This tutorial explains how to achieve an effect based on the post processing by photographer Masashi Wakui. His primary subjects appear as urban landscape views of Japan where he uses some pretty and aggressive color toning to complement his scenes along with a soft ‘bloom’ effect on the highlights. The results evoke a strong feeling of an almost cyberpunk or futuristic aesthetic (particularly for fans of Bladerunner or Akira!).
This tutorial started its life in the pixls.us forum, which was inspired by a forum post seeking assistance on replicating the color grading and overall look/feel of Masashi’s photography.
Prerequisites
To follow along will require a couple of plugins for GIMP.
You will also need the Wavelet decompose plugin. The easiest way to get this plugin is to use the one available in G’MIC. As a bonus you’ll get access to many other incredible filters as well! Once you’ve installed G’MIC the filter can be found under Details → Split details [wavelets].
We will do some basic toning and then apply Gimp’s wavelet decompose filter to do some magic.
Two things will be used from the wavelet decompose results:
the residual
the coarsest wavelet scale (number 8 in this case)
The basic idea is to use the residual of the the wavelet decompose filter to color the image. What this does is average and blur the colors. The trick strengthens the effect of the surroundings being colored by the lights. The number of wavelet scales to use depends on the pixel size of the picture; the relative size of the coarsest wavelet scale compared to the picture is the defining parameter. The wavelet scale 8 will then produce overemphasised local contrasts, which will accentuate the lights further. This works nicely in pictures with lights as the brightest areas will be around lights. Used on daytime picture this effect will also accentuate brighter areas which will lead to a kind of “glow” effect. I tried this as well and it does look good on some pictures while on others it looks just wrong. Try it!
We will be applying all the following steps to this picture, taken in Akihabara, Tokyo.
Apply the luminosity mask filter to the base picture. We will use this later.
Filters → Generic → Luminosity Masks
Duplicate the base picture (Ctrl+Shift+D).
Layer → Duplicate Layer
Tone the shadows of the duplicated picture using the tone curve by lowering the reds in the shadows. If you want your shadows to be less green, slightly raise the blues in the shadows.
Apply the wavelet decompose filter to the “blended” layer and choose 9 as number of detail scales. Set the G’MIC output mode to “New layer(s)” (see below).
Remember to set G’MIC to output the results on New Layer(s).
Make the blended and blended [residual] layers visible. Then set the mode of the blended [residual] layer to color. This will give you a picture with averaged, blurred colors.
Optional: Turn the wavelet scale 3 (or any other) on to sharpen the picture and blend to taste.
Make sure the following layers are visible:
blended
residual
wavelet scale 8
Any other wavelet scale you want to use for sharpening
Make a new layer from visible
Layer → New from Visible
Raise and slightly crush the shadows using the tone curve.
Optional: Adjust saturation to taste. If there are predominantly white lights and the
colors come mainly from other objects, the residual will be washed out, as is
the case with this picture.
I noticed that the reds and yellows were very dominant compared to greens and blues. So using the Hue-Saturation dialog I raised the master saturation by +70 and lowered the yellow saturation by -50 and lowered the red saturation by -40 all using an overlap of _60_.
Well if you look at all his pictures he has all kinds off colors.
Anyway this is just one technique to get a similar effect. He does very different things actually.
Here’s a snippet from some photoshop forum where the man himself explained his procedure (found by my brother in law and translated from japanese…):
By playing with some G’MIC filters, I’ve found that the RGB mixer makes some interesting results.
I wrote a small script in script-fu, using this RGB mixer filter alone to give a feel to night street images which -to me- is not that far from the Wakui style.
The script: wakui.scm (1.8 KB)
Some before/after examples (images CC0 Public Domain from Pixabay)
If you haven’t already, consider posting to /r/postprocessing on reddit. Someone asks how to do this weekly and now they’d have a way to do so with open source
I tried with photo I found on pixabay, here is the result. Nice result so far, but what I don’t understand in the part 4 of the tutorial is that what do you do after adding mask layer? I create mask layer but I see no difference after doing it, therefor I decided to use blend mode as hardmix to blend the two layer together. It give darker appearance.
In this tutorial, what’s the point of using a luminance mask in steps 1–5 when you can just use the curves tool to only decrease the reds in the shadows? The curves tool can only control value, and not luminance, but I still don’t see much of a difference between the two methods.
You are right, you could do it with just the curve.
That is basically a personal preference and the way I did it at the time of writing the tutorial…
What I liked to do at that time is to set a general tone on the duplicated layer and then afterwards look if I want this tone applied only to deepest shadows, or all the shadows using luminosity masks.
](Akihabara_original.jpg){kind=link}
](Akihabara_tonedshadows.jpg){kind=link}
](Akihabara_blended.jpg){kind=link}
](Akihabara_color_100.jpg){kind=link}
](Akihabara_color_70.jpg){kind=link}
](Akihabara_scale_8.jpg){kind=link}
