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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. I started by setting the Recovery, Fill Light, Contrast, Clarity and Vibrance sliders all the way over to 100.
4. I then lowered the Saturation until the photo felt right, and backed the Fill Light down quite a bit while bumping the Blacks up.
5. I adjusted the Blue Saturation and Red Saturation under the HSL panel to tone down the skin and the shirt a little bit.
6. I added a minimal amount of noise reduction and a good bit of sharpening.
7. I then tweaked the Tone Curve to drop shadows and bring up highlights–the classic “S” Curve.
8. The results were pretty awesome!!

Try it out yourself and link to your results in the comments!

I’ve been liking the HDR look and have enjoyed playing with it recently; but it is a lot of work to go through. So I was pretty excited to find a video tutorial on the Layers magazine website purporting to get that look right inside Lightroom.

Here is a before picture I took last Sunday while walking in downtown Dallas:

Here is the after picture after roughly 60 seconds of editing in Lightroom:

I like the look and the results. It was painless and easy.

You can watch the video here.

Later today, I’ll post about another application of this technique (one which totally rocks, in my opinion, and which I am extremely excited about).