A Scenic World

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:

One of the questions that seems to get asked most often on the camera forums I frequent is the best way to convert to black-and-white. So many wonderful photos have been ruined by a terrible black-and-white conversion. The worst in my mind is the muddy grays that in-camera conversions come up with; a close second is what happens when you just move the saturation value to “0.” Ugh.

I spent a good deal of time looking at the black-and-white photos I like, and most of them have one thing in common: they have distinct blacks (the histogram goes all the way to “0″) and either stop just shy of the absolute-white mark or hit it full force (“255″ on the histogram, for those who are keeping score). With that in mind, I’ve taken a rather heavy hand with the contrast and curves on the photos I convert to black-and-white. Mine definitely don’t fall into the warm-and-fuzzy category, so please keep that in mind.

Rohan didn’t really want his photo taken the other day, and in typical Rohan fashion, he refused to look at me, forcing me to take pictures of his profile. I only got off seven shots before he got bored and ran away, but I actually ended up with two pretty exciting shots, especially after they were processed.

The photo looked like this straight out of the camera:

Decent light, nice background – the camera and the lens had done their jobs. Now it was my turn to put Lightroom to work.

As always, I just applied a preset and tweaked, but as always, I’ll walk through each step here – especially because the technique used for this photo hinges almost completely on the much-maligned and rarely-touched “Calibration” menu in Lightroom.

First, the white balance. The camera’s AUTO mode did a pretty fantastic job, but with black-and-white, you have to throw almost everything you know about color out the window. The most awesome black-and-white photos I’ve ever done look absolutely insane in color. And I’ll prove it. Here’s how the above photo looks with the white balance adjusted:

So that’s where we begin.

The basic tone settings are actually fairly pedestrian: a bit of exposure bump, a bit of an increase to the blacks. As you’ll see in the final version, the highlights are kind of strong, so I pushed recovery completely. A little kick to the contrast, and you’re ready to go:

The tone curve once again defies convention:

These values…

…give us this:

Yep.

I work a lot with the individual colors’ hues, saturations, and luminances, and that’s no different when I’m working in black-and-white. It’s one of the reasons you should NEVER do a global desaturation in Lightroom (the saturation slider under the Basic Tone – Presence menu). Otherwise you can’t tweak all those individual settings to make your photo pop. In this instance, all the tweaking I did ended up with this:

Next on the menu is split-toning and vignetting. And – surprise! – there’s no split-toning to this photo! Lots of times I add just a hint of gold for a shimmery effect, but this one really is straight black-and-white. Of course I added a vignette, though. How can you say no to that?

Now for the magic:

The calibration menu on Lightroom has two settings for each channel (as I like to think of them, coming from a Photoshop background): Hue and Saturation. You can desaturate each channel, which does some pretty amazing things to the colors you see. In this case, I desaturated the reds and greens, which happens to be the only colors that exist in the photo immediately above. The blue channel tends to control how all colors get expressed; for instance, if I want to make my freckles pop out like in this picture, I fiddle with the blue channel a lot).

Those settings coupled with everything else we’ve done to this photo results in this, our final version:

And remember those histogram settings? We hit them right on the nose:

I was very happy with the photos I took of the shored sailboat at Cedar Key except for one tiny problem: the foreground was darker than that brightly lit sky. Once I could get the other processing squared away, I decided to pull out the brush and gradient to take care of that.

See? Here’s the original:

The processing was pretty boring up to that point, but just for clarification, I’m going to include those steps here as well. I changed the white balance to a slightly warmer tone, as you may see below (but it’s honestly a pretty tiny change, and I couldn’t see that much difference myself):

Next up in Lightroom’s right menu is the basic tone – the Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. Those had some of my standard fiddling: pushing the exposure a bit, pushing the recovery for those rather bright whites in the clouds, increasing the blacks. As a result, contrast and brightness pretty much didn’t get touched.

My tone curves are never “S”-shaped, and this one wasn’t either. For reference, my highlights were at -26, my Lights at +36, my Darks at -12, and my Shadows at -44. Definitely not your standard, but it seemed to work for this photo.

Next was the color. Based on the calibration, the colors are going to look pretty funny, but once the calibration comes into play, everything should make sense.

There was a bit of split-toning and a LOT of vignetting added (which definitely seems counterintuitive, but bear with me):

Next up is that promised calibration step. A desaturation of the green channel and a push of the blue channel toward purple results in blues that look normal again:

Now the scene is set for our other tools.

First, we’re going to do a gradient just along the bottom half of the photo where the sand is. You can change any of the values of the gradients and brushes, but in this instance, all we really need is to increase the exposure by +.70.

Now we can actually see all of that section of the sand that has the shell, but the vignette still adds drama to the sky.

I’m not especially keen on that dull brown color, though, so I wanted to add the brown back in there. But I still wanted that shell to retain its original color. This is where the brush comes into play.

First, I need to tell the brush what to DO. I want to bring up the color that’s already there, so I push the saturation to +100. It turns out that that color is kind of green, so to balance that, I’m going to add a color that’s peachy. The two mixed together is going to make that gold color that you’ll see in the final product.

There are quite a few options that you have when you choose the brush. You have to choose the size of the brush, the feathering, and the opacity. This job is fairly straight-forward; I need to cover a pretty big area, so I’m going to choose a fairly large size (18.1). I don’t want to feather too much, but I don’t want a hard edge where the horizon meets the sky or water, so I’m going to choose a value of 30 for the feathering. When I actually get to that point, I’m going to zoom in so I can carefully determine where the lines end. And as for opacity (or “flow” as Lightroom calls it, but as a girl I find this kind of icky), I’m going to go with 60. The more times I move the brush over the area, the more opaque the “mask” (or the covered area) will be – one pass over it will result in 60% opacity, whereas a couple of times over it will result in something more like 100% opacity. This will just help me control that part in the middle that I still want to reflect the colors of the sky.

So I paint over that entire bottom section, making sure to leave the middle somewhat transparent (the red areas indicate what was painted – NOT how the photo is going to look once my settings are applied):

But I don’t want my shell to be that gold color, so I’m going to choose “Erase” and change the brush settings and zoom in REALLY close (like 4:1) and carefully erase the mask from the shell:

Once I’m done erasing that section, my mask is going to look like this (note the hole in the red where the shell is):

And then once I click the brush icon again to leave the brush mode, I see my final result: