A Scenic World

First, in case you want to skip all this, you can download my newest preset by clicking here.

I’ve said time and time again that all the steps I write here in my tutorials aren’t anything like what I actually do, and now I can prove it!

Original Photo:

I took this photo of a snowflake flower (or “Leucojum vernum” as fellow photographer Gerry Winterbourne informed me) the other day with my settings at their usual: low contrast, low sharpening, slightly underexposed. I definitely wanted to punch it up during post-processing, but none of the presets I had were quite doing the job. Then I happened to scroll over “Red Dragon” (protip: it’s available under the “Lightroom Presets” tab) and I thought “This is just what I want, except without all that red and yellow!” So I started to play.

Here’s how the photo looked with the “Red Dragon” preset:

I told you: lots of red there. All that color cast you see above is done with split-toning, so my first step was to get rid of all of that. I set both the split-toning highlights and lowlights to 0.

That was almost exactly what I was looking for, but I decided to make a couple of tweaks. First I adjusted the luminances and saturations of the yellow and green colors to get the following:

Next I adjusted the curves so that the petals popped more. In this case, the highlights were increased all the way to +100 (take that, conventional thinking!) and the highlights were increased to nearly the same amount.

Next I pushed the global saturation a bit:

A slight change to the camera calibration emphasized the original tones even more (honestly, I don’t remember when I did this step):

And finally, I went back to split-toning and added a bit of golden highlights for a slightly more mysterious, emo look (although in retrospect, I think I might like the “cleaner” version above):

And there you have it! The story of a preset, from conception to graduation :)

Yesterday I went to the Hoggetowne Medieval Faire, a perennial favorite of the inhabitants of Gainesville. As always, I got my face painted. And as always, I took a moody shot of it :) When I started doing the post-processing, I just kept coming up with different ways to accentuate or enhance various aspects of the photo, most based on presets I’d already developed, but with big twists that really seemed to work. I literally had to make myself stop using the computer last night so I could get some sleep.

So  here I offer twelve different ways to post-process the same photo. I also offer the following: if you choose to vote for your favorite, I’ll post the preset for download for the version that garners the most votes.

Let the fun commence!

#1

#2

#3

#4

#5

#6

#7

#8

#9

#10

#11

#12

I recently had the opportunity to sit in on a meet-up of some Ovation enthusiasts at a friend’s house. For those who don’t know, Ovation guitars get little respect today, but at one time they were THE guitars for performance. The guys who gathered to show off their gear and show off their skills reminded more than a little bit of some of my Pentax enthusiasts :)

I plan on doing a separate post for the guitars but in the meantime, someone asked me how I processed some of the photos taken at the event of the actual people. So I pulled out Lightroom and broke it down. Watch the magic at work!

Original:

This shot was taken with the K200D and the FA 77/1.8 at f/5.6. The room was quite dark, so I pulled out my too-seldom-used AF 540 FG-Z flash and bounced it off the opposing wall and from the ceiling to light up the participants. It looks fine as is, I think (I had good models to work with!), but I figured I could make it look a bit more dramatic to match the blues the guys were playing.

A quick white-balance change to almost all blue (2476) and all green (-150) results in this :

I know this seems crazy, but bear with me.

The next thing that I usually change is the camera calibration settings. For this photo, we’re going to extremes:

Tint: -62 (toward the green end)

Red Primary: Hue +100, Saturation -100
Green Primary: Hue +2, Saturation -100
Blue Primary: Hue +36, Saturation +100

This results in the following:

Next is the Basic tone. Exposure was raised almost 2 full stops, but highlight were recovered completely. A bit of fill light was added, and the blacks were pushed a bit:

The actual tone curve is surprisingly minimal: just a small bump to the Highlights (+7), no change to Lights, a slightly larger bump to Darks (+31), and then +29 to the Shadows:

The real work is handled with the colors. We’re going to push overall vibrance to +21 and lower the saturation to -69. Because we have created what looks like a cross-processed image, we’ve actually ended up with a photo that is made almost completely of greens. So greens are what we’re going to concentrate on. By adjusting the saturation and the luminance of only the greens, we can control how the light seems to hit our subject’s face. In the instance below, the greens’ luminance is pushed to +100. Since I used these settings for a multitude of photos that had many different colors, I adjusted the other colors as well (even though they don’t affect this particular photo).

Now to just add some split-toning (hue: 60, sat: 20 for the highlights; hue: 34, sat: 15 for the shadows) and some vignetting:

If you want, you can get the exact settings from the preset I made called “Ovation People” by clicking here, or head over to my Lightroom presets page to get that one and more!