Creating a consistent moody vibe for Sueno Swimwear

Ever seen the Armani Acqua de Gioi perfume ad with the girl wandering through the jungle, dripping wet, eventually stumbling onto a deserted beach and smiling with the most sexy steely blue eyes you’ve ever seen?

I saw the ad years ago and was intoxicated by the cool blue tones and exotic mood they created all through the colour grade. It stuck in my mind and I recently remembered how much I loved the ad.

So this past week I decided to use it as inspiration to edit a shoot we did for Sueno Swimwear. Of course with a little spin that honors our unique style that continues to evolve.

Thought I’d share how we created this moody vibe and a consistent look and feel to the images.

Getting it right out of camera

This blog mostly speaks to the how these images were edited. But it’s important to remember that getting it right out of camera is always the foundation.

The images were shot at sunset in RAW at ISO 100, F2.8 and we manually adjusted the shutter to get the exposure we wanted. So essentially, we had nice clean RAW images out of camera which is always where you want to start.

Setting the vibe

Since we wanted to create a moody aesthetic we decided to go heavy on the vignette, with rich textured shadows, generous blacks, and to stay true to our style, we still brought up the whites quite a bit for punch factor.

For the vingetted look, we almost always profile correct for the lens we’re shooting with first, and then manually add the vignette. This allows you to add the exact amount of vignette that you want and also remove distortion.

I’ve heard before that applying lens corrections can result in a loss of detail in the images, but I personally have never been able to notice a difference, and I have a very critical eye.

Game of tones

The next step was to narrow down the tone we were going for. Shooting in RAW gives us so much flexibility with the edit and how the final image will look. We decided we wanted to focus on the blues, whites and dark sand to create a consistent look that would compliment the black and white bikinis. We wanted to make them pop, and also eliminate any distracting colours.

To achieve this, we completely yanked the pinks and purples from the images. I find when you’re trying to create a consistent look for a brand, pulling stray colors that don’t need to be there really helps to create a strong cohesive esthetic.

We actually do this in a lot of our images. You may have noticed this in past shoots like the Mika Yoga Wear shoot in the jungle. There wasn’t blue skies in the background, or any other blues except in the leaves, so we almost completely pulled the blues from those images.

Otherwise you get blue light bouncing off clothing and the whites don’t end up looking crisp and white. There is a bluish tinge which I think completely ruins the look, and doesn’t do a beautiful white outfit justice.

Challanging skin tones

There was one factor that made this a bit of a challenging edit. If you’ve ever been to Costa Rica during dry season, you know that our sunsets have a distinctly orange glow. When you couple that with subjects that are tanned or even a little red, it’s very, and I mean very difficult to get that rich, punchy look that we are known for, and not have your subject look orange.

Essentially, as soon as you start adding vibrancy, dehaze, clarity, contrast, or really anything that takes a RAW photo from flat and bland, to rich and punchy, the skin tones can become an absolute nightmare.

It becomes a necessity to pull oranges, reds and yellows, but it’s a delicate dance, because if you pull too much of any of these colours your subjects will start looking like the walking dead. Lips turn grey, skin tones become lifeless. So you essentially need to tweak little by little, aiming for a bronzed glow that doesn’t scream oompa loompa.

The best way to avoid this is make your models aware of it and tell them to avoid excessive tanning, spray tans and getting burnt prior to shooting. But it’s going to happen sometimes, especially with the intense rays here in Costa.

Before and afters

I often have clients, and even sometimes fellow photographers, ask why post processing takes us so much time, so I thought I’d share a couple before and afters that may help explain.

Essentially when you’re shooting in RAW your images are going to look flat and pretty lackluster out of camera. The reason we typically shoot in RAW is to give ourselves complete creative control over the end look of an image. But it takes a lot of love and care to perfect and refine the images.

Alternatively, when you shoot in jpg you’re limited with what you can do in post. Now there’s nothing wrong with shooting in jpg and there’s actually tons of situations where it makes sense to do so. For example, if you need to get the images out quickly and need them looking great out of camera, jpg is your best friend. It’s also a lot less data.

For commercial clients we often shoot RAW + jpg so we have the best of both worlds. We can send the contact sheet out quickly (with the jpg’s) for the clients to review the images and make their selections. Then when it comes to editing, we can still edit with the RAW files.

Hope you enjoyed hearing a little bit about our editing process and how various inspirations come together to fuel the end look of our images. If you have any questions, or want to learn more, connect with us and we’d be happy to share more about our creative process.

Thanks for tuning in and following our journey!

JP & Stephanie