Cabrini-Green “Making of the Image Part 2.”

Cabrini-Green Demolition (1/125 at f/14 30mm, ISO 125)

Picking a treatment for an image can sometimes make or break the  image. In the case of my Cabrini-Green shots I had a strong suspicion I would be converting the images to black  and white. There are several reasons why I was leaning toward black and white. First, I the love the timeless factor BW lends to an image. Second, the scene felt cold, gritty,  and sinister in small way.  Lastly, the sky was a brilliant blue and I knew I would be able to convert the sky to pure black with the use of a red filter. I thought the black sky would add to the mood and serve as a nice contrast to the white building and the dust/debris that was being  knocked loose by the wrecking ball.

Once I had the images in Lightroom I did process several of them as straight up color images, and truth be told I just wasn’t feeling it. I had even gone as far as to process a few  HDR images, but once again I just wasn’t feeling it. I know this process can be extremely subjective and at the end of the day some people may have preferred the color images over BW but I just wasn’t feeling color, so I decided to stay true to my original gut instinct and  focus on converting the images as BW.

I didn’t use an on camera filter for this image but rather used a red filter preset that you can find HERE. Once the preset was applied, I decided to work on increasing the contrast through the tone curve. I wanted the white of the dust to really pop against the black sky so I increased the Lights slider a bit (this is located under the tone curve in Lightroom). I darkened the shadows just a hair to help set the mood and I added a little clarity. Now you can go crazy with clarity, and some people avoid it all together and use sharpen brush instead.  I feel when you have an image that has some texture, using the clarity slider can work nicely if you don’t push it too far.

The following images were processed very similar to the above image.

Cabrini-Green (1/250 at f/10, 70mm at ISO 125)

Cabrini-Green (1/200 at f/10, 85mm at ISO 125)

Cabrini-Green (1/125 sec at f/11, 80mm at ISO 125)

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 26th, 2010 at 7:00 am. It is filed under Adobe Lightroom, General, making of the image and tagged with "cabrini green", Adobe Lightroom, lightroom presets, making of the image. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.