My Attempt at the ‘Sarah Logan’ Look
So, I kept seeing these pictures online, people talking about the ‘Sarah Logan’ style. Looked kinda moody, you know? Different. I liked it. Figured I’d give it a shot myself, see if I could get that vibe on one of my own photos.
Pulled up a picture I took last weekend – just some trees and stuff, nothing fancy. Opened it up in the usual software I use for tinkering with photos.
First thing, I tried to pin down the colors. Her style, it looked sort of faded, but parts of it really popped, especially the darks. My first thought was just, okay, lower the saturation. So I grabbed that main saturation slider and pulled it way down. Nah, that wasn’t it. Just looked dull and flat. Totally missed the mark.
Alright, plan B. Maybe it’s more specific? I went digging into the color settings, the HSL stuff – hue, saturation, luminance for each color. Started messing with the greens and blues, pulling their saturation down. That felt a bit closer. Less cartoony, anyway. But still wasn’t quite capturing that specific feeling.
I went back and looked really closely at some examples of her work again. What stood out? The shadows. Man, they were deep. Really dark, almost black in places. But the bright spots, the highlights, they seemed soft, not harsh.
Okay, back to the software. Found the tone curve tool. Grabbed the bottom end, the shadow part, and yanked it down. Yeah, that started giving me those deep, dark areas. Felt like progress. Then, for the highlights, I did the opposite, sort of lifted the top end of the curve a little, trying to make it less aggressive. Played around with making a gentle S-shape curve, focusing on crushing the blacks and easing off the whites.
- Pulled down shadow point on curve
- Gently lifted highlight point
- Adjusted midtones slightly
Getting there. But something was still missing. Her photos had this texture, almost like film grain, but subtle. So, I found the grain effect. Added some. Whoa, too much! Looked super fake. Dialed it way back until it was barely there, just enough to give it a bit of roughness. That helped.
What else? Maybe sharpness or clarity? I nudged the clarity slider up. That definitely made things pop more, gave it some grit. Maybe a bit too much, actually. Had to pull it back slightly. It’s a fine line, you know?
Then I thought about the overall color temperature. A lot of the examples felt a bit cool, leaning towards blue. So I tweaked the white balance, just pushed it a tiny bit away from yellow/warm towards blue/cool. Subtle change, but it shifted the mood again.
Honestly, I spent a good chunk of time just going back and forth between all these things:
Contrast,
Shadows,
Highlights,
Clarity,
Grain,
and those individual color saturations.
It wasn’t one magic button. It was getting all those little adjustments to work together.
In the end, I wouldn’t say I nailed it perfectly. It’s not an exact copy. But I got something that feels pretty close, captures the essence of that moody, textured look. Took a while, lots of small tweaks. It was a cool exercise, though. Really made me focus on how tone curves and selective color adjustments can completely change a photo’s feel. Definitely learned a few things just by trying to copy that ‘Sarah Logan’ vibe.
