From Monitor Shock to Moody Blues

Sometimes (more often than not, actually), I make a picture and when I look at it on the LCD, it seems just fine. But then, at the end of the day, I import it into my computer and when I see it full-size & full-screen, ‘up close and personal’, I get something I have come to call ‘Monitor Shock’: the picture just doesn’t seem to reflect the mood and feel I had attributed to the place in my memory.

In those cases, it’s up to the post-processing not just to objectively ‘correct’ the image for things like overall exposure and white balance, but to subjectively ‘restore’ the look and feel of the original place. After all, unless you’re a purely documentary photographer, you want your photographs to reflect a certain atmosphere, and as much as the focal length used, the aperture and shutterspeed set and the shooting angle and crop employed, the post-processing is an essential, yet often overlooked, part of the equation.

Take this picture of a wall of an abandoned office building in Brussels, for example. It was taken during the Brussels part of Scott Kelby’s Photo Walk. Serge and I had kinda wandered away from the group and all of a sudden we found ourselves in this remote area which felt more like East-Berlin, before the fall of That Other Wall!

The place had a really desolate, gritty feel to it (admittedly helped by some rather unfresh smells hanging about the area) but when I saw the picture later that day on my monitor, I just saw a rather dull – and somewhat distorted – raw file of a graffiti’d wall.

So I delved into Lightrooms Develop module to try and make the picture convey what I had felt when taking it.

• I first corrected the distortions in DxO Optics Pro. This is software that can be called as a Secondary Editor from within Lightroom. The advantage to DxO’s way of treating lens distortions compared to Photoshop’s way of doing things (via Filter – Distort – Lens Correction) is that DxO’s corrections are based on actual measurements of the specific camera and lens combination used. In the mean time, I also adjusted the slight tilt of the wall, resulting in a stronger composition.
• Then, back in Lightroom (DxO automatically exports back into Lightroom), I played around with various presets and tweaked the settings to give the image it’s overall, dark and blue moody feel. I chose a cool tinting (although it was actually very hot that day) because that conveys the desolate feel of the area better.
• I added a couple of graduated filters with a positive clarity to the sidewalk and the street, to make the texture stand out better
• One unwanted side-effect of the post-processing (which involves a very high black clipping setting) was that the diagonal dark line between the wall and the windows had lost every bit of shadow detail (see below, right). I could try to restore detail by painting with a Local Adjustment Brush but because of the rectangular nature of the area (and Lightroom’s lack of something like Photoshop’s Polygonal Lasso tool) I thought I would be quicker off in Photoshop. So I made a virtual copy of the image, and brigthened it considerably to get detail back into the area (below, left). Then I selected the two images in the filmstrip and chose ‘Edit – Open as Layers in Photoshop’. I added a layer mask, allowing me to combine the best of both worlds.

Although I try to keep my edits as much in Lightroom as possible, sometimes it’s just quicker booking a quick return flight Lightroom – Photoshop – Lightroom…

In order to maximize my flexibility, I could even have chosen to open the images as Smart Objects, but this time I saw no reason to.

Below another proof that Brussels is, if anything, a city of contrast: a homeless person has arranged his bed – a cardboard ‘mattress’ is a more exact description – in the entrance hall of the … Ministry of Employment!

PS: the graffiti on the wall of the top picture says: ‘The future, if not black, will be green’. Now there’s something to think about…