Reverse engineering some postproduction work

[onesh0t]

http://500px.com/photo/1118702

First of all I would like to point that Teuku has a pretty awesome gallery. He seems to use a few tricks in post-production over and over again which make his photos really pop and enhance the mood of work.

To me the above looks like:
Selective sharpenning
Highpass filter in soft light
Selectively taking out a lot of red out of the picture
Gradient map
gently lifting the curves in the shadows (no true blacks)


Anything else you see there?

Check out his other work, some cool post-processing in that too.

[jbedford]

I've seen another Indonesian photographer with similar shots...Rarindra Prakarsa...I think that fundamentally, both of these photographers live in an area of the world that is consistently misty at dawn...Helps to have beautiful light and atmosphere to begin with. That said, his photoshop technique is fantastic and very eye-catching. I feel that there is a lot of gradual building of white gradients set to different blend modes, careful masking and local contrast adjustments. There was a tutorial that gave a decent description of this technique, posted about four years ago HERE.

I look forward to revisiting this thread for (hopefully) more updated and detailed information about this look.