Cool high contrast technique for flowers

[drr0b]

Hi everyone,

I've been messing around with sliders in lightroom, and have found a cool effect for flowers. It is similar to the "gritty portrait" effect described by Scott Kelby in his LR2 guide.

The idea is to get very high contrast, but with low saturation: you want high recovery, fill light, clarity and contrast. You can then either max vibrance and reduce saturation, or leave saturation alone and reduce vibrance; you get different effects because saturation affects all colours while vibrance affects dull colours more. You can then alter the blacks level to suit.

Here is the photo

Panasonic FZ7
ISO 100
Exposure 1/125
Aperture f/5.6

And here is the shooped version

Recovery 100
Fill light 99
Blacks 68
Contrast 100
Clarity 100
Vibrance 100
Saturation -68

The result is a very detail image, but it looks very flattened. I hope you like it!

[jbm1991]

I really like it. Great edit

Best wishes
John

[x_eternity_x]

I do a similar technique without the fill light. Usually when I pull in the fill light I end up reducing contrast, but I guess if you're looking more for a low-end contrast that would work nicely. Good job.

[drr0b]

Good to know, I'll try that thanks

[klr]

Really neat. Seems like something that one can easily go over board with, but you did a nice job.

[drr0b]

Thanks ! It works well for loads of my flower shots... give it a go!

[failte]

I love it.

The idea here is to show/tell us how you did it.

[drr0b]

Well I gave an overview of what I was doing: altering the the exposure sliders to achieve the desired effect, and gave the paramters that I used for each slider under the second photo. Is there something else needed?

Originally Posted by drr0b

Well I gave an overview of what I was doing: altering the the exposure sliders to achieve the desired effect, and gave the paramters that I used for each slider under the second photo. Is there something else needed?

Uhh... ya.