Lomography

The “Lomo” Effect

You may have heard of it. Lomography emphasizes casual, snapshot photography. Characteristics such as over-saturated colors, off-kilter exposure, blurring, “happy accidents,” and alternative film processing are often considered part of the “Lomographic Technique”. [Wikipedia]

Lomography is actually inspired by the popular Russian 35mm camera that creates this effect. Pictures from this camera are vivid, blurry, and mostly snapshot style of photos. Still Lomo photos are not the norm as they are usually spur-of-the-moment action shots. But I wanted to experiment with the effect using this photo of a daisy.

BEFORE:

In GIMP, this is how I post-processed this photo:

1. I auto adjusted my original photo’s white balance. I also cloned out 2 dark spots on the petals.

2. I ran the Lomo plugin: FX-Foundry ->Photo -> Effects -> Lomo effect…

AFTER:

In Photoshop, I found this action set you could use >

And here are Photoshop instructions (someone will have to tell me if it works right):

1. Create a vinigrette by doing a freehand lasso of a circle around the photo. Set the feather to 80-90px before creating the circle.

2. Invert your selection.

3. Add a Levels layer.

4. Adjust the levels by moving the center arrow to the right to darken the edges, giving you a vignette.

5. Flatten or merge your layers.

Now we need to add color contrast and saturation.

6. Add a curves layer and create a slanted S.

7. Create a new (3rd) layer on top of the other two. Select the paint bucket and pick the color black and fill the new layer with solid black.

8. Change the blending mode and set it to Hue and reduce the opacity to 40%.

9. Flatten or merge your layers.

Now you need to sharpen the photo which will also darken some areas:

10. Go to Image -> Mode -> Lab Color.

11. Select your channel window and click on the lightness channel. The 3 other channels should be deselected.

12. From the menu, select Filter -> Sharpen -> Unsharp Mask. It will depend on the photo on what settings you’ll need. You can try Amount 50%, Radius 50%, threshold 0 to start.

13. Go to Image -> Mode -> RGB Color. You will not need to reselect the unchecked channels, when converting back to RGB.

Save your photo and you’re done!

These instructions were originally located on the DPS blog but I’ve condensed them a bit.

Okay class… Are you up for a Challenge?
Find/shoot a photo and post-process a fake lomo effect on it. Link back here or email me (christine @ hoguechronicle.com - without the spaces) and I will share everyone’s photos on Tuesday on this blog!