I Don’t “Get” Grunge

Posted by Philip in Photo Processing, Photo Technique

It could be my age, it could be that I have a different ascetic sense, but I don’t “get” grunge.  I’ve seen so many tutorials all over on how to get a grunge look and how to use lots of plugins and filters.  The steps are sometimes very complicated and time consuming. I don’t want to spend all that time working on an image unless I’m trying to clean it up. But did you know you can do grunge in-camera, sorta.  When I’m asked to do a grunge look, this is what I do:

Start by blowing out the image with a flash.

1) Use enough light to blow out the subject.  Yes this creates and Image you would normally trash.  But this is grunge after all, it is trash.

Then re-expose as far down as you can go

2)  In Camera Raw/Lightroom/Aperture re-expose as far down as you can go.

There are some other sliders you may want to over-drive, but that’s it really.  Once you have the image on your machine it takes 10 seconds.  No need to load into an image manipulation program unless you need to resize or remove some clutter.  I’m sure I’m missing the point of grunge, but does it have to be anymore difficult than this?