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Taking Lightroom to the under saturated extreme
When I am out of ideas for this blog and looking for inspiration, I often find myself surfing the web forums and seeing what the photo hobbyists are up to. Since they are doing it for the love of photography (not a paycheck), they are often fearless in their experimentation and try things that most pros would not even consider.
So there I was surfing through the Retouching forum at dpreview when I came across a listing that read "lightroom extreme samples", I fully expected to see some images with extremely over-saturated colors, but was surprised to see the opposite instead, a selection of very nice dark, moody and heavily under saturated images.
The original poster of this thread admitted that his technique only worked on a few of his own images, but that is not really surprising because the more special effects you intend to use on an image, the more careful and deliberate you usually have to be when making the initial exposures with your camera.
When I saw the images I thought, wow this technique might work on some of my darker Angkor temple images, which really need some sort of special treatment to give them a more timeless appearance. The Angkor Archaeological Park in Siem Reap, Cambodia is a really magical place and great to photograph, but literally millions of images have been taken of all the temples. Something special is obviously needed to get anyone to give your images more than just a glance.
Every photographic image is different of course so some readjustment is usually needed to make this process work.
The basics starting point of this effect:
Recovery - plus 100%
Fill Light - plus 100%
Contrast - plus 100%
Vibrance - plus 100%
Clarity - plus 100%
Saturation - minus 95%
Black - darken slightly
Exposure - adjust until it looks right
Vignetting - darken the corners
In the image below I started with the settings above but then made the following adjustments
Recovery - plus 87%
Fill Light - plus 61%
Saturation - minus 89%
Saturated red only by using the localized HSL Saturation control
Color Noise Reduction and Sharpening
Adjusted image of the central chedi in the Preah Khan temple compound
The original image with no adjustments
This is fantastic. It has a very nice High Dynamic Range (HDR) feel to it - but with class!
Could you perhaps save these adjustments into an exported preset from LR?
|B
Interesting, George -- that first image reminds me of the spooky environs of modern video games...
Thank you Brandon, if you follow the instructions above it is pretty easy to make your own preset. The second stage of the process will be different for every image though depending on content. Have fun.
Thank you Laura, I'm not a big game player so had not noticed that but you are right of course. I will have to take a closer look at some of the game graphics.
http://www.lightroomkillertips.com/2007/video-surreal-edgy-effect/
Ummm...
Nice pics, BUT, isn't it normal behavior to actually LINK to the original web-page on dpreview that inspired this topic, saving each of your readers the trouble of trying to find it?
Hyper-linking - It's the future!
Here is the original thread on dpreview
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1006&message=26372303
Credit should be given to the first who actually posted on this, Matt Kloskowski. the link to his web site is given above.
I have never seen Matt's post and when I tried to download the video that was "anonymously" posted here I could not download the entire video (I made several attempts), so still have not seen it.
If Matt is the originator of this method then I would of course like to thank him. The original formula as presented on dpreview did not really work for me, but with some re-adjustment (mainly in Fill Light and Recovery) and re-introduction of specific color saturation, it gives me a result that I like.
Yes! Oversaturation is overused.