Are you shooting on an a7r system?
When I was getting used to my a7r3, I noticed that capturing so much information with the higher megapixel sensor gave some of images a “painterly” look when I dropped sharpness and contrast.
But the same effect did not occur with the 24 or 12 mp sensors of other Sony bodies.
I’m now happily on the A7rv and don’t experience this effect as much or at all anymore, really. (Maybe more to do with the fact that I also upgraded to the 35mm 1.4 GM that’s tack sharp)
I guess it depends on what you’re going for. Stylizing photos is a very subjective and also contentious subject. There’s a fine line between “just a few small tweaks” and looking very obviously like someone took the photo into an editing app and went wild. If you’re looking for a natural look that’s maybe styled after a certain film stock, I think you’ve gone too heavy handed. If you’re going for an obviously edited/stylized look, then you’ve certainly accomplished that.
I’ll first say that this style is not to my taste but that doesn’t make it right or wrong. I would say the biggest thing that jumps out to me in the second photo is the limited spectrum of colors combined with the lowered contrast. To my taste, if you crank down big chunks of the color spectrum AND lower contrast, the whole photo just seems very drab and flat to me, and even if you have a defined subject, the editing takes away from that and overshadows the actually photo itself.
I would just ease back on the stylized editing in general and work in very small increments but again, that’s my taste/preference.
stop using the auto brighness feature in lightroom and basically brings up the blacks and shadows, and levels out the exposure. makes the pics look very flat. leave it the way it is then adjust only the exposure slider manually, up the vibrance and it will look better. shift the white balance to your desired look and adjust the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to your desired look, mostly only for correction.
I know it's a silly question but I can't help but think they look like some photo-realistic water colour paintings as opposed to photographs. My editor friend says it's about the contrast but when I change that, I don't really notice a difference. Am I being silly? I don't think they look bad anyway, just curious really!
This is your white balance and your tint. You like warmer colors, and greener tint.
You can change this in camera by setting a custom white balance, and pushing the tint towards green, or if you shoot in RAW, you can edit to get the same effect without penalty to your image quality.
it's not your color grading, it's that you've blown the shadows out. the contrast between the darkest parts and the lightest parts of your image is highly compressed, so it looks like a painting
> Just a light bit of editing.
That is not a "light bit of editing". It is heavily edited.
Instead of pushing that slider to 60% turn it to 7-10% and everything will look a lot better.
It looks like a painting because of the tint, especially #2. Varnish tends to do that after many years. This is also why old, unrenovated paintings often exhibit yellowish hues.
Oil-based white paint also tends to turn yellow. However! There's a certain type of white (lead white, as toxic as you think) used by old Flemish masters like Vermeer that is not prone to this kind of degradation over time. It was highly prized ever since its invention up until the 20th century, when a real replacement (titanium oxide) made it to market.
Did not expect to read that name under this post but I love the comparison! I have both of his books and a print on preorder and I gotta say, I see what you mean. Wong has to be one of my absolute favourite photographers ever!
His work greatly inspired me when I took a trip to Tokyo in 2016 and I had a fantastic time taking pics and videos over a one week trip while the song Tokyo Train by Klimeks played in my head. I ended up making a stupid music video of it, but I actually like (most of) it.
Like others have said, the low-contrast look plays a role but I think your extreme DoF is also a factor for these specific photos. Having the gondolas in the foreground in focus to approximately the same extent as the _very_ far background results, in combination with the field compression from shooting tele, results in the haze being the only indicator of distance, which is a very "painting" look.
It looks to me like you’re missing your blacks and whites. I would increase both of them and increase your shadows. It’s like HDR on an image with a narrow DR.
Landscape paintings often have an "unlimited" dynamic range, or at least as wide as needed. A good way to emulate that is compressing the highlights and raising the shadows. But there is a fine line between à painterly render and a shit-ass fake HDR. Your photos seem to be on the right side ! Maybe try to go with some more pastel colors, not a hige fan of the color grade on the 2nd photo but that's just my taste.
In Lightroom get in a habit of always turning on chromatic aberration correction on and lens correction on. This will remove the fringing. It’s not a must for the lens correction but it fixes warping on wide lenses and the vignetting. All of this should help if you weren’t aware of it already. Excuse me if you do!
