The climate control system at work went wacko this afternoon, and the temperature shot up to the point where my palms were sweating without me actually doing anything. It was difficult to focus on work and very uncomfortable sitting in my cube. I figured if I was going to be exposed to that much heat, I might as well do it outside where it was sunny and warm. So, I took a break mid-day and went out for a walk.
It was quite refreshing to get outside for some fresh air and a bit of exercise beyond walking to the break room. Naturally, I took my camera with me just in case I saw something worth shooting. There were some pretty harsh shadows from the afternoon sun, so I didn’t find many things that had good lighting. I did come upon some flowers that were wide open and soaking in the sun and decided that they would be good subjects for my mostly-daily photo katas.
Today I shot with the intent of heavy post-processing in Photoshop. I didn’t care so much about proper exposure and white balance and focused instead on overall composition. I didn’t even pay much attention to sharp focus as I simply held the camera low for some shots. I did meter off the sky anyway, just to make sure I didn’t have too many blown out highlights.
As can be seen above and in my photostream, the post-processing in Photoshop yielded extreme contrast and heavily saturated colors that can be seen in Lomos and other cross-processed images. The images out-of-camera were nowhere near as saturated as the final versions. In fact, they were downright dull by comparison. However, shooting in RAW mode gave me the flexibility to tweak to my heart’s content in Photoshop.
The digital cross-processing workflow is really quite simple. I used an S-shaped curve in a Curves adjustment layer to push the shadows and highlights further to their extremes. I tweaked the curves for the individual color channels until I found the color balance that I liked. I also increased the saturation by +25-35 units depending on the image. Finally, I applied Photo Filter adjustments using Cool or Blue filters to push the sky color a bit more.
At some point, I plan to create an Action that will apply all the adjustment layers that I use. I may even create different variations for cool images, warm images, bright skies, deep shadows, etc. The adjustment layers can then be edited as needed on a per-image basis. I need to do some more experiments with a wider range of images, but I think I’m settling on a basic set of adjustment layers to create a cross-processed look. I’ll write more about the whole process when I have things figured out.
| 
Now that is wild. Does it end up yielding the same kind of colors as cross-processing? It’s kind of hard to tell from that picture since you don’t really know what color the flowers were originally. That’s neat though.