‘Tattoo Two’ is a shot I posted the other week on my Photoblog. It is a shot that I was pretty happy with, and is different from the types of shots that I normally get, although its the sort of thing I’d like to get more of. You see the processing style I have used on this, can only really be used with certain shots. It comes from liking the style of the film ‘300′. You see a while ago I downloaded a preset called Matts 300 Look from Lightroom Killer Tips, and have applied it to a number of shots but unless you’ve got the right subject it doesn’t work. The right subject needs to have the right sort of colour palette aswell. I have used it since, as the basis of the processing, and then clawed back the detail, brightness and played with the curves, and can generally get something good.

When I saw this couple in Bolton I had the processing going on in my head as i was taking the shots. Every shot I got of them was from behind as they were heading into a well known burger place and I wasn’t going to wait for them to come out.

So I’m glad I didn’t get a frontal view as I may have not have considered the rear view. Like I said before I’d like to create more shots like this, but its finding the subjects as you are wandering around town. I guess I’d actually have to set up some sort of photo shoot or go to some sort of convention or festival where you get all sorts of weird and wonderful subjects to photograph.

Processing

So as far as the processing goes, I did most of it in Lightroom, starting off with the ‘Matts 300 Look’ preset. Then like I said I then claw back some detail, brightness and saturation.

So as you can see fairly extensive use of Recovery, Fill Light and Blacks. You get really strong contrast as well as  a high amount of detail when using this style, and its something I use quite a lot, but not always as strongly. You’ll notice that I’ve boosted the vibrance but desaturated overall to -50, theres no real set reason for this, other than I do spend time experimenting with different mixes of the two settings and sometimes the vibrance does give a better feel to the shot. Its easy to over saturate something, and I’m always tweaking saturation levels as it can either make or break the overall effect.

Colours have been desaturated and and as you can see above I’ve only retained the red and orange channels. There are also some slipt toning that has been applied, and that is as it was with the 300 preset.

So after this I export to CS3, resize, sharpen and I think I boosted the overall saturation a bit more too.

Well my recent post on my photoblog is of our friends dog Millie. We went round recently and I was trying out my new SB600 flashgun on the dog. Anyway, whilst experimenting with processing in Lightroom I came across one shot that I discovered worked well with the ‘Matts 300 Look” preset. So starting with that this is how it progressed. The original shot below was taken into the ‘Develop’ view in Lightroom and the I’ve hit ‘Auto’ to let it auto process it, that sort of gives me a default start point.

I actually quite like it just like this, but I was in an experimental mood so carrying on I applied the preset ‘Matts 300 Look’. Which basically plays with the White Balance, boosts the Blacks and Fill Light and Recovery. Then I’ve tweaked the settings further actually reducing the effect of the preset quite substantially. The Basic setting look like this;

Some Noise reduction and sharpening and then the image starts to look like this.

Then finally the image is opened for editing in CS3, where I resize, sharpen, and do some localized saturation on the eyes, curves and levels elsewhere. My layer palette ends up looking like this.

Then save a jpeg and upload it to the photoblog, done.