At what point does the technical process of editing stop and instinct take over? Mark Littlejohn reveals how he balances the two, to achieve a result that’s more about feeling and less about reality
When I was asked to write a few words on my processing style, I immediately said yes. I quite enjoy writing. It exercises the brain. Although I don’t very often write anything that could even remotely be described as technical. Where would I start on an article that had that sort of slant?
And I guess the beginning is a good place. My brief was to talk about split toning, so the first question is not how, but why. When I first took up photography it was a stress break from my work, which at the time was in a serious crime unit examining paedophiles’ computers. That work involved sitting in front of a computer screen for up to 60 hours a week – some weeks it was even longer.
While I instantly fell in love with photography, I didn’t want to spend my free time adding to those hours spent in front of a screen. I therefore developed a style that meant I only made general alterations. No masks, layers, or any of that complicated palaver. But I still wanted to enhance what it was I felt as I took the image: the atmosphere and mood that permeated the scene and attracted me to it in the first place. For whatever reason, I’d had a little play with the split tone pre-sets that came as standard with Lightroom at the time. I liked them, even though they could be a little surreal. Or even quite a bit more than just a little surreal.
Then, in April 2012, I took a picture of my daughter’s horse being shod. All smoke and burning flesh. A pungent smell that invaded my nostrils as the horse’s hooves smoked and sizzled. It was an almost three-dimensional experience: sight, smells and sounds. I loved the pictures I’d taken, but they lacked something. The pungent aroma. That atmosphere. I decided to play a little with Lightroom. I looked at how its split-tone panels worked.
They were refreshingly simple. Sliders for hue and saturation in the shadows and the same again in the highlights. I found that the best way to operate was to set the saturation level in the highlights to the high teens. I would then move the hue slider backwards and forwards. I wasn’t interested in knowing where the slider was. I didn’t even look at the sliders as I moved them. My only concern was the picture. That’s all that I was interested in. When I was happy with the tonality, that was it – I stopped. And then I moved on to the highlights, and did the same again. The only other thing I did was to look at the balance between the dark and the light. You can’t have nice light unless it’s balanced with a little bit of darkness. On that basis, you also
