Joey Baltimore

In an effort to not just show you the photos I am taking, but show you how I get to the end results too, I am starting this series of before and after photos with an Adobe Lightroom preset download of the effect used in each picture and why they were used.

So, instead of me yapping about what I am trying to do, just let me say that these photos are of The Paul Collins Beat from August 26th in Madison, WI. The first is from an in-store at Mad City Music Exchange and the second is from their concert at The Frequency later that night.

The Paul Collins Beat, or The Beat for short, are a power pop rock ‘n’ roll band that’s been around for quite a long time. Before The Beat, Paul Collins was in The Nerves, who were the originators of the song “Hanging On the Telephone.” The photos I took this day needed to reflect that vintage, late 70′s rock look without straying into black & white punky territory. That’s how this slightly washed out, vintage effect was born.

• I reset the white balance from the “as shot” to the standard tungsten, which added a bit more blue and green tint. From there, I pushed up the fill light, blacks, and contrast, as well as maxing out the recovery and clarity (just a personal preference for those two).
• Adjusting curves to brighten the darks and shadows on the regions sliders was the next step.
• To get the colors closer to end results, I used some split toning with a puke-ish yellow for highlights and a springtime, little girl lavender for the shadows (a match made by someone watching a fabulous sunrise from the roof of The Wisco).
• From there tweaking the individual color saturation sliders to adjust for any blown out or just plain annoying areas of the picture was in order. Oh, and dropping the luminance slider of magenta, because that’s the magenta haired step child of colors.
• Since I shot this with a 50D, and they’re kinda bad with the kit lens and color noise, I blasted that slider to full reduction and added some masking to the sharpening of the photo, because I wanted you to be able to read Paul’s shirt even on a web version of this image.
• With the image almost done, I dropped the vibrance slider just a few notches to deaden the color a bit more. That was it.

You may want to tweak out the vibrance and exposure sliders after applying this preset to get better results, but that is about it. You can download the preset at the bottom of the article.

This is just a slight tweak on the previous to make things a bit better for dark concert venue settings by cutting the amount of the blacks slider in half, but as you can see, the preset is quite versatile in regards to settings. With some exposure adjustments, and maybe some slight white balance adjustments, you can push it for other types of settings too.

Download the Lightroom Presets Series #1 presets now.

To view more of The Paul Collins Beat photos, take a look at the set on my flickr.