Photography Tips

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Forman posted a new photoessay at his site that feature gritty, urban type post processing. Quite a few people are interested in this type of look, so I decided to create a tutorial that outlines the steps you can take to achieve a similar result.

Starting with our RAW file, we import it into Lightroom or Photoshop. Both use the same RAW processing engine and have the same controls. My screenshot below is from Lightroom, but you can use the same settings in Adobe Camera RAW in Photoshop. 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 add a vignette in the vignette panel to darken the edges.

You may find that it makes peoples skin appear overly sharp - if that’s the case, you may want to soften the skin. 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 are a couple more examples. 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 import the preset.