Making of Aimless Wanderer & creating a MATTE look

Hi,
today I wanted to show you a technique that helps to enhance the moodiness of a image. With the help of Lightroom's gradient tool or/and Photoshop's curves tool you can clip the shadows to achieve a matte effect.

Images that were treated this way also work well with textures.

Please move mouse over the picture for a Before/After look!

Working in Lightroom

After the playing around for a while the gradient curve looked somehow weird, but the the shadows looked faded & pale:

The important part you can see on the bottom left. I dragged the curve up, thus making the dark parts paler. I also used the sliders as you can see in the second screenshot to get the mood I wanted.

Here is a Before/ After view of the processed image:

The shadows in the right part of the picture are lighter & more pale/matte. It also seems to add more fog/haze to the overall image.

Working in Photoshop

Apart from some manipulations I wanted to show how I further texturized the picture as well as added even more mood by using a color gradient and the curves tool.

I only used subtle textures, Baltic Sands from the Vintage-Film-Photography-Pack and

Portrait  from the /build-your-own-texture-pack

Both have a frame and are based on old tintype / glass plates.

The impression of the colorful rising sun was achieved by using a color gradient. 

You'll find a bunch of my gradients over here: 30-fine-art-retro-color-PS-gradients

The one I used is part of this collection.

The textures and the gradient led to darker tones and stronger contrasts and made it necessary to once again work on the matte effect.

The technique is the same as in Lightroom - you simply drag the curve up a bit and the shadows become paler...

Thanks again for your interest and be creative!!!

Have a nice weekend!
Dirk