You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Post Processing' category.
I’ve been a little bored with the same old black and white images or just color ones lately, so I downloaded a bunch of Photoshop actions recently. The actions allow me to try and emulate old film types and several other colors like Cyanotype. It’s a pretty neat little package and as long as you drop the opacity it looks pretty nice and fairly natural. Here’s some examples from the Johnson/Charnock wedding from last week.
I think my favorite is the Paladium. I like the brown warm tone it gives, but it’s not so brown that it looks like Sepia. What’s your favorite tone?
Grayscale
Silver Gelatin
Silver
Selenium
Platinum
Paladium
So I meant to get this up yesterday, but got really busy after subbing for the day. I wanted to take a second to talk about a few things I’m learning as a studio photographer and businessman.
The biggest thing as a businessman is that a business will never be completely setup/finished. There’s always little details that need to be finished or improved. And while completing that task, there are usually 3 or 4 more that get discovered.
As a photographer you will never have enough equipment. A person could have $400,000 in lights, cameras and modifiers and still come up with an excuse to buy just one more piece.
Thirdly, never undervalue Photoshop skills. As I’m transitioning to being primarily a studio photographer during the week and a photojournalist/wedding photojournalist on the weekends, I’m learning a lot.
Mostly the value of using layers in Photoshop. As a photojournalist you have to be less concerned with a person’s look or appearance. Not saying you had to ignore it, but if someone had a zit or red spots, that was what usually got printed. Mostly because journalism ethics says we had to print what was actually there. Not at all what a portrait photographer has to do.
Our job is to make people look good and interesting. If there’s blemishes, we need to correct them or work around them. I ran into my first major problem the other day and think I handled it pretty well.
I had a client that came in with significant red spots across her face. I felt terrible for her. Her mom said the spots had just shown up a week or two ago and they weren’t able to get rid of them. Ain’t that the luck. Of all the times to get spots, right before your senior portraits.
Hopefully I put her worries aside by telling her I’d do what I could to correct them. It wasn’t until after I was done shooting and downloaded that I remembered how bad red shows up in the camera becasue of the technical aspects of a sensor.
I tried out a few of my own techniques that I knew to hande color spots and blemishes, but wasn’t quite happy with the result completely. I was able to remove a lot of red, but it didn’t look quite natural. I was a little stuck and frustrated until I remembered I have the best resource available to man. The internet.
I did a quick search for “Correcting red spots in Photoshop” and came up with several results. The technique I used was from a short video found here.
I expanded a little on my own and I’m pretty happy with the results. You can see the before and after pics above. If anyone has any suggestions on what I could do differently or make it a little better.
If anyone’s interested in my exact process, please feel free to comment and I’ll email you the process I used on my own.
I’m going to be showing the final product to Kassandra, her twin brother (who I also shot portraits of), her mom and dad on Friday. They’re going to the first ones in our viewing room. Wish me luck.
I’ve really been itching at the chance of getting outside to try some creative portraits over the past couple of days, and I finally took my chance this evening. Bobby and I went across the park with my camera, two strobes and a beauty dish modifier.
I wasn’t looking to make anything overly spectacular tonight. Just to try out some stuff I’ll use in the future. The photos I got turned out much better than I hoped. Especially since Bobby and I were both freezing.
The lighting setup is pretty simple when broke down. I took an SB80DX with a homemade beauty dish and place it just camera right. I then moved my 550EX on a modified hotshoe slave unit with a pocket wizard to camera left and aimed it directly at the hoop.
My first aim was to find the correct ambient exposure for the sky. Somewhere around ISO 100 1/30 @ F4. From there, I dialed my sky down a few stops by setting my shutter to 1/100. Next, I turned on my 550 strobe. Set it to what I though would be ‘okay.’ I think somewhere around 1/4 power. Next I grabbed the SB80DX/beauty dish and pumped up to 1/8 power. Aimed it right at Bobby and tested everything.
I didn’t really care for the power on the 550, so I backed it down to 1/8. Next I looked at the key light. It was lighter than I hoped, so I bumped it up to 1/2 power. I shot a few more test shots and finally got exactly the look I wanted.
I then just shot around a little and let personality come through a little bit in the poses. Easy enough with Bobby. This worked until all my equipment started to get just a little too wet. Then my cords started shorting out and couldn’t get everything to cohesively work.
Time to pack it in.
The whole shoot lasted about 15 minutes, but it was a long 15 minutes. I’ll definitely be using Bobby as a model a little more for some other shots I’d like to shoot. I’m also going to be buying one, maybe two more Strobes so I can get some rim lighting going on too.
Post Production: I used Photoshop for all my post production on these shots. Everything was shot in Raw and opened in the PS Raw Converter. From there I made minor adjustments in exposure settings, so the levels popped a bit more. I boosted the contrast and the black levels until I got the look I was going for and then added a vignette on the final image.
After that, I officially opened the image. I duplicated the background layer, desaturated it, and added a High Pass Filter with a 100 radius setting. I then changed the layer mixing to Hard Light. This gave me about the look I was going for, but I just wasn’t as happy with the way it made the background pop. I added a mask and then masked out the areas that stuck out too much. I was pretty happy with the outcome. Everthing together took me about 45 minutes for all these photos.
I’ll most likely be making a Photoshop action that does the High Pass action, but I want to play with the different radius settings before I do it. I’ll put it here if you’re interested when I get it done though.
After a lot of searching and a lot of wondering, I finally figured out how photographers get that surrealistic 3-D look to their portraits. Or at least one way. I did not come up with this on my own. I simply followed someone else’s directions posted on another blog.
First create a duplicate layer. Desaturate it. Then choose the high pass filter and change the settings to 100 radius. Switch the layer to a hard light, and voila. I cut the opacity down so it looked like what I was going for and then decided to desaturate the photo a little.
You’ll probably see this effect a little more as I shoot more portraits. I’ll try not to overdue. And don’t bother me with the whole “I don’t like it” or “it’s not real” arguments. I realized you either like this look or you don’t. I personally like it and will utilize it.
I’m trying to figure out how to get some football players to do something like what Dustin Snipes did. Just need to get them all in the same place at the same time.
I can’t wait to do it though. I should probably get one or two more lights for rim lighting before doing it, but I guess I could always beg or borrow.
And thanks to Matt Haines for spilling the beans.
