Hindenburg @ De Beloften
September 13th, 2009Just like last year, I was at the rock contest De Beloften to give my mental support to a befriended band. Last year that band was Lixi, this time it was my pals of Hindenburg. And just like last year, being imported from West Flanders turned out to be a disadvantage: neither Hindenburg or Outskirts made it to the top three. The righteous winner still was found in the Intergalactic Lovers. I’ve only taken pictures of Hindenburg, as fellow Indiestyler Paul Lamont was already covering the whole show.
As the pictures already had high contrast because of direct sunlight, I decided to experiment a little and exaggerate it. I tried to get a gritty look by playing with unsharp masks and vibrance. With varying success, I guess =) Though it’s hard to judge in screen resolution. I’m also not sure about the method to increase local contrast. Two possibilities are an unsharp mask or an overlay blend of a high pass copy. Both more or less do the same thing (technically, the unsharp mask is also a blend with a high pass). The unsharp masks has more pronounced ghosting though, which makes it grittier of course, but it doesn’t work as well in low resolutions.
Link to complete photo series.
September 25th, 2009 at 9:21 am
Quite a bit of haloing on that one. Intentional?
September 25th, 2009 at 11:19 am
Yeah it’s intentional. I wanted a gritty look with lots of contrast. So I applied heavy unsharp masks with radii of about 40 px. In the letters, it is most pronounced, and I guess I could have used a mask to temper it a bit. But it really works better on higher resolutions.
I used the same idea on the AssebRock pictures, but using an overlay blend with an high pass filtered image instead of directly applying an unsharp mask. It works better I think, although I also masked out the backgrounds in this process.