This week’s channel video is something I discovered about contrast and its related tools that you need to know.
Because in an era of sliders and algorithms it’s sometimes easy to lose sight of what we are really doing to a photo when we edit it. So today I’m going to show you how contrast actually works and how you can get the exact effect you want in Lightroom, in Photoshop, IN Luminar, Capture one etc.
A tool is just a tool. you are the one that makes it work. So when I design classes, Lightroom presets, Capture one Styles, and actions, what I’m really doing is finding unique ways to combine these tools, and today I’ll show you how.
Think of contrast as the primary ingredient in every photo.
When you do that, your perception shifts and you see the tone and light in new ways as I talk about in my Exposed workshop using Zones and other exposure guides.
This may seem like a blip on the radar, but once you start to apply it it will change everything about how you make photos.
I wanted a more perfect Portra film preset for Lightroom and Capture One. So I made it!
Portra is a classic film, the 160 leans a touch green and is very versatile. The 400 is warmer and probably the top portrait film ever and the 800 is less famous but has a bit more color pop and a rich look.
Portra gen.2 took the Portra presets that have always been part of my Filmist presets and made them so much better. I tinkered and calibrated for days to get the feel of Portra just right. It took a lot of film research and formulation but the result was worth the wait.
You can Get Filmist here– The free pack has my new Portra 160 preset. Here’s my new video on the new Portra looks.
In making gen2 Portra I had to make all 3 presets from the ground up for Lightroom and then do it again for the Capture One Styles. But the result is a film emulation of Portra better than any I have ever used. It captures the aesthetic of Portra and just looks stunning. Watch the video and I’ll show you how it works.
Porta looks amazing on Portraits but also on a lot of other things.
Filmist is a lot of film emulsion presets, but the gen.2 Portra looks along with new gen.2 Natura 1600 which I recently finished developing brings in two of the most versatile films ever as digital presets for Lightroom and Capture 1 and LUT. I’m using these constantly in my workflow. Even if you only grab the free one I included in my Filmist free sampler pack, I hope you enjoy it.
In today’s video, I’m going to show you how to un-clip any photo.
Fixing a photo at this level may seem difficult at a glance but it’s actually not hard and we’re going to make short work of this. I’m going to show you what to do when NON of that is enough and you have an image so clipped that it seems like it’s useless. This is how you can fix ANY clipped photo.
If you expose well you can usually get rid of clipping and have stunning dynamic range using simple sliders, presets like Natural HDR or Filmist presets with a few of its dynamic chemical mods.
So for me there are 3 levels of clipping. Here’s why it happens and how to fix it every time.
You can also DOWNLOAD the RAW file I use in this to follow along.
This is a primer to my Shadow Hackers workshop. If you have not yet signed up for Shadow Hackers do it HERE.
Photography is all about tone, but not how people think.
In today’s primer video, I’ll use Black and white photography as a reference and we’ll start hunting shadows. This still applies to color because with this you can learn to people’s attention ONLY where you want it.
You can’t just have BLACK but you need black!
I love shooting in black and white to help me see tone better, even if I return to color. That tone-based sight makes you see better. It makes you plan your image to amaze.
My mentor Ken Whitmire died about 5 years ago now but I will never forget one of the most important lessons he taught me. Today we’ll look at some basics and histograms and in Shadow Hackers, we’ll go deeper.
The Birds, by Gavin Seim
“Tone” Ken said – “It’s the least used and least understood aspect of photography”.
That knowledge has driven me to discover something more. What I learned from that is that tone is complex but also simple Photographers are not using tone because they are afraid of it.
There are histograms, exposure charts, tools for luminosity making and tone, and RAW and actions. I even make some of them like
I realized that a rich tone starts with blacks. Zone 0, Zone 12 for you Ansel Zones Fans. If you stop being afraid of blacks, it changes the way you see and builds photos everywhere because you start seeing that contrast
Shoot shadows a bit and watch what happens…
Take the time to watch this video till the end. If you apply what’s shown here your blacks, your tone and as a result, your entire photography game will level up.
I’ve also been focusing on the latest editing tools I make to make finding shadows easier. Tools like Blackroom and Lumist. completely change how I can manipulate the shadow.
I also uploaded a FREE sampler pack from my Silver 4, the black and white Lightroom presets. Play with those or the Capture One Styles are also included. Watch how blacks are being used to do what we’re seeing in this video. See tones first, regardless of whether you’re photographing in black and white or color.
Don’t miss Shadow Hackers because in it we’ll go deeper and I’ll show you the entire process to master this – Gavin Seim
The Fuji worm invasion came after the film! In today’s video, I’ll show you how to fix it.
I want to tell you a story as we continue the LR vs C1 experiments because today I going to show more important ways to control details like the wormy artifacts sometimes caused by ISO noise.
I was starting photography in the late 90’s when I saved up for a Canon EOS 3. Oh I thought I was the coolest ever (hint, I was not)
I devoured the magazines. In those days we talked about fine-grain films like the new Portra 400, but words like worms and color noise were not topics. 1600 ISO was about the limit and it was noisy. Take it or leave it!
These days I’ll sit for hours and tinker with a formula for presets like Natural HDR 4 to get the best detail and tone from our files. Photographers that use presets actions and tools get better results. Because they see more without working harder.
35mm film was like having 10-20 megapixels.
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.
Serious pros of the day said 35mm was not enough. Strangely they downgraded a few years later to the 6MP generation of digital SLR’s.
No matter. My EOS 3 cost $1000 without a lens and I used it for years, starting out my portrait and wedding work and being the official photographer at the local speedway. It had eye control focus, meaning it focused where you looked in the viewfinder. It did not detect the subject’s eyes like today’s cameras. It was just cool and it worked, some of the time.
Each Saturday I would go early to the speedway and pre-sell photos for 15 bucks. Then I would sit all night in the center field taking photos, playing with pans, and getting dusty. On Monday I developed 6-10 rolls of film, sort 4×6 prints, store the negatives and give the prints to my racers, hoping to profit about $200
That 35mm film with it’s noisy ISO 800 grain was what I had and I made it work and I learned a lot in that dusty center field.
But noisy was relative and more organic then. It was silver. These films were classic and looked beautiful. The formulas I’ve created in Filmist presets are more high-res than we had then, but they look great because they look like film.
PS: Download my FREE Filmist pack to get my noise presets and the film looks if you missed it. You’ll see what I mean about film color and detail.
Today I think about the hurdles we had to get a good print and how many stages of noise and artifacts and dust and scratches could be introduced.
Today we pixel peep and panic over a little blip in a sensor or a little noise that as I showed in last weeks video is easy to clean up with good use of detail and grain tools
Watch my worms video and learn how to control detail.
I love doing testing. It’s experimenting like in this week’s video that help us understand more. It’s that hunt that results is tools like my presets and like Emulsion 3 and Lumist for Photoshop.
So this week I uploaded another video looking at more grain and noise. It’s a focus on Fuji files, but also another look at LR vs C1 and how it will handle noise regardless of what camera your worms and artifacts come from.
That’s all for this week. I’m hitting the streets looking for light like I found here and processed with Filmist. Come Monday I’ll be back to my experiments, working on formulas and ideas for next week’s email.
See you then, Gavin Seim
Fuji X100V ISO 800, Filmist process and Gavs detail preset
This was me in the early 2000’s with my prized EOS 3.