The urban portrait look is a highly sought-after editing style which many photographers seek to achieve. There are tons of tutorials out there teaching you how to do this, and there are many great ones indeed.
However, the issue is (at least how I felt when I learnt to do it myself), every person does it in his own way.
But as someone just starting to experiment with this style, you want to know in a systematic way what creates the basic framework of the urban look, not necessarily the individual habits that might not apply to everyone.
Today, you are in luck! Based on my observation of the work of urban portrait photographers, and after watching thousands of hours of editing tutorials, I summarised everything I have learnt into a few steps.
Theses steps highlight the common elements that give these portraits that ‘look’. With these steps, you will learn which areas to pay attention to in your editing. And you will see that apart from these few most important things, the rest is entirely a matter of personal preference.
For the purposes of demonstration, examples will be given using the Camera Raw filter in Adobe Photoshop, which is essentially the same as Adobe Lightroom. These principles are universal so you can apply them across any photo editing software.
Here are the 5 main steps in editing urban portraits:
Slightly lift blacks
Blast highlights
Preserve skin tones
Create color contrast
Cool down overall tones
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Slightly Lift the Blacks
What are the blacks?
In every photo, there are 5 regions, organised based on brightness levels: blacks, shadows, midtones, highlights, and whites. This is the dynamic range - the span of brightness levels your camera can capture.
In Camera Raw, the brightness levels are represented on a numeral scale of 0-255. 0 is where the blacks are, and 255 is where the whites are.
What concerns us here is that, blacks represent the parts of the photo where no light was recorded, and midtones are parts where the brightness is 50%. Anything between midtones and blacks fall into the category of shadows.
If you want to find out if there are blacks in your photos, and how much, you can refer to either the histogram, or the tone curve.
See the below screenshot for your reference.
What is ‘lifting’ the blacks?
Now that you know what the blacks are in a photo, we can talk about the concept of lifting the blacks.
Lifting means adding brightness to the black points in your photo. This results in all black points being turned into shadow areas. There are no more points with 0 brightness in the photo.
Why lift the blacks in urban portraits?
Urban portraits often have a moody look. Based on my study of urban portraits throughout the past 5 years, I gathered that this moody look is created by adding grey to colours.
This mutes the vibrance of colours and creates a faded look. The science behind this warrants a separate discussion. Read my article “Effectively Improve Photoshop Skills for Photography Retouch” to understand the science behind the moody effect created by adding grey in greater detail.
But for now, acknowledge the fact that lifting the blacks is one way to create the washed-out style and this adds mood to your portraits.
How to lift the blacks in urban portraits?
There are two main things you should pay attention to - the tone curve, and the histogram.
Read the Histogram
This is arguably the first skill you need to learn in photo editing.
You can see the distinction between the 5 regions as they brighten up when you hover your cursor over each of them.
For instance, in this example, the cursor was in the highlights region and thus the highlights range lit up.
Whatever you do, always check the histogram after you make a change.
The importance of looking at the histogram is that you can’t trust your eyes. Your perception of how dark a point is can easily be obscured by other things.
For instance, the blacks appear darker than they really are if the rest of the photo is very bright. Or, the darks appear brighter than they really are if the background of your screen in the software is black rather than white.
By checking the histogram as you manipulate the sliders, you make sure the blacks are lifted by a reasonable extent, and it helps maintain a degree of consistency in your editing.
Adjust the Tone Curve
The tone curve follows the same logic as the histogram. The leftmost of the horizontal axis represents the blacks, whereas the rightmost represents the whites.
To lift the blacks, drag the leftmost point of the curve upwards.
Again, as I do this, I check my progress against the histogram because the human eye is not very objective in its perception in brightness. Everything is relative.
Stop once the dark points are lifted to a sufficient extent on the histogram.
Why lift only ‘slightly’?
One note though, is to be cautious in the degree of lifting the blacks.
In the areas which were initially black, your camera recorded no digital details. When you raise the brightness of these areas, you are introducing digital noise into your photo.
Plus, lifting the blacks slightly can already drastically change the look of your photos. The black slider causes every single data point in the photo to brighten up.
