He uses a particular model and gets some amazing colours (perhaps too vivid for some). I did ask him and he replied “Lightroom”. I tried using sample points but I cannot get anywhere near a similar effect.
I’m aware that his camera and lens are well out of my league but I’m not sure if they are the main contributing factor.
Anyway heres a link to a photo of his I really like. http://tinyurl.com/j68tz8t
What do you think? Any suggestions on how he is acheiving this style?
He seems to have lowered the saturation quite a bit for most colors and got a blueish white balance. Might even have some sliiiiigth orange/teal touch as the highlights look warmer than midtones/shadows. I didn’t color pick anything so I might be wrong.
To me it looks like he might be using Cross Processing filters found in NIK Software Color Effex software that I think is available for use with Lightroom. Well many images in his gallery reminds me colors of one filter from Color Effex I tried many years ago. I think it is possible to achieve similar colors using GMIC Color Grading filter if you don;t want to play with curves.
The blacks/dark parts are usually quite crushed/compressed. From what I remember from playing with a digital Leica that’s part of their style/rendition. But there is of course absolutely no reason why you couldn’t achieve the same effect using a bit of post processing.
The white balance is used creatively rather than just neutral
Thereis are color shifts in the images. They could be from curves, plugins, presets, LUTs or just lightrooms hsl tool.
In the particular photo that you posted it looks like the blues have been pulled down as @Morgan_Hardwood nicely spotted.
If you have a sample shot in a similar style I’d be happy so see how close I can get.
@bminney That’s a well frames photo But it’s going to be hard to get it to look like the one you posted. A few reasons why:
Lighting: The Hao Wan Photo above seems to be shot with very even light. Probably on a overcast. Yours looks like it’s straight in the sun. This results in a lot harder shadows and glossy highlights on her skin. It also means that there is very little contrast on the background.
RAW: Do you have a RAW? Doing more serious editing to JPEG files usually makes them look fairly terrible as it throws away most of the non essential data for that specific representation of the image on a Screen.
Aperture: This image has a very deep depth of field, the reference one has a very shallow one. Try to open up your aperture more. If you don’t have one you probably really want a fast prime on an aps-c (or of course larger) sensor. An entry level DSLR & 50/1.8 should do.
Thank you Jonas. I wasn’t sure if I should have posted that photo, my apologies.
If you look at Hao Wang’s other photos you realise he is doing something different with the colours that Danas alluded to (Nik Effex cross processing filters). I was hoping to do something similar in GIMP. Thanks to Morgan Harwood I’m looking at RawTherapee and LAB. You can tell I’m just a keen beginner!
[quote=“bminney, post:9, topic:805”]
Thank you Jonas. I wasn’t sure if I should have posted that photo, my apologies.
[/quote]There is no reason to apologize. I didn’t intend to criticize your work, just wanted to give you a few pointers to get closer to those images.
[quote=“bminney, post:9, topic:805”]
If you look at Hao Wang’s other photos you realise he is doing something different with the colours that Danas alluded to (Nik Effex cross processing filters). I was hoping to do something similar in GIMP. Thanks to Morgan Harwood I’m looking at RawTherapee and LAB. You can tell I’m just a keen beginner!
[/quote]If you want a really simple way to play with some film effects you can try the tool I wrote based on @patdavid s lookup tables:
This is only a test. For all of the reasons already listed by @Morgan_Hardwood and @Jonas_Wagner, much of the “look” you’re after is due to many different factors (the postprocessing is just one). (also, holy crap I just saw the exif for the file on Flickr - Noctilux-M is almost $10k usd…)
The blue luminance might be lowered (or the halo may be a clumsy masking of the vignette that was possibly added in post). I’m not sure which.
I think the two main colors that you are looking for in this image are the teal/cyan shift of the blue-ish tones in the water, coupled with the almost over-exposed light skin of the model. (Also, overcast really, really, really helps with this - it’s like a free giant softbox of light).
I would focus your efforts on pushing the water colors into a deeper green/blue color, and pushing the skin slightly warmer and brighter. Then try masking based on those regions. In my example I fiddled with the water color (dropped the low-mid tones to remove red, slightly bump green and blue. Then played with skin adding some red/magenta and pulling blue out just a tad. A simple layer mask based on lighter tones and this is the result after a few minutes. Not exactly there, but sort of an idea to start with?
[edit] - after having looked at the full size (which I should have done to start with), I think @Morgan_Hardwood might be right about the blue luminance contribution being lowered. The halo is much more distinct at full size.
