Is This Achievable in Photoshop?

Hi Nikonites.

I have a vision of where I'd like to take my portraits from a tonal perspective, but I'm struggling to find a way to execute. I've also been doing a lot of nature photographs lately as well and I love the darker, desaturated look. I've been playing around with gradient mapping, curves layers, and some photoshop filters but nothing is getting the tones where I want it. Despite lots of googling, youtube tutorial watching, I just can't seem to find the right way to achieve this type of look. Or even where to begin.

I'm now starting to wonder if this is something that would be best achieved in Lightroom? (which I'm not very well versed in yet)

I do a lot of work with alternative models who often have different colored hair. I've attached an image from a shoot this week, this image I REALLY wanted to be dark like the panel of images that I've included, with her pink hair popping but nothing I did could achieve that dark, rich tonal range that I envision.

If anyone could point me into a direction of any use, I would be very grateful!

Not sure if this is what you are looking for? Did this in LR, used radial filter to highlight her face and darken everything else. Then pumped up the pink colors using HSL adjustments focusing just on the hair. Then added slight vignette and then used the dehaze slider to adjust slightly. Kinda hard to do with a jpeg.

kristentyler said:

If anyone could point me into a direction of any use, I would be very grateful!

View attachment 196572View attachment 196573

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The first thing I notice is all the shots in that panel have a reeeally strong vignette applied. That's way harder than I'd take a vignette, personally, but that's me. Also, do you have NIK Tools? I ask because I'm thinking a Tonal Contrast filter, in conjunction with the vignetting, would get you close to the effect you're looking for. A larger file to work with would be helpful as well.

Horoscope Fish said:

The first thing I notice is all the shots in that panel have a reeeally strong vignette applied. That's way harder than I'd take a vignette, personally, but that's me. Also, do you have NIK Tools? I ask because I'm thinking a Tonal Contrast filter, in conjunction with the vignetting, would get you close to the effect you're looking for. A larger file to work with would be helpful as well.

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I'm with you on the vignette lol that aside, I'm just looking at the tonal quality.

I'm not familiar with NIK Tools. Is that for Photoshop?

Off to google it!

dickelfan said:

Not sure if this is what you are looking for? Did this in LR, used radial filter to highlight her face and darken everything else. Then pumped up the pink colors using HSL adjustments focusing just on the hair. Then added slight vignette and then used the dehaze slider to adjust slightly. Kinda hard to do with a jpeg.

View attachment 196574

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That's definitely getting closer !!! Thank you for giving it a try.
I'm hoping to try to find a way to do this in PS since I don't have a copy of LR

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I found another few images that are a good example. the more I look at them I'm wondering if they desaturate, then do some blue curves adjustments, and mask out the color areas?

kristentyler said:

I'm with you on the vignette lol that aside, I'm just looking at the tonal quality.

I'm not familiar with NIK Tools. Is that for Photoshop?

Off to google it!

Click to expand...

I'm working with your upload and the Tonal Contrast filter right now and I'm not really getting the results I was hoping for...

Use the Camera Raw filter and you can basically do everything you do in LR. It has the radial filter, etc

Like so, maybe??
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...

You could also just make a copy layer of the picture. Then on that layer adjust it to the desired background look you are going for, and don't even look at her face. When you get it like you want, then make a mask section on that and paint over it with black on the face section to bring out just her face.

Here is quick try using layers and PS...not sure what you are wanting the background like. Keep getting the weird halo effect, I'm guessing because of the low quality file we are trying this off of.

What you're going to want to do is create a layer mask for the model so you treat the background and the model separately. It's a little more difficult to do on the low res image you posted, but I fudged one (I had to clean up bright spots from the background layer around the hat after the mask was applied)) and then just applied a solarization filter to the background. I could have done anything.




The key is, once you get a good selection for your mask, right-click on it and choose "Save Selection" which will place the mask in your Channels tab so you can use it whenever you need.




Heck, now I can put her anywhere, and adjust each layer individually. I pulled back some of the warmth and stuck her in front of a train...