How-To: Sam

Sam: Son of my Mother's other Son.

So this is the shot of my beautiful nephew I took over the weekend. The gear was quite simple - Canon 5DmkII and the 50mm f/1.8 and some patience (important). People seemed to like the processing, and I've been meaning to do a tutorial type post for a while now, so here goes...


This is the original file as loaded into Lightroom. On a quick side note, learn your Lightroom shortcuts and little tricks, it's very handy for doing these types of posts, and to see where you've come from in your processing. As a standard in my processing, I always start with the Auto-Tone and Punch Presets, then adjust from there. As with all my portrait works, I pulled the clarity slider back to about -20 (-17 here). I also pushed the warm tones, pulled the saturation, and pushed my contrast. I also pushed the exposure slider up to +1.50. This value was dictated by the histogram. I turned on the "Show Clipping" (J) and adjusted until just before his face was blown out. I also added in a vignette.

I then employed a system of colour pushing that I've worked out. It's quite simple really, in the Color tab of the HSL/Color/Grayscale panel push the saturation to about +20 and the luminance to about -20. I skip the reds and pinks/purples when doing this, mainly because I find that Canon cameras usually over-saturate this range anyway. Those are just guessing numbers, in reality I'm no where near that specific with it, but those are the values I try to keep it around. In finishing I ran over the pic with the spot removal tool (N), just to clean up the leftover pieces of cake on his face. Which then gives us this image:


After this there was nothing for it but to try a bit of split toning. When I come to something that is going to be a major change from the original I always create a virtual copy of the image and then continue working on that, that way I always have the big stepping stones of my processing workflow.

I put the highlights into the green, and the shadows into the pink/purples, then pushed up the saturation on both till it got to a point where it looked right. Looking back at my settings I also pulled my exposure back to +1, added in some recovery and fill light and pushed my clarity way up. And here is where that got me:


Ok, now here's the important bit. Which is a bit of workflow that I try(and usually end up keeping) on just about every image I put up on flickr. Export your image to photoshop (or GIMP). take the background layer and duplicate it 4 times. You should now have 5 layers exactly the same.

On the top layer, do a High-Pass Filter, with a radius of about 60. Set the layer blend to Soft Light.
On the next layer do a Soft Light layer blend and set the opacity to about 40% (starting point).
On the next layer do a Screen layer blend, and also set the opacity to about 40%.
This is optional and can sometimes help manage a bit of the noise, Gaussian blur this layer to about 40px, keep the Normal layer blend and set the opacity to about 40%.

Play with your opacity sliders and various variables until you get a result that you like. Onto that I added my watermark and a 4px wide black boarder around the image. Save and export/import back into Lightroom.


Then just a small tweak in white balance (warming) and a touch of fill light, and it's done.
And to save you from scrolling up, here's the final image again.

Hope that shed some light on it all for you.
J.P.