Anyone have any thoughts on how to achieve this look?

[sarahf]

I love this photographer's work. I especially like how alot of the photos have an almost hazy quality to some of them, yet they are still fairly vivid with sharpness and depth. I have been experimenting in Lightroom, but cannot seem to quite figure it out. I would love any thoughts you may have.

Here is the think to her blog, scroll down past the wedding and look at the baby portraits, those are the ones that have the hazy look to them.



2010 June » Amy Sandoval Photography Blog

Thanks!

[SusanH1970]

Looks like a vintage action. Check out CoffeeShop Free PS/PSE Actions! for some really good (and free) actions. Some of the photos appear to be backlit too, which will give a hazy look.

ETA: Just saw you're using LR. You can find vintage presets for LR, too, not sure if Rita's got them at that site, though.

[teaking]

Yup I agree the colour shifts deffinately look like a processing effect you can achieve it using curves and adjusting each colour channel and applying colour filters or with actions. There are lots of tutorials on google just look up. Vintage effect

[LeeR]

Yes, there are some post processing techniques you can use to make your images look a bit like this photographer's, but make no mistake, this woman is very, very good at what she does. Study hard, shoot thousands of images for hundreds of clients and in ten years, you, too, can post your own similar site. There are no shortcuts.

[SusanH1970]

Originally Posted by LeeR

Yes, there are some post processing techniques you can use to make your images look a bit like this photographer's, but make no mistake, this woman is very, very good at what she does. Study hard, shoot thousands of images for hundreds of clients and in ten years, you, too, can post your own similar site. There are no shortcuts.

True - and I might add that actions/presets will (for the most part) ONLY work well on an image that is properly exposed and in focus. Try and use an action/preset to "fix" an image and you'll end up with a big, hot mess.

A lot of newcomers that admire certain looks do go overboard on actions. That's fine to start with, to play and learn, but you need to understand what each action does step by step so you see what the action does to each photograph, and why and why not to use it on a certain SOOC. Actions/presets have different effects on different SOOC's. I've written my own actions and know which types of photographs I can and cannot use them on.

[RecurrentNerve]

Two words... gradient maps.

[teaking]

The gradient map would be a great way to tone the image so you could use it as a kind of colour filter layer to give it the overall red tone. But I still feel you would need to adjust the curves colour channels to replicate those other colour shifts as you would do in chemicals with roles of film you would process them for another film which would give it colour shifts.