I wanted to share with everyone one of my favorite techniques to give my pictures the other-worldy, surreal look that you see in the pictures above.
First you need Lightroom with “Matt’s lomo effect” preset installed. You can get the preset from Matt’s site www.killerlightroomtips.com. You also need Photoshop or any other photo editing program, just as long as it allows you to use layers.
Open your photo in Lightroom and adjust the color and other settings to your liking. You only need to worry about the way you subject looks because we are going to change the background to give it the surreal look later. Now hit control+e and select “Edit copy in Photoshop with Lightroom adjustments”. This will create a copy and open it in Photoshop. Go back to Lightroom and apply “Matt’s lomo effect” to the same photo and hit control+e and again, select “Edit copy in Photoshop with Lightroom adjustments”. With the “lomo” version selected press control+a to select all of the photo and use the picker tool to drag everything to the regular version of the picture. Now you should have the regular version with two layers; the bottom layer should be the regular version and the top layer the “lomo”. Create a copy of the bottom layer and put it on top. Now delete everything on the top regular copy except your subject. This will reveal the lomo layer beneath as your surreal background. Now you can play around the opacity of the different layers to make your subject/background look more/less surreal.
Have fun and be sure to leave links to some of your pictures in the comments section and I’ll add them to the slideshow.