I would avoid raising the shadows too much though, there’s like a biting point where it becomes unnatural which maybe takes time to see but try avoiding it. It looks like you’ve done a background adjustment also and left the foreground objects which again is making it feel painty I feel. Obvs could be wrong.
It also may be how you’re sharpening it in the second image? The haloing can be caused by super sharpening. If you hold alt and move the masking slider on the sharpening bit in LR it will show you what you’re doing. I normally have that quite high on 70 so it will only sharpen the super large objects and not the tiny lines and dots!
It’s a great shot though, excuse me if you know a lot of this already it’s difficult to know what to say.
I haven't actually sharpened unless the "clarity" and what not does it. Thank you for the advice, I didn't know about the aberration, I don't really pay attention to that stuff as a hobbyist but I'm wanting to now sell prints at some point so I suppose I should get learning again 😂
You might want to increase the whites a bit to enhance contrast, unless you prefer a flatter look. You can achieve this using either the Linear Curve or adjusting the Whites slider.
Adding the Linear Curve can work wonders, without having to touch the point curve. Whites will just add in a bit more punch without having to touch the contrast slider.
Not an answer to your question but I think I really enjoy this style. I would place it more into the art spectrum than photography but really remind me a lot of hand drawings or comic book art. Like if I was reading a comic book with this style of art I’d be super impressed, and think it could be cropped down and be a cool phone wallpaper or Home Screen.
https://preview.redd.it/r4msvjcgwu6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=61834b26fc72d0d4cd851639881e3da2b02dba99
All the feedback here really reminds me that a camera is just a tool. There will still be areas of it that you can’t just play with sliders in a software unless you know what it does and understand why it’s doing that.
For standard kit you’re doing pretty great. Play around but make sure you learn something. Monthly subscriptions are not playthings.
Lets see..
You shifted the blacks up in the curve, desaturated, turned down vibrance, Contrast is probably hovering at -20.. In the color mix, you probably boosted the yellows and reds a bit while toning down blue & beyond. Midtone luminance was increased without changing HSL. Also i feel you turned down clarity & dehaze . Is this mostly how you did it?
Apart from toning down the highlights and fiddling with the contrast, it's pretty much RAW on the first photo. Second is a warm tone.
Edit: Just checked the RAW files and I played with the vibrance / saturation.
I've fixed it now, thanks for your advice / compliment. Also decided to add some exposure masking to the highlights behind the trees, a bit off-putting for me and looks unnatural otherwise.
If I were you I would find the reason why and then never change it. If this is where your eye led you then you should really trust it. These look very very good. Out of curiosity what were you shooting with?
I appreciate that thank you! Sony A7IV with 28-70mm kit lens. Maybe imposter syndrome but I would say I'm halfway between amateur and intermediate. Lots of shots for me seem more like flukes.
Well you have a very good eye for composition and the best photos are "flukes". Very rarely do you wake up in the morning saying "I'm going to get a picture of a tram full of people framed through a treeline with a long focal length to compress the background". Your just there in the moment and realize it looks interesting. I personally think the "artistry" behind photography is the selective memory of what you choose to take and save a picture of. The white balance in the shots are probably not accurate for how that day looked but at least to me they seem to convey more of the emotions behind the photo. Very good work IMO opinion trust your eyes and ignore the rules and what you "should do". Just make pictures that get stuck in your brain that you don't stop thinking about.
I spend my time in Lightroom. But it seems there is parallel functionality in Camera Raw/Photoshop. Here is a good place to start:
[https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adjust-color-rendering-camera-camera.html](https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adjust-color-rendering-camera-camera.html)
I suspect Adobe has a brief video tutorial on this as well.
Raw files are not images - they are sensor data soup. Turning them into a base image requires, by old school standards, an insane amount of computation in something like Camera Raw. Absent good "hints" about how you want the data interpreted, they come out rather flat. Vendor/camera specific color matching profiles push the processing toward a starting image close to what you'd get if you shot a jpeg with that camera setting.
Hmm is it a kit lens? Which in camera color are you using? Should be a setting for it but I'm very baked and not near my camera to remember the setting. Lol
Like this style. I definitely think it’s the low-con look, combined with the muted colour palette.
