I’ve had several people ask me about my post-processing technique on this photo, so here it goes. I knew that I wanted a high-contrast image with a really cold and gritty feel to it. This image really started with the prep. I found the right models, clothing, and makeup, and then lit the scene to get the most from my image. To get maximum “muscle” power, I used a hard spot-light with a snooted flash camera right, and for fill, a flash high and through a white-umbrella. I also realized today that I’d accidentally left the white balance on Tungsten, which is why it’s got that blue-ish cast to the original image… always remember to check all your settings before a shoot kids! But once I got my image, how did I get to here?

This is where I started out after a quick sharpening with the Smart Sharpen filter:

Now I wanted to add some punch and also some desaturation. To do this, I create a black and white adjustment layer. Photoshop CS3 has an AWESOME Black & White Adjustment Layer function, but I’m using CS2, so the best way to create a B&W image is to use the Channel Mixer. The way this works is you examine the Red Green and Blue channels separately and figure out the best, second best, and worst channels. In this case, the Green Channel is the best, followed by the Blue, and then the Red. Then I open up the Channel Mixer Adjustment layer. The trick is to get your 3 channels to add up to 100%. Click the Monochrome button, and start mixing your channels, starting with your best channel. I find that 60, 30, 10 are good values to start with. When I was done, I thought the black and white was a little to bright still, so I lowered the Constant a little bit.

A fun little trick I use is to then set this Adjustment Layer to Soft Light and then play with the opacity a bit. This ups the contrast to a really pleasant level, and also desaturates the image.

There’s still way more contrast than I wanted, so I duplicated this Channel Mixer Adjustment Layer and reduced the opacity down to about 40%. This gets the color tones much closer to what I’m going for.

Now I needed to do a bit of Dodging and Burning. For those of you who’ve never used a darkroom, dodging and burning is under-exposing and over-exposing little parts of an image to darken or lighten it. I do with with a new layer set to Overlay mode, and I paint in black (for burn) or white (for dodge) with the paint brush set to a low opacity (about 20-30%).

Now the dark areas are a bit too dark, especially in the brickwork. Instead of doing more dodging and burning, the best way to handle this was to copy my original layer and to run a Shadow/Highlight adjustment to it. The default mode is like a ridiculous hammer, so I always click on More Options. I generally start with 20 for the Shadow Amount and 15 for the Tonal Width. You can more or less ignore the Radius setting as it does next to nothing as far as I can tell. You’ll notice that, although I did NOT adjust the highlights, my pavement highlights were dulled down. This sometimes happens, and in this case it worked. If it affects highlight areas in a bad way, you can always throw a layer mask on the layer and paint it out.

Next I wanted to smooth out the skin. I’ve already gone over my skin-smoothing technique on my Marriage Is Beautiful tutorial, so read that one for the details.

Finally, I wanted to add a vignette to the image just to darken the corners and keep the focus on my models. On the very top I added a new layer, filled it with white, and set the Blending Mode to Color Burn. I prefer Color Burn to Multiply because I like that it plays WITH the colors that are on the layer, rather than just darkening the colors. I then go to Filter -> Distort -> Lens Correction and play with the Vignette settings to get them where I want them. I thought the effect was too strong on the lower-right corner, so I added a new Layer Mask to my vignette layer and painted some black onto it with a large brush with a low opacity to hide some of the vignetting.

And that’s it! I hope you guys have enjoyed the tutorial. Please drop me a comment if there’s anything you didn’t understand, or just to let me know if you found it helpful!