Shortly after reading the last post from fellow Inside Lightroom blogger, I was browsing through my catalog of images and came across an image that I had given a little more “attention” to than others. Generally speaking, I don’t like to tweak my photos to the point where they can easily identified as being “Photoshopped” (or “Lightroomed” as the case may be). But rules are meant to be broken, and I definitely broke them when I called it a wrap on the following image:

The following adjustments were made to produce an image that I can best describe as “harsh”:

• Exposure was increased (+0.60),
• Blacks were boosted (+80),
• Contrast & Clarity were boosted (+100 and +55, respectively),
• Highlights & Lights were boosted (+100 and +70 respectively),
• Lens Vignetting was increased (+9),
• and a Grayscale Mix was applied (the adjustments made to the colors were left to their default values).

(A larger version is available here.)

The photo was taken immediately after a storm rolled through the outskirts of San Francisco and as dusk was settling in. The cloud-cover muted what little light there was to produce a low-contrast setting that didn’t capture the moody (and almost spooky) atmosphere when the shot was taken.

As a reference, the starting point is shown below:

I don’t have any intentions on being as heavy-handed on most of the shots I take, but it’s never harmful to play around with your work and push the boundaries every once in a while. It’s been said a thousand times already, but I’ll repeat it once more here: Lightroom’s non–destructive editing makes it dead–simple to play around with your photos to see what sort of results you can produce.

And now that I’ve got this image out of my system, I can go back to producing “normal” shots again. Or at least until this urge strikes again…