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Contrasty street photography in color

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September 19, 2018

#contrasts #

Introduction – finding a personal signature in my photos in post-processing

While finding time to actually get out in the streets became a difficult task recently due to the starting academic year, I started editing and post-processing my photos as soon as I had some spare time. The aims are to, firstly, further get myself familiar with Lightroom and, secondly, to give my pictures somehow a common look. To do so, I started working with some settings – still with the premise to only use minor adjustments to my photos – and decided to save a couple of combinations of settings and adjustments as presets in Lightroom. Therefore, I am now able to quickly get an advanced idea of the photo under my regular adjustments. Throughout the process, I also experimented with settings, which did not include transformations to black and white. As a result, I came now up with (so far) four presets, which allow me to run photos through all three options to quickly check for the direction, I would the picture like to take (although, I usually have a very strong idea about that when taking the photograph). Below, I take one of my favorite pictures (presented before) to show the first three presets: one more contrasty monochrome (in which I tried to somehow reproduce the Fuji’s ACROS film simulation), a flatter monochrome variation, and a vintage color preset.    

Contrasty street photography in colors

The fourth preset I saved, was initially a pure experiment when playing around with a couple of the available Lightroom settings. For quite a couple of pictures, however, I was really surprised by the effects. Therefore, I kept the preset. Although I still consider black and white my go-to-transformations in Lightroom, I particularly like the contrasty and colorful outcome with photos taken in hard light with strong light-shadows contrasts. Below are two very recent examples taken during the trip to Bordeaux, I recently wrote about

Anmut Street Photo

Anmut Street Photo

Family man and academic, I am an amateur street photographer since 2017. My photos explore people in urban environments.

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