Editing For Inspiration

By Jack Bird

In the middle of a Dark Knight trilogy binge, I stopped on this scene around the middle of the Dark Knight. Looking at the colours I thought I would try and replicate it with a photo of my own. During the COAP Lightroom course Tom’s talk on colour theory really interested me and this seems like a good practical application for that. I chose a Lightning shot from the COAP shoot earlier this year as I know I can pull the colours I want out of the sky and manipulate the shot to replicate the one from the Dark Knight.

I made a few basic edits to get me started. I didn’t want to push the image too far in the sliders as I knew most of the work would be done in masks. I kept it fairly simple just pulling out the colour in the sky and deepening the shadows in the foreground. I also cropped in a bit but didn’t screenshot that as it wasn’t that major.

Let’s get stuck into the masks, this is where the bulk of the work was done. I brightened the bust of sunlight and adjusted its hue. I depend the sky enhancing the blue tones, I added a few small highlights to help break up the shapes in the otherwise dark foreground and I brighter the pilot a bit. I was constantly referring back to my original reference to balance the colours. This was really interesting as to match the colours in the reference photo I found myself going against what I would normally do and how I would push the colours.

This is my final comparison, While not identical I think I captured the feel of the scene in my edit. A trick I tried is to squint at the photo to blur the details and see if the 2 images look similar. It was quite a fun challenge and as you will see quite different to my original edit of this shot. I am currently watching through the Star Wars films so will see if any more scenes inspire some edits…. 

A quick final note comparing my original edit(left) to my Dark Knight edit(right) I love both edits for totally different reasons.