A Scenic World

I had seen these railroad tracks on my first day in Richmond (when I was stupid enough to not bring my camera), and luckily my wonderful host had no problem taking me back there to get some shots. I had no idea that I would be even MORE lucky to have a train come by in the two minutes I stood there, but when it did, I snapped away as if my camera had 20 FPS. One photo in particular jumped out at me as having all the elements come together perfectly. Unfortunately, the weather was particularly lackluster that day, and it shows in the original:

As I was scrolling through my presets, a little-used and rather bizarre little preset I made some time ago seemed to fit nearly perfectly with a bit of tweaking. The preset is called “Gentle Hardcore,” and I remember making it over a year ago and not using it since:

I set about doing the tweaks. So here’s each step, broken down by Lightroom’s distinctions:

First, a white balance change. I always shoot in RAW and always leave my white balance set on AUTO because it’s the easiest thing to fix in post-processing. A slight bump to the warmer side of things can almost always make a world of difference. In this case, the preset also moved the white balance toward the magenta range:

Next up is the basic toning. This includes Exposure, Recovery, Fill Light, Blacks, Brightness, and Contrast. In this case, the exposure and brightness were both increased a bit, recovery was used extensively, a bit of fill light was added, and the blacks and contrast were pushed moderately:

It looks like a super-poorly-processed photo from 1978, no?

Next up, we have the tone curve. Conventional wisdom says to go for an “S” curve. Mine looks more like an alpine ski slope. Go for broke.

Next we have the color treatment. I always change the default view of the color screen so that I can see each color listed separately and affect the hue, saturation, and luminance of each color as I want. So mine looks like this:

Being able to finely adjust each color means that the photo looks like this after they’ve all been tweaked:

Now we’re getting somewhere.

I love adding split-toning, so this one got a big dose of mustard highlights and slightly rosy shadows:

It wouldn’t be a picture from me if it didn’t have a vignette, so that was duly added, although not to its full force:

Now here’s where the real magic for this photo comes in, I think. I like the picture above, and I could have easily left it there and been mostly happy. But by playing with the camera calibration settings, I was able to pick apart how each color interacts with the others. My calibration menu ended up looking like this:

And the photo ended up looking like this:

And that’s exactly how I wanted it to look. I spent 6 hours in airports and on planes to get to Richmond; spending an hour playing with all those sliders to get this look definitely seems justified to me.

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 :)