I’ve been playing around in Photoshop and Lightroom recently, in an attempt to better know the programs, color, etc. One of my favorite tutorials so far has been Scott Kelby’s tutorial on “Getting That Cool Gritty Look.” Yep, the one all the cool kids are doing, and without having to purchase some overpriced plug-in like LucasArt ($279 – $359).

Kelby lays out the steps to achieve the look as follows:

* Recovery = 100
* Fill Light = 100
* Blacks = Drag this slider to the right until photo looks balanced again, because setting the Fill Light at 100 will wash the photo out big time. In our example, I dragged it to 24
* Contrast = 100
* Clarity = 100
* Vibrance = 100
* Saturation = -81 (basically what I do here is drag the saturation all the way to the left, to -100 (which removes all color, making it a black and white image), and then I slowly drag back to the right until some of the color starts to return to the image.

This can be done in either Adobe Camera Raw, or in the develop section of Lightroom. He also recommends adding a vignette, under the lens correction settings, and softening the skin on the face with a Gaussian Blur and layer mask.

Here are a few that I did: