How to get these airy bright photos?

[Mashburn]

not meaning to derail the thread. but does anyone have a good link or program to calibrate the monitor?

 

[Vince.1551]

not meaning to derail the thread. but does anyone have a good link or program to calibrate the monitor?

If you have a Mac there's a software in it to do that. However calibration is only as good as if your ambient lighting remains the same.

 

[CarolynB28]

I use Spyder4Pro, it really makes a huge difference to calibrate your screen!

 

[hombredelmar]

Her pictures are lovely, she uses Canon 5d Mark III , about 3 prime lenses and post processing.

 

[sscarmack]

not meaning to derail the thread. but does anyone have a good link or program to calibrate the monitor?

If you have a Mac there's a software in it to do that. However calibration is only as good as if your ambient lighting remains the same.

I have a mac and never have used this....Any more info?

 

[hombredelmar]

I'm trying imitate the effect achieved in the photos found on this site: Paris in Four Months |Paris in Four Months I've been playing with the exposure on my camera and get pretty bright photos through that, but not as bright as I'd like them to be like that photographer's photos. Any photo editing suggestions?

What you are seeing is diffused lighting either through a white translucent curtain or from a strobe with a large rectangular soft box. I'm not so sure about the house. Unless your original image has even lighting it's hard to replicate in post.

It is interesting you mentioned a soft box, that is the impression I got from seeing many product and close ups, she has nice even light so in addition to her post processing she is using light boxes even though on her site she mentioned that she is using canon mark 3 and about 3 prime lenses
I actually love her style, compositions and of cause her lighting

 

[hombredelmar]

It is interesting you mentioned a soft box, that is the impression I got from seeing many product and close ups, she has nice even light so in addition to her post processing she is using light boxes even though on her site she mentioned that she is using canon mark 3 and about 3 prime lenses
I actually love her style, compositions and of cause her lighting

 

[Braineack]

She's also very smart about shooting white things, or things against white. Notice that all her pictures are primarily white, that includes the subjects and backgrounds.

I was able to mimic the style in a few of my shots. It really only worked in pictures on a white backdrop or with white lights/sky.


example -


her's -


mine -

Not the greatest shot by me, but the first that came to mind of colors on white.


again-

her's:



and my bad shot:





Applying the same technique to another more typical shot:

Here's her's:



and my very similar shot edited to her "style"



This is nothing like how I'd edit my photo, but I think I was able to mimic it pretty well.


I'd edit her's more like this:



another -

before:



after, doing the same curves adjustment above, and also recovering highlights:




She definitely has go-to presets she uses. Probably starts with the basic curve and then will go from there, looks like a lot will "matte" the blacks as well.

I think she has a lot of stellar shots that are ruined form her one-click button edits.

 

[Proulxski]

While I still don't have a defenitive answer, I do believe there is more to this than just over-exposed image, and post processing. Many of the more knowledgable photographers have shed their insight.

I would not be suprised, if soft boxes, or some sort of external light is being used. If it was over exposed, it would look overly washed out. Yes, this artists style is to wash things out, but it is done in such a soft manner.

Playing with the curves, whites and blacks in post processing, will also help. And I'm sure she has it down to a T by this point.

I personally enjoyed her photos, it's not my thing, but that doesn't make them bad!

 

[Braineack]

She's probably using flash in some of her staged photos, but not the majority on her blog. She looks to only may be using flash in the staged shots that introduce a new blog entry.

and she's not really over exposing the images--that was a joke--she's taking a picture and clicking a button in LR.

I just demonstrated how to get the same look, I could even make it a LR preset for you that would be a pretty damn close starting-off point. It's mainly in the curves, with a bit of highlights/whites/shadow slider to fine tune. That's really about it.

It was easy to "fix" her photos by simply inverting the curves as I showed.

But also as I mentioned, she's very careful about what she's taking pictures of--lots of back lighting, lots of natural light, lots of white subjects, lots of black subjects on white, lots of white walls, lots of white flowers, white curtains, white buildings, white gravel, white table cloths, etc.

