Before/Before->After/After

July 7, 2009 | Filed Under photo 

The man in the shot is Stewart Goodyear. He was in recently for a future show on Radio 2, I believe. This was a last minute shoot, in that I found out about it 5 minutes before he was going to sit down. I had My D90, my f3.5/4.5 18mm-70mm lens, and two flashes (an SB600 and a no-name). I placed the SB600 to camera right, fired full power at 24mm directly into the white ceiling, about 8-10 feet away from Stewart. The no-name flash was behind Stewart, to camera left, on top of a shelf. It was also straight up to the sky. Here are the four files, the final ones being the ones on the left. Wordily-detailed info on what I did, after the fold.

The light is very much diffused because of the white ceiling, and ended up providing pretty even coverage and casting a short/Rembrandt style light over him. Short lighting is when the light falls on the side of the subject facing away from the camera, and Rembrandt lighting has side lighting that grazes the other eye on the side of the face not primarily lit. I think this falls between… ANYWAYS!

The reason I’ve posted four versions is to show what I did to overcome a situation I wasn’t paying attention to. Note that it’s almost always easier to get it right the first time instead of having to photoshop things later. In this case, I was very much present in the studio glass as a reflection. The host wasn’t in the room at the moment and the goal was to have Stewart look like he was listening to the host, presumably behind the camera. If the glass had been a straight 90 degrees I probably wouldn’t have shown up, but the glass is on an angle so I become very visible.

The bottom version: This has a less obviously photoshopped look to it because I didn’t take too much creative license with the image, however, it required a lot more work than the top version. I created a new empty layer on top of the original, and did a lot of cloning and heal tool (set to ‘replace’) work on this new layer. The reason I used an empty layer for cloning and healing is that it’s non-destructive, with the original layer being left untouched. To do this, set the “sample” in your tools options to “all layers” or “current and below”, depending on what you’re working on. When you do this, anything cloned or worked on is automatically written to the new layer instead of the layer being shown at the moment.

The top version: First, I wanted to darken up the whole studio control room area and really focus in on Stewart. I duplicated the layer, darkened the whole thing with levels, and set a layer mask to ‘reveal all’ on it. Then, I hard lasso’d the rough area I wanted darkened (left some space between the hard lines of the foreground)  and filled in the mask. Then with a very soft brush, I painted in the edges of the mask around everything in the foreground I wanted to leave untouched. After that, I added some blur to the paint on the mask to soften it further, “to taste”. Getting rid of my reflection was pretty easy, as I just used a heal tool (set to ‘replace’, again) and made my arms as black as the rest of me showed up. The actual image itself is the product of some work in Camera Raw. I adjusted some contrasts, turned the black levels and the fill levels way up, and the recovery to 100. Exposure and brightness were also messed with a bit. Once doing that you end up with a very saturated image that usually requires you to pull back on the white balance and skin colour balances if you want it to look alright. The reason I did this? I like the look of it, and it’s something I do now and then, no other reason. You couldn’t do any of what I’ve done to these pictures if you were shooting for editorial purposes, but alas, I wasn’t. If I was, then I’d just provide any of the other dozen shots I ended up with. I doubt the heavily modified version will get used, but I wanted to take the time to do it anyways.

Comments