Thursday, April 24th, 2008
I’ve been rather enamored with that “look” that seems to be all the rage in editorial photography. After browsing some photography websites last night, I came up with a solution that involves using similar techinques to the
HDR look I
wrote about earlier.
- I captured the image during a photo shoot in January. I shot it using a Nikon D200 which generated a 10.2 megapixel, 12-bit RAW file. The original was shot at 1/125 sec at f/9 on ISO 400 with a 50mm prime, shot using studio strobes fired off of umbrellas. Because of the ample lighting and low ISO, there was almost no noise. Because I metered using an incident flash meter, my original exposure was dead on.
- My lighting setup involved a light almost dead left slightly above eye level. My second light was coming over my right shoulder from about 12 feet up. This strong, profile lighting helped immensely.
- I started by setting the Recovery, Fill Light, Contrast, Clarity and Vibrance sliders all the way over to 100.
- I then lowered the Saturation until the photo felt right, and backed the Fill Light down quite a bit while bumping the Blacks up.
- I adjusted the Blue Saturation and Red Saturation under the HSL panel to tone down the skin and the shirt a little bit.
- I added a minimal amount of noise reduction and a good bit of sharpening.
- I then tweaked the Tone Curve to drop shadows and bring up highlights–the classic “S” Curve.
- The results were pretty awesome!!
Try it out yourself and link to your results in the comments!
Tags: editorial, lighting, Lightroom, Photography, portrait, post-processing, studio
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