If you have no idea who Dave Hill is, you really should, so have a look here: www.davehillphoto.com.
You might be wondering how he acheives such fantastic compositions. His photos seem to have a gritty-highlight (almost cartoonish) look about them which is hard to put into words, and is even harder to imitate.
Here are some links which cover the Dave Hill mystery:
- Flickr
- ReoutchPro Forum Thread on Dave Hill
- Strobist - How to get Dave Hill’s Gritty Look
- I’ll add more… later!
Visiting most of the few forum posts and blog entries about his work, you’ll come away thinking… “Oh well… its all down to the lighting then…” - You wouldn’t be wrong in saying something like that, but Dave Hill, without a doubt, goes through post production! … And a lot of it!
So how can achieve the Dave Hill Effect???
I had a go with a photo I found on stock.xchng and tried adjusting it in Photoshop CS3 (Obviously, there are other programs out there that can achieve similiar results to Photoshop, but I just love Photoshop). After looking through some tips other people have left on the web, and messing around quite a bit I came up with quite a cool effect: (Click on the image below for a closer view)
Even though I am not totally sure how I got to this exact result I have an idea so here goes:
- Open your photo in photoshop.
- Copy the base layer (Ctrl + J) to a new layer.
- To the new layer, apply a blending mode of vivid light or Linear Light.
- You should have two layers now: Merge them.
- Now duplicate that layer (Ctrl + J) - You should now have two layers again…
- Now, on the top layer, go Filter >> Other >> High Pass - A radius between 5 & 10 (Depending on image resolution)
- Your image should look like this with the high pass filter applied:
- To this layer, apply filter >> sharpen >> sharpen edges
- Now set that layer to a blending mode of color.
- Give the layer an opacity of between 40 and 60 percent.
- You should still only have two layers. Now merge them.
- Duplicate that single layer (Ctrl + J)
- To the top layer, Apply Filter >> Blur >> Gaussian Blur with a radius between 1 and 3 (depending on image resolution)
- Now apply Filter >> Noise >> Add noise to that same layer - between 15% and 30%, uniform distribution, monochromatic.
- Now merge layers.
- Final step –> Go Filter >> Sharpen >> Unsharp Mask
- Amount: Between 30% and 150%
- Radius: Between 20 and 250
- Threshold = 0
Now you can mess around with the colours a bit, and then you should have a pretty cool-looking photo.
This effect is best used with photos of close objects, whether its a person or a car etc. The effect does not look too amazing when used on landscapes…
If you don’t want to follow along to the run-through above, I have made a photoshop action file available for download >>HERE<<. Download the file, then unzip it, then place the .ATN file in >Program Files/Adobe/’[Photoshop version]’/presets/actions and then restart photoshop and it should be there in your actions palette (If not, then you can just load it in).
Thanks for reading, I hope this helped in some way! 
24 Mar 08 4:05 pm
Thanks for this. Awesome tutorial… worked a treat! I’ll post a link to the image I came up with later!
25 Mar 08 12:18 am
If you look at Dave’s pics, you’ll see its all in the composition… I mean, like u said, you can only achieve so much with post processing!
25 Mar 08 12:21 am
There are some other sites which have started threads/topics on this… u should link to them::
- sdPhotoForum
- VelocityForums Post
09 May 08 1:28 pm
I found a free action you can donwload to get the Dave Hill look along with some info on the lighting you need to use for it:
http://www.photographythailand.com/Forum/index.php/topic,1150.msg5528.html#msg5528