How to Create that Post Apocalypse Look

At the moment, we’re in lockdown and we’re allowed to go out once a day for a piece of exercise. So, I went out on Tuesday, which was the first day we were under lockdown, for a walk. And, as ever, my camera goes with me everywhere. And my idea was to photograph empty streets, no people around, shuttered up shops, and that sort of thing.

When I got home, I decided I wanted to post-process them to give them that sort of post apocalyptic look, that sort of grungy, dirty type of look that is appropriate for the present situation. And I thought I’d just share with you how I went about that.

This is one of the shots that I took. What I would normally do when I’m doing any sort of post-processing technique, as it were, is I do my normal processing to get the image as it would be in a normal situation. So, in this case, I put a graduated filter on the sky to bring the highlights back there. I cropped the image to 16 x 9 to give it that sort of filmic look. So, this is my starting point.

The first thing I’m going to do is go to the basic panel. This style of images tend to be a bit dull. So, let’s just take the exposure down a fraction. If you click on the exposure box, and then you can use your arrow keys on your keyboard. And I’m going to reduce the exposure just 0.1 to bring that down.
But I want to bring the contrast up. If you click on the box and then hold the shift key while you use your arrow keys, you can go in 10s. So, let’s go plus 30 on the contrast for there.

Now to the blacks and whites. If we click on the white slider and hold down the alt key, the image will go black and it will show you, as you move the slide up, where the clipping points are. But there’s actually no whites clipped in that image, so I’m going to leave the whites as they are. If we do the same with the blacks, we’ve got a little bit of clipping on the blacks. I want to take that down a bit further. So, let’s go down with the blacks to say minus 20 so we’re getting a bit of clipping there.

We’re now going to go to the shadows and highlights. Again, we haven’t got much highlights here. But again, we want to bring the highlights down a bit. Let’s go down about minus 40 on there. And these sliders are guides for you. It will depend on your images. But, having increased the contrast, we now just want to open up the shadows a bit. And I’m going to go to about plus 20, plus 30 on the shadows.

From there, we’re going to go down to the presence panel. If you’re using the latest version of Lightroom, you’ll have texture and clarity. These two are both sharpening type tools. So, what I’m going to do here is I’m going to take the texture up because I want to give it quite a gritty sort of grainy feel. So, let’s take the texture up to about 75. And let’s bring the clarity up. And we can start to see the grit appearing in the road and on the buildings there. And I’m probably going to go to perhaps 55 or 60 on the clarity there.

We also want to reduce the saturation because, in this sort of post apocalypse, you tend to get a lot of dust in the air. So, let’s take the vibrance down, take out right down to there, say just under 70, something like that. We’ll also take the saturation down, not as much as that so that the colour is leaching out of the image. But we’re just still leaving a little bit in the blues and reds there on the brick work. So, that is our basic panel.

We’re then going to go to the tone curve because we want to lift the blacks. So, click on the center there to fix that point. We are also going to click on the 25:25% point of the tone curve. And we’re going to take the zero point and start lifting it up. You’ll see the blacks become quite sort of muddy, which is the effect that we want. So, we’ll leave that about that and actually take the 25:25 point down a little bit there on that curve. We can also put a point up on the three quarter point just to flatten the curve out, because otherwise, it tends to bend that layer.

We’re now going to go down to the hue saturation and luminance panel. Make sure you’re on saturation, we want to boost the reds, oranges, and yellows. On each of those, we’re probably going to want to go to plus 20 to 30. The exact figures, again, will depend on your images. But what we’re trying to do is start to bring a bit of colour back into the brick work on the buildings. But then, we’re going to take all the other sliders and take the saturation down somewhere around -40 to -50. And, again, these will depend on your images. So, these are a starting point. You’ll need to play with those to taste. So, we’ve got an image there that’s not quite monochrome.

We’re now going to go to the split toning panel. We’ve got highlights and shadows. And we’re going to turn the highlights with a sort of sepia tone and the shadows blue. But, if you move the hue slider around, you’ll see absolutely nothing happen in your image until you add any saturation to it. And so, I’m just going to add a saturation of 20% so we can see what we’re doing. And we’ll then play with that afterwards. Now, I’m going to move the hue. And I probably want sepia around the 50 to 60 mark. But I want to increase that saturation. So, let’s just take that up to about 50 as well. So, we’ve now got that really sort of dirty yellow in the sky there and in the whites on the buildings.

Similarly, the shadows, again, let’s put some saturation in the shadows so we can see what we’re doing, about 20 there. Take the hue up. We want blue here. So, we’re going to want a hue figure of somewhere around 230, 235, something like that. In terms of saturation, probably a little bit more than I’ve got there, probably about 25. There we go. So, now we’ve got this sort of blue colour in the road. But we’ve got too much yellow in the sky. So, take the balance slider now and offset that towards the shadows. And now, we see we’ve got a bit of blue appearing in the sky. That’s good. That’s what we want. So, let’s go -36 on that. And again, that will depend on your image. So that, we’ve now split toned it.

To give it that gritty effect we want to add some grain to the image. Now, to some extent, the amount of grain you put on the sliders will depend on your image sensor. Now, I’m using a 20 megapixel sensor. And it’ll also depends on what size you’re out putting your image to. I’m going to output mine at 1600 pixels along the longest side to post on Facebook. So, for the amount, I’m going to go fairly strong on the amount of grain here. I’m going to go up to, say, 65. You can start to see it appear in the sky there. I’m going to increase the size of the grain from the standard 25. Let’s go up to about 45 there. Again, we can see that. Well, let’s increase the roughness from the standard 50. Go up to about 60. You want to play with those figures depending on your image. But I wanted this grainy feel in the sky.

The last thing we want to do is add a vignette. And I’ve got some vignettes here in my presets. So, I’ve gone to about 14 on the amount there, midpoint 48 & roundness minus 43. But, again, it will depend on your image and your image size.

So, there you have it. That’s how I give my images that post apocalyptical feel. So, have a play & have some fun with it