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.