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:

Because it’s from the library, and I don’t want to forget.

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“Just go round the corner, and there it is: a world you’ve never seen.”

“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”

“There is nothing so cruel in this world as the desolation of having nothing to hope for.”

“That’s reality for you: quick and efficient.”

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: