Showing posts with label tutorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tutorial. Show all posts

Monday, April 18, 2011

Back to The Shop

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So, you're a creative photographer who understands outdoor lighting, and how to create edgy senior portraits. You have all sorts of photoshop tricks up your sleeves, and can turn any mistakes into art. But what do you do when someone comes to you needing clean professional images for business cards, magazine articles, websites etc?

If you're anything like me, this isn't where you want to put your money. But these are the jobs you tend to get more than you expected. It's not always very exciting, but then most of the jobs we get aren't all glamour and glory. It may seem like these are the easy shoots that you really don't need to think about that much, but for me these are the jobs that tend to keep me up at night, because they demand something beyond adding texture and using some actions to make them pass. You need to get it right from the start, and keep the photoshop to a minimum to preserve quality.

So what am I trying to say?

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First of all you don't need to buy a magic softbox and a how-to guide. Head out to your workshop, grab a 500 watt work light, and a 100 watt heat lamp, (Just don't keep them out too long or those poor little chicks will freeze, and your dad won't be able to finish his wiring project) and follow the diagram.

Keep in mind that these lights are very warm, so you'll probably want to keep your color temp below 3200K, and the images might need some minor color correcting in post. And they will start a fire if you leave them on near anything that burns...

If you found this helpful or have questions I'd love to hear from you!

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Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Sorry

It's been a year since I've updated. Sorry about that. Here's a little glimpse into what I've been keeping busy with.






If anyone is interested in seeing how I'm making these wings let me know. If I get enough interest I might give away some secrets.

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Monday, September 13, 2010

Lighting Vid #1

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Superimposing An Image On Paper

I had a few people ask me how I placed the image of Hannah on paper in a previous post, so I'm going to try to explain it very briefly. If I miss something, or if you want to know more you can email me or leave a comment.

I'm using Photoshop CS4 and a graphics tablet, but you can do the same thing with the last few versions of photoshop.

Final image preview.


This is a barely edited version of the original portrait.


This is my paper image. I took two normal pieces of paper ( I was out of card stock) and folded them over in different directions until I got the look I wanted, and then took a picture with them sitting on a flat piece of paper. Obviously I desaturated it at this point, but I haven't done much else to this image yet.


Here you can see it coming together a bit more. I have a high contrast version of Hannah over my paper, and I've given the paper a bit of a vignette, and decreased the contrast a little.


To get the photo to look somewhat flat and printed I decreased the layer opacity to 72%. Now to get the wrinkles of the paper to come thru and merge with my wrinkled backdrop, I set Hannah's layer blend mode to multiply. You can see the fold of the paper thru Hannah's layer now.


I selected the fold with a polygonal lasso, and created a layer mask. Then I selected a grungy brush, and masked around the edges of my portrait to give it an abused look, and blend it with the wrinkles of the paper.


To give it an old magazine look I used the halftone filter on Hannah's layer. I created a flat version of the entire image, and added some noise to blend it all together, along with a gradient map to ensure that there are no true blacks in my image. I also added a lighting effect to increase the directional light coming from the bottom left of the image.



This is a somewhat condensed description of how I merged these photos together, but I hope it'll be useful to all you photographers and graphic artists out there.

And once again feel free to contact me if you want to know more, or if there are any other images you'd like me to break down a little for you. If there's any interest, I'm more than happy to share what I've learned with all of you.

Thanks for reading!

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About Me

I am a photographer based in Omaha, NE

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