From the course: Photo Tools Weekly

Rock star look

- [Instructor] Hello, this is Chris Orwig and welcome to another episode, Photo Tools Weekly. This week's episode, we're gonna try to craft what I'm calling a rock star look, using Lightroom and Photoshop. And, the idea is, I have this photograph of my buddy, Luke. Lemme press F to go to full screen so that you can see that. Captured him in this alley and it's a pretty even tone image. It was an overcast day. What I wanna do is add some more drama, some more grit, some more snap and punch to it. So, I'll do that by working in Lightroom, going to Photoshop, duplicating the image, applying some HDR adjustments, and then sandwiching those, or combining those back together. In Lightroom, what are the steps? Basic and Effects. So, let's start in Basic. In Basic, sometimes I hit Auto, just to see what happens. It kind of gives you an even tone. You get sort of a starting place and then modify from there. So, here I'm just modifying this a little bit to change the overall look that we have. Now, another thing I wanna do with this image is, I want to have a little bit of a vignette, so I'll go down to Effects. In Effects I'm going to exaggerate my effects. I mean, this is gonna look kinda horrible, but just stick with me for a second. And, the reason I exaggerate them is, I try to figure out, okay, where do I want the effect to be applied to the image? Then, I can sort of scale everything back, soften the edges, and determine exactly how that's going to modify the image, or affect the image. So, here I'm looking to darken stuff, but not in such a way that it's like super noticeable. So, I have a nice look there, I think, at least for the vision that I have, that I'm going for with this image. All right, after we have done that, I'm ready to go over to Photoshop and to go to Photoshop from Lightroom, you can press Command E on a Mac, or Control E on Windows. That then sends the file over. I always hit F in Photoshop to go to full screen, so I can see what I have to work with and kinda get focused on the image. If you press F multiple times, it just goes through the full screen modes. So, I wanna go back to where I can see my tab, because here I'm going to duplicate the image. Image and Duplicate. And, click OK. And then, Image and Adjustments, and here we're going to HDR Toning. Now, the HDR Toning controls are kind of, a little bit old school. What I mean by that, they're, you know when HDR was really popular, people were doing a lot with this. It's not used that much, anymore, but it can be great for an effect which I'm looking for. So, I'm gonna remove color. I'm looking to experiment with my settings, to see about getting some details out of this. So, I'm just gonna, experimenting with these different values, and I basically wanna have a ton of detail here. So, I'm just modifying my Exposure, my Gamma. And, what I'm looking for, my detail, isn't a picture that looks good. I also don't want it too kinda glowy, like that. So, I want just a little bit of glow happening. One that looks overdone. What you can do in Photoshop, as you know, is you overdo something, then blend it in, and that's where it becomes interesting. That's the beauty of Photoshop, right? Take something that's super intense, blend it back in at a lower level, and then it becomes intriguing. So, then, we'll pull this image over. Hold down the Shift key and use the Move tool and just bring it back over to this one, so we have this sitting on top of our other photograph. Now, we'll get to that one in a second, but before we do, we also are going to need a Curves adjustment here, so I'm gonna go ahead and apply a Curves adjustment. Wanna add some contrast to this. I just didn't quite like the contrast I had with that, I felt like it was, it was still kinda too flat. After we've done all that, we can go to this layer. This one I'll call HDR. We can try some different options out. We know that Soft Light is this great layer for blending and photographers love Soft Light, because you get contrast, but it affects color in a nice way. And, actually, this right here, with these two, is already kind of cool. It's a little bit too heavy for it, but I think that that's kind of cool there. I'll use Hue/Saturation. I like to do this a lot with Hue/Sat, use the Targeted Adjustment Tool and you click on a tone, Reds, or you could go into the Yellows, and I just wanna drop those back. The reason why I like to do that with more stylized photographs like this is because, you actually aren't trying to create reality, you're trying to create a feeling, or a mood, or expression. It's almost like a painter trying to say, you know, rather than using bright, vivid colors, I'm gonna use a little more subtle, subdued color palette. And, so that's what I was looking to do there, drop down some of those. One of the things I'm trying to experiment with, with this guys, I'm not totally convinced that this is the right value. Let me just drop it down and then bring it back up. I guess, when I see it, I do think it looks pretty good, right where it was. Make sure my color layer is good. And, I think with that, that's a wrap. Lemme go to full screen mode and zoom in so you can see the image. What you can do is, if you wanna pull, or bring back your Layers panel, that's the F7 key, sometimes it's nice to show clients or even yourself, just to have a view like this where you have the Layers panel, kind of floating or hovering over here, or over the image, or something like that. Then you can go ahead and click through those layers. Lemme find a good spot for this. And, look at what you've done. So, here we have the original image and then we have the photograph after the whole Curve, using the HDR Toning. And, this technique is really fun, so you have to try it out. Try it out today on one of your images. It's pretty easy and can lead to some interesting results. And then, that little bit with color. Now, you may be wondering, okay Chris, why did we have to duplicate the file when we went, we went to Image and Duplicate? And the reason is, because it flattens the image and you can't have multiple layers when you do that type of adjustment. So, you have to duplicate the file, apply the adjustment, then bring it back over, and sandwich those two together. All right, well, on that note, that is a wrap. Here is our look for the day. Here's before and then here's after. I hope that you have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks for joining me this week. I'll see you next time, bye for now.

Contents