6 Steps to Lightroom Grunge Heaven

Posted by admin on Jun 5, 2011 in Blog, Tutorial | 1 comment

You don’t have to look far to see gritty, grungy media – TV, movies, photography, print – everyone’s at it. So how do you get this look? Well, as usual there are dozens of ways, but I particularly like this method using Adobe Lightroom. You may prefer a one-click option, but I like to know what’s going on under the hood; These effects are rarely one-size fits all, so knowing how the effect was applied will give you the knowledge to tweak and refine. Knowledge that you won’t have with a preset effect. (This tutorial originally appeared on my old site as ’10 Steps to Lightroom Grunge Heaven’.. this is the new, improved version!)

To start, you’ll need a good image. Something with strong subject matter and properly exposed with a decent amount of contrast. As with the application of any filter or effect, you can’t turn a bad image into a good one, but you can turn something good into something great. So, do yourself a favour and pick out one of your better shots!

I’ll use this image of a leaping guitarist that was taken using a couple of off-camera strobes. There’s some interesting lighting going on and this always works well with this effect.

Step 1 - Recovery

First step, go into the Develop module and move the Recovery slider to 100%. The Recovery slider is used to recover detail in areas of the image that are over-exposed or “blown”. It works best when used on RAW files but will work to a lesser degree on JPEGs so long as the over exposure is not too great.

Step 2 - Fill

Next, move the Fill slider to 100%. The Fill slider works at the opposite end of the spectrum to the Recovery slider. It recovers detail in areas of shadow or where the image is under-exposed. If the image is severely under-exposed, this can introduce unsightly noise artefacts, but when the aim is for a gritty, grainy image you can get away with a bit more noise than normal.

Step 3 - Blacks

Now move the Blacks slider to 100% to bring some contrast back into the image.

Step 4 - Saturation

Now we’ll tweak the colours. Bring the Saturation slider down to about 20%. The saturation slider works on all the colour information in the image and the image now has that washed-out, grungy look, but we need to bring back a bit more punch using the Vibrance slider.

Step 5 - Vibrance

Now turn the Vibrance slider up to 100%. The Vibrance slider works in a similar way to the Saturation slider, but has no effect on the skin tone colours. Using the Vibrance slider, you can punch some colour back into an image, without giving people serious sun burn!

Step 6 - Vignette

Lastly, darken the corners slightly using the post-crop vignette slider.

…And that’s it! Six easy steps to Lightroom Grunge Heaven!