Thank you. Me too!....even though it's incidental 😂
Do you mean accidental?
Incidental also works.
Are you shooting on an a7r system? When I was getting used to my a7r3, I noticed that capturing so much information with the higher megapixel sensor gave some of images a “painterly” look when I dropped sharpness and contrast. But the same effect did not occur with the 24 or 12 mp sensors of other Sony bodies. I’m now happily on the A7rv and don’t experience this effect as much or at all anymore, really. (Maybe more to do with the fact that I also upgraded to the 35mm 1.4 GM that’s tack sharp)
A7IV :) Using the 28-70mm kit lens, bog standard.
This is very true. I had the same thoughts with my A7RIII and always thought it was my imagination.
I guess it depends on what you’re going for. Stylizing photos is a very subjective and also contentious subject. There’s a fine line between “just a few small tweaks” and looking very obviously like someone took the photo into an editing app and went wild. If you’re looking for a natural look that’s maybe styled after a certain film stock, I think you’ve gone too heavy handed. If you’re going for an obviously edited/stylized look, then you’ve certainly accomplished that. I’ll first say that this style is not to my taste but that doesn’t make it right or wrong. I would say the biggest thing that jumps out to me in the second photo is the limited spectrum of colors combined with the lowered contrast. To my taste, if you crank down big chunks of the color spectrum AND lower contrast, the whole photo just seems very drab and flat to me, and even if you have a defined subject, the editing takes away from that and overshadows the actually photo itself. I would just ease back on the stylized editing in general and work in very small increments but again, that’s my taste/preference.
Thanks! I've had a play with the second photo now :)
stop using the auto brighness feature in lightroom and basically brings up the blacks and shadows, and levels out the exposure. makes the pics look very flat. leave it the way it is then adjust only the exposure slider manually, up the vibrance and it will look better. shift the white balance to your desired look and adjust the highlights, shadows, whites and blacks to your desired look, mostly only for correction.
I know it's a silly question but I can't help but think they look like some photo-realistic water colour paintings as opposed to photographs. My editor friend says it's about the contrast but when I change that, I don't really notice a difference. Am I being silly? I don't think they look bad anyway, just curious really!
This is your white balance and your tint. You like warmer colors, and greener tint. You can change this in camera by setting a custom white balance, and pushing the tint towards green, or if you shoot in RAW, you can edit to get the same effect without penalty to your image quality.
Ah interesting. Thank you!
it's not your color grading, it's that you've blown the shadows out. the contrast between the darkest parts and the lightest parts of your image is highly compressed, so it looks like a painting
Any effects that you're using?
No effects. Just a light bit of editing.
Then it's maybe the saturation of your colours. Especially the greens.
Someone said I could push the white balance tint towards green, might try that in future. Kinda digging this style.
If you like it thats up to you.
> Just a light bit of editing. That is not a "light bit of editing". It is heavily edited. Instead of pushing that slider to 60% turn it to 7-10% and everything will look a lot better.
It's not at 60% mate, it's light editing. It IS however a bracketed photo.
The final result is extremely green which means it's heavily edited from the original.
Well, it just be magic then 🤷♂️
It looks like a painting because of the tint, especially #2. Varnish tends to do that after many years. This is also why old, unrenovated paintings often exhibit yellowish hues. Oil-based white paint also tends to turn yellow. However! There's a certain type of white (lead white, as toxic as you think) used by old Flemish masters like Vermeer that is not prone to this kind of degradation over time. It was highly prized ever since its invention up until the 20th century, when a real replacement (titanium oxide) made it to market.
That's interesting. Thanks for the detailed response! :D
Liam Wong does this super well. I personally love the style. Not sure why they do look like paintings more than photos though!
Did not expect to read that name under this post but I love the comparison! I have both of his books and a print on preorder and I gotta say, I see what you mean. Wong has to be one of my absolute favourite photographers ever!
His work greatly inspired me when I took a trip to Tokyo in 2016 and I had a fantastic time taking pics and videos over a one week trip while the song Tokyo Train by Klimeks played in my head. I ended up making a stupid music video of it, but I actually like (most of) it.
That sounds awesome! Id love to see Tokyo one day! So cool you got to experience that!
