much more difficult to start with an under-exposed photo and expect to be able to get the same effects with similar processing.

Another gradient over the bottom third of the photo (although at an angle so that the gradient takes in that bit below the pier) with the exposure pushed to +.40, contrast increase of +82 and clarity increased to +60 results in this:

A final gradient that only increases contrast by +43 and clarity by +100 was added from the top to the horizon for the clouds:

And if you want to skip all the stuff above (except for the gradients – those would definitely be photo-specific), just download this, unzip, and add to your presets: Dark and Stormy.