If you look at her first few pictures, she's inside her hotel room taking pictures of shoes. she placed them near a window for light--there's no flash involved. Zoom in on the pictures, you can see her holding the camera above the shoes and you can see how close in proximity they are to the window as the light source. She exposes for the subject and that in itself already throws the surrounding white bg/wall very bright. she then amps up the whites in post.

In the shots that don't have a lot of white, like the greenery shots, she looks to use a subtle matte/vintage color-toned LR preset.


But man, if I was the new creative director for Dior responsible for draping all those millions of flowers at the Dior fashion shows, and then i saw this girl completely wash them out in all her pictures, i'd be more than annoyed.

 

[hombredelmar]

I don’t care what people say but she is great. Her pictures are simple and even though some of the pictures are “washed out” they still look like pictures from reputable magazine. She definitely has her own style that is hard to replicate. I absolutely love the fact that she does not saturate the pictures with color and is confident with her blown out skies.

 

[Vince.1551]

I have a mac and never have used this....Any more info?

It's under System Preference > Display > Color > Calibrate

 

[limr29 2]

I think her pictures are nice, but honestly, they're not really distinctive. It seems very very familiar to me. The folks who are commenting in this thread are probably not reading Vogue or In Style, but a flip through any fashion mag of substance (I'm not talking Cosmo or anything) will show that this kind of processing is fairly common. You'll see it a lot in design magazines as well, and it's also showing up in magazines like Food and Wine.

 

[Vince.1551]

I think her pictures are nice, but honestly, they're not really distinctive. It seems very very familiar to me. The folks who are commenting in this thread are probably not reading Vogue or In Style, but a flip through any fashion mag of substance (I'm not talking Cosmo or anything) will show that this kind of processing is fairly common. You'll see it a lot in design magazines as well, and it's also showing up in magazines like Food and Wine.

I remember this style being around even before digital photography.

 

[Derrel]

I'm trying imitate the effect achieved in the photos found on this site: Paris in Four Months |Paris in Four Months

I've been playing with the exposure on my camera and get pretty bright photos through that, but not as bright as I'd like them to be like that photographer's photos. Any photo editing suggestions?

Expose normally, then in software raise the exposure a good deal, then use either the curves tool to blow out at least the very highest highlights, or nearly blow them. Or use the curves tool to make the highlights very,very bright.

These are not over-exposed in-camera, these are fairly good, but normal exposures, but she's making SURE that the higher tonal values are pushed verrrrrrrrry far to the right.

There are a number of Lightroom pre-sets that can accomplish this. Exactly how the brightening is done depends on your software: for example, on older versions of Lighreoom, in the Recovery slider, you would use MINUS recovery, to make the highlights wayyy too bright, as opposed to using it to recover blown highlight detail. The curves tool is probably going to be the easiest for most people to use, along with the exposure slider.

This is sort of a post-processing stage high-key effect used as a bludgeon...she just keeps HAMMERING away, frame after frame after blown frame with detail-free highlights, almost as if she's just become enamored of this effect rather recently. After about the tenth shot, it grew a bit tedious to me.

But that's kind of what happens these days when it's so so easy to ONE-CLICK or batch process huge batches of images using ACR or Lightroom or whatever...we become accustomed to a "look", and normalcy takes a vacation, and rather tedious and outlandish "normal" looks starts to be considered to be "okay" or even good. Again, this is I think, because our minds and brains can adapt rather easily AND, this is the big thing, we now have the ability to process an image and then BATCH process or "paste settings" en mass, and since the batch processing approach took hold, we've seen more and more people who start relying on a go-to look or a go-to preset quite repeatedly.

The thing is, if you have much of a visual sense of style, seeing scenes that are in NO WAY high-key subject matter being "Paste Settings" processed looks rather newbish and trite. As Braineack mentioned without maybe being fully aware of exactly WHY, you cannot take dark-toned objects and scenes and slap on a "high key pre-set" or crank the top end of the curves skyward, and not have it end up looking like crap. It's like a singer singing wayyyyy out of key. But hey...we have Autotune these days!