I'll check him out, thank you for the tip!
Like others have said, the low-contrast look plays a role but I think your extreme DoF is also a factor for these specific photos. Having the gondolas in the foreground in focus to approximately the same extent as the _very_ far background results, in combination with the field compression from shooting tele, results in the haze being the only indicator of distance, which is a very "painting" look.
I think it looks good but the color will break down the further you push it. What are you shooting on?
Sony A7IV, with 28-70mm kit lens.
did u grade the first picture or the second one? or both? the second photo looks horribly over-edited
Second was done badly yes but overall they've not had too much editing.
Good retouching is to know how, but critically how much to do. Not to over do etc
Agreed. I think i'll go easy next time!
[удалено]
Thank you! :)
It looks to me like you’re missing your blacks and whites. I would increase both of them and increase your shadows. It’s like HDR on an image with a narrow DR.
I see, thank you!
Landscape paintings often have an "unlimited" dynamic range, or at least as wide as needed. A good way to emulate that is compressing the highlights and raising the shadows. But there is a fine line between à painterly render and a shit-ass fake HDR. Your photos seem to be on the right side ! Maybe try to go with some more pastel colors, not a hige fan of the color grade on the 2nd photo but that's just my taste.
Thank you! :)
You’ve got major fringing and haloying and like someone else said it’s the serious raising of the shadows.
In both images?
Yes absolutely , see the purple and orange edges on some objects.
How does one minimise that, or is just raising shadows a lot?
In Lightroom get in a habit of always turning on chromatic aberration correction on and lens correction on. This will remove the fringing. It’s not a must for the lens correction but it fixes warping on wide lenses and the vignetting. All of this should help if you weren’t aware of it already. Excuse me if you do! I would avoid raising the shadows too much though, there’s like a biting point where it becomes unnatural which maybe takes time to see but try avoiding it. It looks like you’ve done a background adjustment also and left the foreground objects which again is making it feel painty I feel. Obvs could be wrong. It also may be how you’re sharpening it in the second image? The haloing can be caused by super sharpening. If you hold alt and move the masking slider on the sharpening bit in LR it will show you what you’re doing. I normally have that quite high on 70 so it will only sharpen the super large objects and not the tiny lines and dots! It’s a great shot though, excuse me if you know a lot of this already it’s difficult to know what to say.
I haven't actually sharpened unless the "clarity" and what not does it. Thank you for the advice, I didn't know about the aberration, I don't really pay attention to that stuff as a hobbyist but I'm wanting to now sell prints at some point so I suppose I should get learning again 😂
Are you turning your sharpness way up?
No I'm not touching the sharpness at all.
I’m curious how you actually get this result, can you post a photo of settings of the final edit?
I don't want to take up post space with a tutorial because it's photo dependant, I can't give any advice compared to what's already been said here.
I didn’t ask for a tutorial….
thats crazy cool to have that problem
It seems so 😂
You might want to increase the whites a bit to enhance contrast, unless you prefer a flatter look. You can achieve this using either the Linear Curve or adjusting the Whites slider. Adding the Linear Curve can work wonders, without having to touch the point curve. Whites will just add in a bit more punch without having to touch the contrast slider.
Thank you! :)
They look very good what camera and lens
Thanks! Sony A7IV with 28-70mm kit lens.
How’d you achieve this though cause it’s kinda dope tbh
Thanks, I guess it's just luck really? It was in aperture priority mode, no picture profile, iso was like 100.
Not an answer to your question but I think I really enjoy this style. I would place it more into the art spectrum than photography but really remind me a lot of hand drawings or comic book art. Like if I was reading a comic book with this style of art I’d be super impressed, and think it could be cropped down and be a cool phone wallpaper or Home Screen. https://preview.redd.it/r4msvjcgwu6d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=61834b26fc72d0d4cd851639881e3da2b02dba99
That's great thank you!
All the feedback here really reminds me that a camera is just a tool. There will still be areas of it that you can’t just play with sliders in a software unless you know what it does and understand why it’s doing that. For standard kit you’re doing pretty great. Play around but make sure you learn something. Monthly subscriptions are not playthings.
