How to Create a Grunge Photograph using Photoshop Raw

This tutorial was inspired by a video by Matt Kloskowski on the NAPP site.

Here is the starting photo, that I took at a riding competition in Bedford Hills, NY:

For this tutorial all I’ll need is a .jpg file. In Photoshop, go to File/Open As and click:

I’ll pick a .jpg file from this folder and I’ll make sure to open it as a “Raw” file, then I’ll click Open:

Here’s the Camera Raw dialog box before I start to make any changes:

What I’ll do here is bring the Exposure to +20, Recovery to 73, Fill Light to 75, Blacks to 15, Brightness to -9, Contrast to +80, Clarity to +80, Vibrance to +80, and I bring down the Saturation to -50.

Here’s what the image looks like at this point with these settings:

The next thing I’ll do is go to the HSL/Grayscale and click on Luminance. I’ll make the Reds -100, Orange 14, Yellow 18, Green -73, Aquas -94, Blue -60, Purple 11 and Magentas 23:

Here I’ll give the image a little vignetting to bring the focus onto the horse and rider. I’ll go to the Post Crop Vignetting and give the Amount a -30 and Roundness -60:

Here is the finished image:

Now I’m going to save this as a preset, so I’ll go to the Preset tab and then click on the New Preset icon:

I’ll name it “Grungy Look” and then check all the features I used while creating this look. Then I’ll click OK:

Here’s the preset ready to be used for another image:

Here I opened another image in camera raw. I’ll click on the preset icon and then I’ll double click the “Grungy Look” preset to add the effect:

The good thing about doing to this way is that, if I don’t like any specific part of the image, I can go back to the Basic tab and tweak it to my liking:

If you’re into this kind of grungy look, have a great time playing with this tutorial and remember every image is different. The settings I used might be different from the settings you’ll need. Experiment and play around with the sliders. If the first image doesn’t come out to your liking, just try a different image. Not all images take a liking to this effect.

Have fun!