This is pretty long-overdue, and I apologize. I wanted to show you guys how I got that cool effect on Daniel’s fashion shoot. Here’s my RAW, straight out of the camera photo brought in to lightroom.
As you can see, I specifically lit the scene with this post-processing technique in mind. If you take any old-photo and go through these steps you’ll get something stylistically the same, but it won’t have the same impact as something designed to be made this way. I did this by split-lighting my subject with hard lights that had no modifiers to soften the light. In this case two speedlight flashes at 3 and 9 o’clock to my subject.
Step 1: Crank The Recovery & Fill
When I first learned this technique I was told to crank these sliders all the way up to 100. Personally I find using the full 100 settings obnoxious and the effect overpowers the photo. I find around 50 to be a much more usable setting and so start my effect there and salt and pepper to taste.
Step 2: Do The Same To The Contrast
Again, this slider was originally supposed to go up to 100, but I find 50 a better starting point. I took it up to 60 because I thought it needed a smidge more contrast.
Step 3: Now It’s Clarity And Vibrance
Yeap… you guessed it… take those sliders up to 50 as well.
Step 4: Now Finesse The Exposure
Now it becomes a bit more subjective and less mechanical. You’ve messed with most of the photo settings so you’ll want to finesse the overall Brightness and Exposure here.
Step 5: Now Desaturate
Now you’re photo looks pretty over-the-top and it’s time to bring it back to earth. Grab that Saturation slider and crank it down. I normally start around 50, but it’s really a subjective thing.
Step 6: Tweak It
Earlier than this it was hard to visualize how all these strong effects would actually work on the image, so now that you’ve got it pretty close you can go in and adjust the settings to get the right balance of everything.
And that’s all she wrote. Here’s the final image after all that, then bringing it in to Photoshop where I did a little final tweaking there.
