Anyone reading my blog for any amount of time knows how much I love sharing my passion for photography and I love teaching other photographers things that totally make their day. For the longest time I’ve been sharing lighting tutorials, composition tips, equipment comparisons on small blog posts but I’ve been wanting to share even more and for the last year or so we’ve been working on a new website where I can do just that.
This past fall I launched an Online Photography Education site called Shoot for Love, it is a monthly membership site priced to be as affordable and as accessible as possible. I will be posting more and more premium educational content including classroom style instruction, instructional video from past workshops, posing tutorials, retouching videos and more. I focus on techniques I use to create the images I love to create.
The monthly membership fee ($12.95) allows me to not only put more time and effort into these posts, it also comes with a money back guarantee so if you don’t find something you love simply request a refund! Here are a few of the things we’ve posted within the last couple months, with plenty more to come!
Studio Lighting Details and Diagram with a Parabolic Umbrella
Lighting Diagram and walk through of a studio lighting setup using a borrowed studio and borrowed lights.
A Photoshop Layers Walk through (video)
Jake Garn gives a video tour of one of his fully retouched photoshop files, layer by layer. A quick way to pick up on some techniques you may have overlooked.
Demonstration On Directing Models (video)
This is a quick little glimpse into some intense model directing by Jake Garn.
The Importance of Great Models
Heather - Makeup by Danielle Carlsen - Hair by Steven Robertson
Classes available at Shoot for Love
Finding Your Style – A class by Jake Garn
In this class shot exclusively for Shoot For Love Jake Garn discusses his path to finding his photographic style and shares this insight with the hopes of inspiring photographers everywhere to find their unique voice.
Lighting Tools 101 – A Class by Jake Garn
Filmed at the 2011 Shoot For Love workshop this is a great overview of basic lighting principles and available types of lighting equipment along with a slew of sample images showcasing different lighting techniques and equipment. We talk about the first step in learning light and that is understanding yourself. A must watch for any photography lighting enthusiast!
Posing and Expressions – A class by Jake Garn (Coming Soon)
Filmed at the 2011 Shoot For Love workshop Jake Garn shares posing tips and techniques to get the most flattering looks from your models, also a discussion on inspiring (and stealing) the perfect expressions.
Free Content on our Blog!
You don’t have to be a member to enjoy the website, we post plenty of free content including equipment reviews and monthly photography assignments.
This blog post is my homage to a photographic era of yester-year, the days before anyone had even heard of a little program called Adobe Photoshop, back when making a digital scan of your photo meant purchasing THOUSANDS of dollars in special equipment. This didn’t mean people didn’t do crazily creative things to their images, Man Ray was creating images like his one titled “Kitty” over 60 years ago.
Photo by Man Ray circa mid-1900s. Think about doing this one without photoshop.
Obviously special effects for the sake of the effect don’t make the images better, but in the world of creative expression every tool has power, and this post is all about creating images with three simple tools. A camera, a lens, and a flash.
The Challenge!
Here’s the challenge, I’m going to post three images, each one was created in-camera with only limited cropping and color correction in Photoshop. If you think you know the techniques I used to create them then post your guess in the comments! To make it fair I posted a full equipment list I used for each image.
Image One
Hint – I did not use a fog machine and color effect was created in-camera.
These results would be pretty easy to accomplish in photoshop, but pretend you’ve never heard of Photoshop and explain how I accomplished these inside the camera… it’s not very hard by the way! Just label your responses 1, 2 and 3.
Once enough people get it right (could happen quickly) I’ll post a full explanation. Good luck!
Ever notice how most digital black & whites look sort of washed out? That’s because they’re using what an off-set printer would call an “unsupported” black. When a graphic designer wants a pure, rich black they use a black “supported” with additional inks making a dark silky black instead of a sort of dark grey that would appear if you used just black ink.
Well, the same principle applies to black and white photos. By blending additional inks into your black and whites you get a richer tonal range which gives you more details in your highlights… a complaint many film shooters have about digital images.
Take a look at these for example, a black and white made by just desaturating the colors vs. a duotone (or tritone) image. As you can see by using additional inks you can create black and whites with a lot more visual appeal.
Good news is duotones are very easy, and I made a quick video tutorial to show you how. Enjoy!
If you don’t already have a copy of Adobe Lightroom I highly recommend it. Available at B&H (with a $50 discount through 1/2/11)
Remember back to when you were first learning Photoshop? You probably went through and applied different filters, maybe you tried doing a colorized-black-and-white image, maybe you created some color effects stuff like that. Well, the idea was to experiment! You didn’t know how things would turn out you just started TRYING things.
There is nothing wrong with this experimental stage, but at some point you need to LEAVE that stage and you need to come into your digital darkroom with a very clear idea of what you want and some basic ideas on how to get there… otherwise you’re probably just making your photos worse, not better.
