The “Look” settings that determine how your photos turn out are extremely important.
In this regard, LUMIX offers a wide variety of “Looks.” Beyond the diverse “Photo Styles” built into the camera itself, they’ve recently started providing more options as “Real-time LUTs,” breaking down barriers with video. It’s incredibly reassuring to have such a wealth of choices, though it can be overwhelming to master them all.
Except in one area.
Regarding monochrome photo “Looks,” LUMIX excels at rich tonal gradation and fine detail—essentially a Leica-like finish—and offers several variations. For example, the photo I uploaded in a previous article is one such example.
This finish is satisfying in its own way, and I’m content with it. However, sometimes I crave a different kind of finish—one that embraces harsh contrast without fear of crushed blacks or blown-out highlights, resulting in a coarse texture and a kind of bleak, hard-edged impression.
Photos from back when I was shooting with the PENTAX K-70. It had a “Hard Monochrome” look built in, which was one of my favorites.
Occasionally, I get the urge to recreate this kind of look. Unfortunately, LUMIX’s Photo Styles currently lack an option that matches it.
If it doesn’t exist, I’ll just make it myself.
So, the other day, I tinkered with PhotoLab8’s parameters by imitating what I’d seen and tried creating my own preset. You could call it “Fake Hard Monochrome”.
Actually, I’ve tried similar things before in both Lightroom and RawTherapee (ART). Where and how you tweak things changes depending on the tool, but how should I approach it this time?
I use FilmPack 7 as a PhotoLab 8 plugin, and within its monochrome profiles, there’s a “Rollei Retro 80’s” profile that delivers sharp, high-contrast results. Let’s use that as our starting point.
First, apply “Rollei Retro 80’s” to the RAW file. Then, fine-tune the tone curve to further emphasize contrast. There are various ways to add graininess, but this time I decided to boldly increase both the strength and size of the grain effect. Finally, slightly lower the color temperature to tighten up the image, and it’s mostly done. I’ll register this as a custom preset.
I immediately applied it to the same RAW file as the photo above, and this is the result.
I think it turned out with a pretty good balance of firmness and texture.
Feeling inspired, I’ll add one or two more points.
Looking up at the roof of the atrium at Tokyo Midtown Roppongi
Maybe I could add a bit more “graininess”… but overdoing it would look contrived, and I don’t want the texture to get too rough either… The considerations never end.
A scene of forcibly photographing an outdoor exhibit from an impossibly distant vantage point.
Photographically speaking, it’s a bit of a questionable shot, but I did confirm that the grass and trees don’t look too messed up.
And so, this was the chapter where I tried making my own preset. It seems usable enough to temporarily self-satisfy myself for monochrome photo development. The road to mastering PhotoLab 8 is still endlessly long, but this time, I might have taken a tiny, tiny step forward.
Well done, well done.
