Dave Hill Wannabe

Tried to take some shots of the girls for our Christmas cards. I was using strobe lighting to create some nice portrait shots. Can't say the session was a success. The lighting turned out harsher that I'd like. Still it gave me a chance to try a Dave Hill style image with just using Lightroom. The idea is that if you have a good contrasty image then you can do something like this:

* take recovery to 100
* take fill to 100
* add a little black for some contrast
* take contrast to 100
* take clarity to 100
* take vibrance to 100
* bring down the saturation to where you almost lose all of your color. NOT BLACK AND WHITE
* go back and play with your exposure and blacks to make the image acceptable

I didn't do these steps exactly but I like the effect well enough, for what it is. I would like it to be still a little more extreme. There is a plugin for Photoshop called "LucisArt ED" that I'm tempted to get but it's not cheap and I don't think I would get my money's worth.

P.S. I have a folder of before and after images of my recent blips. I've added this image to the folder. You can browse the folder to compare the unprocessed RAW images that come from the camera with the final processed versions I used for my blips. I had originally created this collection for a forum post but I think others might find it interesting.