Our step-by-step gritty "Dave Hill look" tutorial...

This is a "sister" post to yesterdays "Get our free set of "Dave Hill" Photoshop actions", yes you can still get the actions and yes, they are still free.

Not everyone likes actions, many folks like and enjoy the start to finish, step-by-step process of editing their images, so for those of you who do (and you know who you are), here is our step-by-step "gritty Dave Hill look" tutorial.

If you have not seen the work of Dave Hill you need to, please take a minute (or an hour) and look at his incredible body of work.

Now to imply that the technique I am about to show you is "just like Dave Hill's" would be a like saying my child worn minivan is just like a Ferrari. The only similarities between those two vehicles is that they both have license plates, after that all similarities pretty much come to an end.

Though I do have to say that the ladies seem to love my minivan, as it is the "sport" version.

;)
 
Anyway, the technique I am going to show you will give your images that cool gritty look and will work with/for most images, but it does do its best work on high key images.

Below are several images edited using this technique.

And though it looks like a lot of steps, after you have done it just a couple times it will only take you about a minute to complete (really, just 60 seconds, I swear).

So here goes:

Step 1:
Open your image in Photoshop and create a duplicate the layer.
Go to "Filter" - "Other" - "High Pass" set the Radius to 4 Pixels.
On the Layers palette select the "Vivid Light" blending mode.
Flatten the image.

Step 2:
Create a duplicate the layer (again).
Go to "Filter" - "Other" - "High Pass" set the Radius to 7 Pixels.
On the Layers palette select the "Color" blending mode with an opacity of 40%.
Flatten the image.

Step 3:
Create a duplicate the layer (one last time).
Go to "Filter" - "Blur" - "Gaussian" set the Radius to 9.5 Pixels.
Go to "Filter" - "Noise" - "Add Noise" set Amount to 3%.
Got to "Layer" - "Layer Mask" - "Hide All"
Now use the lasso tool and select only the eyes (assuming the image has eyes, for multiple selections hold the shift key).
Go to "Select" - "Refine Edges" - set "Feather" to 5-6 pixels, then "Select" - "Inverse"
Select the brush on your tool palette, set the brush opacity to 30% and brush over the entire image once.
Flatten the image.

Step 4:
Go to "Filter" - "Sharpen" - "Unsharp Mask" and use the following settings:
Amount 100%
Radius 30.0 pixels
Threshold 0 Levels

That's it, give it a try, and then try it again. We would love to see your results, so feel free to upload them to our Flickr group.

Click on any of the images below to see a larger version, it will give you a better view and allow you to see exactly how the process has changed/impacted each image.






(remember, click on any image to view it larger)