The photo above (click to see it larger) is from a couple weekends ago.  We had taken this family’s portraits at Red Rocks last year and they wanted to update them this year.  So, we agreed on a day and time and met up.  Unfortunately, it turned out to be one of the hottest days we’ve had all summer that day…and they had worn black!

Luckily, they were troopers!  We worked as fast as we could in order to free them up to go get ice cream and were able to turn out some nice shots for them.

For this post, I wanted to share the Lightroom settings I used on the processing of this particular image.  I’m not exactly sure what this edgy/surreal kind of look is officially called, but I call it a pseudo-”Dave Hill” look, since it’s a (very) rough approximation to some of his work.  (Dave has a much more involved lighting scheme and processing flow I’m sure.  Not to mention a MUCH larger session fee…)

I don’t necessarily like this look for a lot of images, but I have built a preset in Lightroom that I will test out on images to see what I think and if that looks good I’ll continue tweaking from there.

Here’s the final Basic settings used on the image above:

My original preset is based off a video I saw at Matt Kloskowski’s Lightroom Killer Tips website and actually has a +0.25 setting in the Exposure slider, which I felt was too hot here. Also, I’ve raised the Blacks slider a bit to regain some contrast as well, which I find I usually have to do when using this preset.

There are more articles & tutorials out there that are probably much better than this quickie – I  just wanted to give you a quick look into a technique I’ve recently used.  Definitely different from the processing in the studio shots of Sam we shot the day before.  I ended up creating a new preset for that one as well that I called ‘Studio Glamour’ and I could do a write up on that one too if folks are interested?