10 Easy Steps to Lightroom Grunge Heaven!

Want to get this gritty and grungy look in your images? Own Lightroom? If you can answer ‘Yes’ to both of these questions, then you are just 10 steps away…!

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0, Full Version (PC/Mac)

Step 1: Load The Lightroom Develop Module
Load the image into Lightroom 2.0 and activate the ‘Develop’ module (or press “D”). Most of what we need to do can be achieved in the “Basic” adjustment panel, so to keep things simple you can minimize the other panels. You can see from the right end of the histogram that some of the highlights in this image are clipped (or blown). We’ll correct this during the editing process.
Step 2: Increase Recovery to 100
Click the Recovery slider and drag it to the far right end of the scale (100). This will recover the maximum amount of highlight detail in your image. You’ll see the clipped highlights in the histogram disappear.
Step 3: Increase Fill Light to 100
Click the Fill Light slider and drag it to the far right end of the scale (100). This will recover the maximum amount of shadow detail in your image. You will (temporarily!) loose all the blacks in the image and it will probably look washed out.
Step 4: Increase Blacks to 100
Click the Blacks slider and drag it to the far right end of the scale (100). This will restore your blacks. You may get some shadow clipping on the left end of the histogram – you can tweak this later if necessary.
Step 5: Decrease Saturation to -80
Click the Saturation slider and drag it left to -80. This will leave just a small amount of colour in the image giving it that grungy, washed out look.
Step 6: Increase Vibrance to 100
Click the Vibrance slider and drag it to the far right of the scale (100). This will restore some of the colour lost when we reduced Saturation in step 6 but, importantly, will have no effect on skin tones.
Step 7: Increase Clarity to 100
Off all the adjustments we’ve made, this will have the most subtle effect. Positive adjustments to Clarity increases local contrast and is great for giving punch to a low contrast image (It’s particularly good for highlighting musculature).
Step 8: Tweak the Exposure
Another minor tweak here. You’ll often find just dropping the exposure a fraction helps give this look an ‘edge’. Here I’ve dropped the exposure setting by a half stop (-0.5).
Step 9: Apply a Post Crop Vignette
Not strictly necessary, but darkening the corners slightly can add some focus and punch to the subject of your image. Here I’ve a applied a post crop vignette of -30.
Step 10: Sharpen and You’re Done!
Of course, there’s nothing to stop you saving this final look off as a preset of your own. You’ll find some images need more tweaking than others, that’s why I think it’s far more useful understanding how to get the look rather than just downloading a one-click solution!

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