When people talk about vintage or cross-processing, they usually think of natural light, bright warm sun, and that style of processing. But can you apply vintage fades or cross-processing to an image made in cold, dark conditions using wireless flash? Sure you can!
Watch The Video Tutorial
The Original Image
Nikon D700, Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 G @ 24mm
1/20 sec. @ f/2.8 & ISO 3200
2x Nikon SB80DX, RadioPopper JRX wireless flash,
Hand-Held
The original image was created using two bare wireless flashes, and a relatively slow shutter speed in order to “soak up” (pun intended?) as much ambient light as possible.
The flash that was placed behind the couple was a bare flash, with the zoom head set to 105mm, while the flash to the right of my camera (also zoomed to 105mm) had a CTO warming gel on it so that my white balance could match the ambient light a little better.
The water you see splashing in the image is not water on my lens, of course, I actually kept the camera a (relatively) safe distance
The Final Images
I feel like both the faded version (top) and the more punchy, slightly cross-processed version (bottom) both look pretty neat, so I would definitely deliver them both to a client.
The presets used on both images were: a -1 exposure bump, and an HDR-effect creating preset designed for images with skin tone. (As opposed to an image without skin tones, which can handle a little more positive clarity and vibrance.) In the video you can get a general idea of what the preset is doing to the image, mainly seen in this screenshot of the Basic Panel:
The exact SLR Lounge preset used was: “BASE – SOFT > HDR MAX (Skin Desat)”
The bright, faded image was created using an additional preset to control the RGB curves only: “CURVES – COOL > BRIGHT WASH (Violet)”
The punchy, vintage image was created using an additional preset to control the RGB curves only: “CURVES – COOL > VINTAGE PUNCH (Violet)”
I also added a slight post-crop vignette, a minor crop, and I stamped out a couple spots that were in the “bokeh dots” of the image.
As always, please feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or additional tips!
Take care and happy clicking,
=Matthew Saville=
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom
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The SLR Lounge Preset System
The SLR Lounge Lightroom Presets is designed to enable Lightroom users to achieve virtually any look and effect in 3-5 clicks. Including basic color correction, vintage fades, black & white effects, tilt-shift effects, faux HDR, retouching, detail enhancing, and so much more, the sky is the limit with what has been dubbed the most powerful and intuitive preset system available! Click the link above to learn more/purchase. The SLR Lounge Preset System is now available for both Lightroom 5, Lightroom 4, and Adobe Camera Raw.
