JAM's Grunge Setting

We had time to take a quick stop at the Great Circle Earthworks in Newark, OH on the way to see some friends this weekend. The main mound, a 1200 foot diameter circle that is probably 15 - 20 feet tall, is estimated to have been built 2000 years ago by the Hopewells (culture or tradition or whatever is most PC). It is truly an amazing piece of American history and if you're in the area you should really stop by and take a look.

This photo was taken on one of the little mounds out in the center of The Great Circle. I love the crests of hills for photos because you can have the whole sky as your backdrop, so when I saw this one with it's short trimmed grass I started yelling for models!!! My kids are just the greatest and have finally excepted that it is much, much easier just to get it over with than to try and hide or kill me, so they came and plopped right down and let me snap away. What sweeties!

This is a processing I came up with a few days ago I call my grunge look. You can do these settings in either Lightroom 2 or Photoshop CS4's Camera Raw and get this exact look. Here's all the settings :

JAM'S GRUNGE SETTING

Exposure : +35
Recovery : 0
Fill Light : +90
Blacks : +70
Brightness : +50
Contrast : +69
Clarity : +50
Vibrance : 0
Saturation : -95

That should get you really, really close. You'll probably have to mess around with the exposure a little bit but this will give you the basics. After I worked this particular photo to this point, I opened it in CS4 and dodged the eye sockets a little so they weren't just big black holes, and then added just a slight light in each eye to give them a little more life. There you go...very simple and a pretty unique look, if I do say so myself! Then just save the settings as a Preset and you can at least take a look at any photo with this look in all of 1 second.

Nikon D200
Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8
Aperture Priority Exposure Mode (my Fav)
F/6.7
1/100 sec.
Auto Iso (my Fav) chose Iso100
Shot at 55mm

Jeffrey