Coke Themed Love Shoot

We had a love shoot at the weekend with a lovely young couple David and Lauren. These guys looked great in front of the camera. We hung out for a couple of hours and towards the end of the shoot I suggested something a bit different. I had already thought about incorporating a fun Coca Cola theme and we came up with these few shots that I think worked out great. I really liked the processing on the 2016 Coke ads and tried to replicate similar editing in Lightroom. After a lot of tweaking I think I got pretty close to the vintage look on the ads.

Technical stuff
I always shoot RAW which is a type of image file that is uncompressed. RAW files allow a lot of flexibility when processing in Lightroom. You can even change the exposure of the image as the information is still in the file. I usually underexpose when shooting to allow for this. If the original image is overexposed and blown out, the information will be irretrievable.

For this vintage look I changed the black levels in the tone curve which gave an aged look, while still bumping up the contrast. I desaturated some of the colours in the HSL module and used a split tone. I used a bluish purple for the shadows and yellow for the highlights. This seemed to be close to the original ads and you can view some of the settings in the screenshot below.

It was a fun, alternative take on a love shoot and it’s always good to experiment with something new. If you would like a full list of the settings I used or if you have any questions just post a comment below and I’ll get back to you.