If you overdo it, the photo becomes way too washed-out. If this is your aesthetic preference, by all means go for it. But on a general note, going overboard is not visually appealing.
Blast the Highlights
What are the highlights?
We can refer to the five zones that we briefly outlined.
We talked about the whites being points with absolute brightness, and midtones being points with 50% brightness. Highlights are points between 50% and 100% brightness.
You can find out information about the highlights in your photos in the 2nd right-most region in your histogram.
What is ‘blasting’ the highlights?
The word ‘Blasting’ conveys the idea of ‘explosive’, and is somewhat a violent action.
And yes, this is exactly what you do with the highlights - drag them so far to the right that it looks like they are jumping out of where they should be and screaming at you in the photo.
See the below screenshots to visualise what I am saying.
These photos were taken with a night urban shoot with Lavina in Jordan area in Hong Kong.
The final photos were all in portrait orientation but for the purposes of demonstration, I cropped them in, focusing on the parts with neon signs.
You can see that the lights are blowing up so much that you can’t even make out their original edges.
This is not usually good practice but in the case of urban portraits, especially night portraits, this is a justified deviation from the usual rules of editing.
Why ‘blast’ the highlights in urban portraits?
There are exceptions depending on your composition, but most urban portraits have bright lights in the background.
This is because most urban portraits are shot at the busiest parts of the city, where there are lights of different colours flashing during the day into the night.
Also, urban portraits photographers have this tendency to incorporate these lights into their photos.
When you have city lights in the back, you want to accentuate their presence because they are a signature central to the urban theme. You want them to pop as much as possible.
Another thing that is true about most urban portraits is that they have strong, well-balanced light contrast.
The brightness levels are well spread out throughout the entire spectrum - we lifted the blacks, so it also makes sense to lift up the highlights to retain that contrast.
How to blast the highlights in urban portraits?
The process of adjusting the highlights is largely the same as how you lift the blacks. There are two major ways to do it, through the tone curve and sliders adjustments.
Tone Curve
In relation to the tone curve, I habitually increase the highlights in my photos, so this is not specific to editing urban portraits.
The reason for so doing is that if you shoot raw, the photo comes out of the camera less contrasty.
So whatever photo I am editing, I make a point in the highlights area, or the 75th percentile on the brightness scale to be precise, and drag that point slightly upwards.
But here we are not talking about making basic adjustments, we are talking about blasting the highlights.
When it comes to exaggerated effects like this, the tone curve is not the best way to go. It is better to make drastic adjustments using local tools, which will offer you more control.
Sliders
The most apparent way is to drag the highlight sliders towards the right, and watch the lights blow out.
Although we want these lights to pop, we don’t want to overdo it. So just like with the blacks, watch the histogram to make sure that the highlights are exaggerated to a reasonable extent.
Preserve Skin Tones
Why is this important?
In editing urban portraits, you can get away with slightly wild colour adjustments.
Except for one thing - your model’s skin tones!
Almost every colour in the photo is up to the editor’s artistic expression but the human skin is just what it is.
You got to make sure it is in this nice warm and reasonably saturated orange-ish tone.
What is the appropriate skin tone?
Based on my experience, there is not a single set of RGB values that would give you the correct skin tone.
This is because the colour of the skin is different for each model. And even for the same model, the skin reflects a different colour depending on the ambient light you took the shot in.
I analysed a huge amount of portraits over the years done by photographers all over the world, and together with discussion with fellow portrait shooters, I came to the conclusion that the appropriate skin tone is a range of acceptable colours.
Add personal preference to the mix. I try to make this website as helpful as possible by providing concrete answers but in this case, I don’t think there is a consensus within the photography community.
My tip for you is to look out for areas in the photo that are supposed to be yellow. Make the skin tone a touch warmer than that thing. This is what I do when in doubt.
If you want some extra perspective about your photo editing, you can book me for a consultation session, where I give your portfolio a personal study and feedback you about it.
Camera Raw/ Adobe Lightroom/ Slider-based softwares
For this type of software, you modify colours using only sliders. Thus, most changes are global.
If you move the orange slider to edit something orange in the background, you will alter the skin as well.
