Getting Gritty in Lightroom

The streets of Kuala Lumpur

Down and dirty, gritty urban type imagery is pretty popular these days. A lot of examples of this can be seen in the various HDR Flickr groups, as they are often created from multiple photographs that have been run through Photomatix or some other HDR processing software. You don’t actually need multiple exposures though, nor do you need HDR software. The photograph above was done in about a couple of clicks in Adobe Lightroom. The original image is near the end of this post for purposes of comparison. I’ve also made the settings available as a preset for you to download and install. Firstly, however, let’s take a look at what adjustments the preset actually makes.

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Starting with our RAW file, we import it into Lightroom or Photoshop. Both use the same RAW processing engine and have the same controls. I always recommend shooting RAW but for those who insist on throwing away image data and shooting JPG, you can apply the same settings on your files.

The first step is to adjust the Recovery, Fill Light, Contrast, Clarity and Vibrance to +100.
Then, drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left (-100) and slowly ease it back until the color starts to appear. In this case, that was -76. Next, adjust the Blacks to balance the photo – setting the Fill Light to +100 will make it look washed out. Finally, adjust the Exposure slider if necessary and optionally add a vignette in the vignette panel to darken the edges (I didn’t in this image).
You may find that it makes peoples skin appear overly sharp – if that’s the case, you may want to soften the skin. In Lightroom you could use the adjustment brush set to a negative clarity and paint over the skin. Alternatively, open the image in Photoshop, hit CTRL/CMD – J to duplicate the layer, apply a Gaussian blur of 20 (Filter>Blur>Gaussian) and lower the opacity to around 50%. Click the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers palette, get the Brush tool, choose a soft-edged brush, and then paint over the skin, while avoiding the eyes, eyebrows, lips, teeth, nostrils, hair—-these are details areas you want to keep sharp.
Here is the before image. At the end of the post, there’s a Lightroom Develop preset that’ll apply the basic settings with a single click. Feel free to download it and use it if you are a Lightroom user. To install, simply open Lightroom and go to the Develop module. In the Presets panel, right click and choose Import to install the preset.

Unprocessed image.

Click here to download the Gritty Lightroom Preset

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 at 06:00. It is filed under PhotoTip, Tools and tagged with Lightroom, PhotoTip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.