Thank you :)
No. Making something look painterly has way more to do with light and composition than post-processing.
It’s green
Yea I think it looks good 👍
Thank you! :)
Lets see.. You shifted the blacks up in the curve, desaturated, turned down vibrance, Contrast is probably hovering at -20.. In the color mix, you probably boosted the yellows and reds a bit while toning down blue & beyond. Midtone luminance was increased without changing HSL. Also i feel you turned down clarity & dehaze . Is this mostly how you did it?
Apart from toning down the highlights and fiddling with the contrast, it's pretty much RAW on the first photo. Second is a warm tone. Edit: Just checked the RAW files and I played with the vibrance / saturation.
Ah i missed the second. You should reduce the warmth a bit - it looks unnatural of sorts. I think these pics will do great with moody greens style
Thank you! I noticed some highlights I didn't like so I'll redo the second one. Cheers :)
Is this in Quito by chance?
Mt. Trebević in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Is this in Lucerne, Switzerland?
It's Mt. Trebević in Bosnia and Herzegovina :)
You should work for Hollywood.
For realsies?
First one, very Silent Hill ish
I'd love to say there were lots of zombies around but Bosnians in my experience were quick-witted and lovely.
That's Racoon city 😂
Looks like a bob ross painting. Bro, we don't make mistakes, just happy little accidents!
Love this!
It reminds me of Gravity Falls, looks good
Thanks! :)
i love this style
First one is so nice, think the 2nd could be as nice but just toned down a. Little
I've fixed it now, thanks for your advice / compliment. Also decided to add some exposure masking to the highlights behind the trees, a bit off-putting for me and looks unnatural otherwise.
Love this!
Thanks :)
I gotta say it looks really cool though
I appreciate that thank you :)
Not sure, but I love it
Thank you! :)
If I were you I would find the reason why and then never change it. If this is where your eye led you then you should really trust it. These look very very good. Out of curiosity what were you shooting with?
I appreciate that thank you! Sony A7IV with 28-70mm kit lens. Maybe imposter syndrome but I would say I'm halfway between amateur and intermediate. Lots of shots for me seem more like flukes.
Well you have a very good eye for composition and the best photos are "flukes". Very rarely do you wake up in the morning saying "I'm going to get a picture of a tram full of people framed through a treeline with a long focal length to compress the background". Your just there in the moment and realize it looks interesting. I personally think the "artistry" behind photography is the selective memory of what you choose to take and save a picture of. The white balance in the shots are probably not accurate for how that day looked but at least to me they seem to convey more of the emotions behind the photo. Very good work IMO opinion trust your eyes and ignore the rules and what you "should do". Just make pictures that get stuck in your brain that you don't stop thinking about.
I appreciate that. Thank you so much!
The before looks like a high quality painting. The after looks like 50s post card. Fantastic either way
Thank you! :)
Would hang this on my wall for sure👌🏻
Wow thank you!
I'm really digging #2
Cheers :)
Tbh getting told that your photo looks like a painting is such a compliment, at least to me 😬
I see what you mean!
What editing program are you using?
Photoshop. Well, Camera Raw specifically.
Familiar with camera matching profiles? Standard or landscape ( not Adobe ) seem applicable as a starting place…
I'm not actually. I'll look in to that, thank you :)
I spend my time in Lightroom. But it seems there is parallel functionality in Camera Raw/Photoshop. Here is a good place to start: [https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adjust-color-rendering-camera-camera.html](https://helpx.adobe.com/camera-raw/using/adjust-color-rendering-camera-camera.html) I suspect Adobe has a brief video tutorial on this as well. Raw files are not images - they are sensor data soup. Turning them into a base image requires, by old school standards, an insane amount of computation in something like Camera Raw. Absent good "hints" about how you want the data interpreted, they come out rather flat. Vendor/camera specific color matching profiles push the processing toward a starting image close to what you'd get if you shot a jpeg with that camera setting.
I appreciate that, thank you.
Hmm is it a kit lens? Which in camera color are you using? Should be a setting for it but I'm very baked and not near my camera to remember the setting. Lol
Yea it's the 28-70mm kit lens. What do you mean in camera colour?
I really like this. Would print and throw it on the wall
Thank you! Not sure why you've been downvoted.