In this situation, you will have to make a compromise, but I would always advise you to prioritise protecting the skin tones.
So when moving the colour sliders, focus first on getting the skin tones at the right hue, saturation and brightness.
If this leaves you unsatisfied with some other parts of the image, usually some orange/ yellows, grab the brush tool and pain over them.
You will have a limited set of tools regarding what you can do with the brushed over areas, but most of the time they would suffice.
To make the oranges pop more, consider increasing the saturation slider. Dragging the temperature slider towards the right is also a plausible solution.
Adobe Photoshop/ Layer-based softwares
For this type of software, the mask function allows for greater flexibility in your colour manipulation.
You can make any colour adjustments you want and simply mask out the subject’s skin. Your subject will remain unaffected by the changes you made in that layer.
By the same token, you can tweak the skin tone and mask out the rest of the image. This is a great system to separate the local adjustments in each part of the image.
Create Colour Contrast
Why create colour contrast in urban portraits?
This is the essence of the urban look. On one hand, you have very cold bluish tones and on the other, you have very warm yellowish tones, usually in the subject’s skin.
Also, you might have bright, saturated reds or greens popping out in various parts of the image.
By nature, the urban portrait look features a symphony of strong, buzzy tones.
What is colour contrast?
Colour contrast, in simple language, is the visual interest created when a cold and a warm colour are juxtaposed against each other.
It is time to pull out the colour wheel so you can visualise what colour pairs create the most contrast.
The most colour contrast is achieved when you put two colours that are opposite on the colour wheel together. The examples most commonly cited are:
Red vs Cyan;
Green vs Magenta; and
Blue vs Yellow/ Orange
Colour contrast is a concept widely employed in photography. But in the context of urban portraits, the most relevant pair is blue vs yellow.
This is because you can almost always expect a bluish hue in buildings, and always a yellow/ orange hue in the skin tones.
How to create colour contrast?
In camera raw, split toning will be a helpful tool in the context of urban portraits.
I do not recommend relying on split toning for portraits in general but it works for now.
In the split toning tab, there are two sliders. One takes care of the highlights, and another takes care of the shadows.
The reason why this works is because the buildings are usually in the shadows, while the skin tones or your subject is usually in brighter light.
So all you have to do is, give the highlights an orange hue, and the shadows a blue hue.
This will enhance further articulate the blues and oranges in the photo, creating a stronger contrast.
Cool Down Tones Overall
Why adjust the tones overall?
If you played with photo editing long enough, you will realise that it is sometimes tricky to get your edits look consistent.
Even if you apply the same adjustments, they can sometime turn out different because every edited photo is a combination of numerous decisions along the way.
But tweaking a few sliders before you finish off with editing can pull a series of shots together and fine tune the colours to give a consistent look.
What exactly does cool mean?
At this point, you should have already made most of the colour adjustments, especially on the blues and oranges, which are the main tones that are dominant in urban portraits.
But there might be other changes that you have made that could affect the coolness of the photo.
For instance, you might have dragged the green sliders towards the yellow end, which will warm up the photo.
So at this stage, what we are looking for are the colours apart from the blues and the oranges. Are they warming up the photo by too much?
Again, this is purely a matter of personal judgment and there is no consensus within the photography community.
If you want some extra perspective about your photo editing, you can book me for a consultation session, where I give your portfolio a personal study and feedback you about it.
How to cool down the tones overall?
The camera calibration module in camera raw provides a simple way to make global yet balanced adjustments to the colour profile.
In the situation of urban portraits, you wouldn’t have to worry about the red primary channel too much, because the skin tones should be well handled by now.
You can drag the blues towards the cyan end and increase the saturation some more if you feel that there is more room for blues in the shadows.
What usually concerns us here is the green primary channel. This holds the power over whether to push the greens to the warmer side or the cooler side.
Pulling the greens towards the left will give you a warmer image, and vice versa.
Summary
In this article, we talked about 5 essential steps to editing urban portraits:
Slightly lift blacks
Blast highlights
Preserve skin tones
Create color contrast
Cool down overall tones
And how you can do to achieve the urban look using Adobe Camera Raw.
More sharing coming soon!
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