Tuesday, 10 July 2018

post processing - Low contrast urban style



I love the colors and the tone of this photo. How can I achieve this look with camera raw and/or photoshop?


enter image description here Image of VisualsByPierre



Answer




Look at the Histogram. See how the blacks aren't at the far left; that means the contrast was reduced / flattened.


If you inspect the photo further you can find the darkest portion has a distribution of RGB as 11, 39, 42. If you create a Curve you can confirm this by setting this point as Black and seeing how the image probably looked closer to out of camera (other than the terrible job dodging her back):


enter image description here


So if we keep that in mind and take any relatively ungraded image we can set the black point to the same value and it'll be pretty close. The rest will be tweaking based on the exact characteristics of the photo. Here's a somewhat ungraded looking photo via Unsplash - https://unsplash.com/photos/U22pJ6BclUQ


enter image description here


Now because this guy has lighter skin and there's no big yellow taxi in the background, or much yellow at all. We might want to choose a different color palette but this is what your example is.


I might look at the colors and think, blue is probably the weakest choice for this so drop it down and let the reds and greens be the more prominent ones:


enter image description here


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