How to achieve this early American painting look?

Obviously, some of this is lighting, but I love how the post-processing was done to get an early American painting look. I tried some things in Photoshop and didn't really get close. Any suggestions?

http://photo.net …photo_id=165870​21&size=lg

Outside of the skin processing I'd say there's not too much there processing wise. To my eyes it's more to do with how the scene was lit than anything else. What have you been working up to so far?

Back then, they either had window light or fire/candle. Think about how you would recreate that. Dramatic side lighting with dark scene.

The costume and color palette makes it work too.

kirk

I saw this picture and others like it and really like the look. I haven't tried to simulate the lighting yet, and I do see that a lot of what I like about this picture is done with lighting. I went back to some "green screen" photos I took where the lighting wasn't that far off, replaced the background with something of similar color, and then I experimented with some post-processing to see if I could achieve a similar look. Initially I tried some different plugin effects, then some filters, but nothing that really came close to this look...nothing that simulated the color palette of fire/candle light.

Try studying some of the paintings of the old masters like Vermeer, de la Tour, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, etc. to get an idea of the lighting and relationship between the lit subject and the scene around them, color palette, etc.

Here is a Vermeer - the Milkmaid - that has a really nice example of all the elements you might want to try to achieve:

Check out the gallery of Bill Gekas, I think his lighting and color palate are very similar to your example. If you go to his blog, he shares his light setups for many of his photos.

^^ That's a good link - although the images are a little bit creepy, honestly.

Gene, thanks for linking to Bill Gekas' site.
His info on using a cookaloris is exactly what I needed - I had a half-formed idea in my head and just needed that little bit of "real" information so I could finish my idea.

I'm shooting Catwoman this weekend and want to shape one of my lights into a Bat-signal spotlight.

Glad you found some useful information at his site. Sometimes he also puts black tape like a cross (+) on the front of a soft box so that the subjects catch light looks like a window reflection.

Bill Gekas has a similar style that I like. And I do understand these lighting concepts, but I know there's work going on in post to really bring out this early American or masters painting feel to the images. Bill even makes a reference to "infusing" this into post-production, without really saying what he does. Since I think I can get very close to lighting portraits similar to this, I suspect my finished product will still fall short. That's why I'm trying to get a better handle on the post work.