What kind of work was done to this photo?

You need a great low-light lens with good bokeh, you need to know your lens' sharpest aperture, color calibrate your camera with an X-rite ColorChecker 24 chart, use a tripod, and still use unsharp mask in Photoshop on any and all photos. For people, use: amount 150%, radius 1, threshold 10.

A better way to unsharp mask is to convert to LAB colors, unsharp mask only the Lightness channel, reapply, and then choose 'Fade Unsharp Mask' from the Edit menu. Fade until you get something you like.
 
I have the same lens (Canon 135mm f/2) as was used in the shot, but ya, I was more wondering about the post-side of things - Colours and tones and such. And kind of a rookie question, but are the sharpness settings in Lightroom similar to Photoshop's unsharp mask or is it totally different?
 
I have the same lens (Canon 135mm f/2) as was used in the shot, but ya, I was more wondering about the post-side of things - Colours and tones and such. And kind of a rookie question, but are the sharpness settings in Lightroom similar to Photoshop's unsharp mask or is it totally different?

Don't know. I just bought Lightroom and haven't had time to learn it. I do all my editing in RAW and Photoshop so far.
 
surely there's some post on it, but for the most part it may be a case of clever composition:

* long lens to alter perspective (as in "the people in front and behind the main subject were, in real life, farther away than it looks like in the picture")

* full frame camera (5D) and wide aperture, for shallow depth of field (full frame + 135mm f/2, shoting 8m from your subject, delivers an image that covers a 2.1x1.4m area at focusing distance, and has only 35cm of depth of field)
http://www.similaar.com/foto/dof/dof.php?f_x=1&f_r=1.5&f_mm=135&f_f=2&f_d=8

plus, of course, very nice lighting, color correction, and maybe some post effects (like unsharp mask)
 
plus, of course, very nice lighting, color correction, and maybe some post effects (like unsharp mask)

Isn't that what he's asking? We've established that he's using the same lens as the one from the picture.

My guess: it's probably in the HSL (Hue/Saturation/Lightness) controls. Maybe some post-crop vignetting applied as well. The color pallet looks like it's reasonably well controlled, giving everything a green cast without making the skin tones look too unnatural. The blacks look nice and deep to my eyes without crushing a lot of shadow details in the dark jacket, which is something you don't tend to get if you just get the in-camera light meter to hit dead center. The tone curve might have been adjusted by lowering the lower bottom end and possibly lifting the rest.
 
my point was: I think the most important thing here is composition

of couse there's color correction, and maybe there are also some other effects, but I think the biggest asset here is the original image
 
Isn't that what he's asking? We've established that he's using the same lens as the one from the picture.

My guess: it's probably in the HSL (Hue/Saturation/Lightness) controls. Maybe some post-crop vignetting applied as well. The color pallet looks like it's reasonably well controlled, giving everything a green cast without making the skin tones look too unnatural. The blacks look nice and deep to my eyes without crushing a lot of shadow details in the dark jacket, which is something you don't tend to get if you just get the in-camera light meter to hit dead center. The tone curve might have been adjusted by lowering the lower bottom end and possibly lifting the rest.

Thanks, yeah, that's more what I was looking for! Of course I agree that the lens and composition plays a huge part in this photo, but I was mainly curious about the post-work done to it.
 
Back
Top