I love using Photoshop as both a conceptual tool and a tool to make slight (nearly invisible) improvements, and in the case of the Samurai series I went in with a clear idea that I wanted to create a slight vide0-game reality to these images.
To show my post-processing handiwork I downloaded a Before & After plugin from Instruite that is kind of cool. There should be a little slider that you can move back and forth to see the changes, first image is straight out of the camera.
Neck wrinkles in photos is my number one Pet Peeve
Neck Wrinkle (n) The overlaps in skin caused when a person’s head is turned with a seemingly unnatural angle relative to the neck.
Even though most photographers and models will create images that avoid overlapping wrinkles of skin somehow neck wrinkles pop up in professional fashion and beauty photography not commonly, but definitely not rarely. There are neck wrinkles in a book titled “Fashion Photography” for crying out loud!
I don’t know why I allow myself to be so bothered by them. Maybe it’s because it’s so easy to make posing adjustments to relieve the excruciating pressure required to overlap one’s skin on itself, or it might be because neck wrinkles remind me of over-active models trying too hard to show their arse AND their face, ala “Bikinis and Cars 18-month Calendar” style.
Whatever the reason, if there is a neck wrinkle in an image I just can’t stop looking at it (and thanks to this article I’ve now cursed you with the same affliction). It’s like this, 1 of my 5 senses wants to abandon their post and render me temporarily deaf whenever I stumble onto one of Jay Leno’s monologues, yet my brain orders it to even greater attention, and in a true plot-twist my senses are repulsed but my brain is fascinated by the agony of it all. So I cannot look away.
I even spend a few minutes talking about posing techniques that will eliminate neck wrinkles in my photo workshops for crying out loud! It’s that big of deal to me. I’m not condoning it, that’s just the way I am.
That being said sometimes, sometimes the perfect shot happens to have the wrinkles. That’s just the way it is. No amount of posing or time-machine can fix it. The perfect comedy line-up just happens to include Jay Leno… what are you supposed to do? Do you skip the whole event just because of one overlapping skin wrinkle? Bless his heart.
The answer is of course NO. You cannot abandon the perfect shot because of one dulwarp.
dulwarp (n) 1. Jay Leno 2. Neck Wrinkles.
So I’m working on a set of images I call the Chameleon Series. You haven’t seen the images yet, nor do you know anything about it because it’s a surprise (the series will go on display at The Aperture gallery in Salt Lake City on Friday June 23rd, 2010 – stay tuned for details) yet it happened… the perfect shot of one of the models just happened to have them. I don’t know how I missed it during the shoot or if I noticed them and just didn’t realize we just made THE shot, but in any case I had to accept the fact that they were there.
THE shot (n) The shot of all shots in this particular look.
At first I just let them be, I thought to myself that I could do it. I could release an image with neck wrinkles, it would be fine. But as the image neared completion I realized I couldn’t live with myself if Jay Leno accidentally made his way onto my TIVO anymore than I could put an image into this series with neck wrinkles.
So, I had to fix them and fixing them takes quite a bit longer than you’d think, yet it was all worth it.
Thank you to everyone that shared their opinions on how I achieved the Spiraling Out effect in my first Exercise in Photoshop Forensics post. I definitely think it was successful enough that I’ll do another one in the future but for now let’s get to the solution!
Ofir Abe’s description was correct in his guess about my technique, which was to process multiple iterations of one image (using Adobe Lightroom) and exporting each version to Photoshop where I exposed different parts of each image using layer masks. Why do it in Lightroom rather than adjustment layers? Well, it’s a matter of bit depth and tonal range and pre/post demosaicing… by doing it in a RAW file I have access to ALL the data the camera captured, whereas if I converted it to a JPG/TIFF/PSD first then the file has doesn’t have access to all the data captured by the camera – especially if it’s been converted it to an 8-bit file. Now if you convert it to a 16-bit file then that’s better, but if you ask me it’s still better to make all the adjustments before locking in your settings and exporting it to a JPG/TIFF/PSD. By making the changes in a RAW editor (like Lightroom, Aperture, Adobe ACR) you have more power in your exposure, saturation, white balance, tonal curves etc.
To sum up for all you non-technical folks, shoot in RAW (rather than JPG) and use a RAW editor to make any color or exposure adjustments to your image, then thank me later. Sure there are some downsides to using RAW – specifically they are a larger file size and take longer for your camera to process, but for 99% of the projects I work on RAW is so far superior it’s not even a question on what should be used. RAW is most akin to a digital negative whereas JPG is akin to a digital print. In a print/JPG what you see is what you get, there is no extra detail that can be extracted. But in a negative/RAW file there is a lot of non-visible detail that can be extracted, if you know how.
But onto the step by step process of how I created them!
Straight out of the Camera
Using a classic lighting technique for beauty photography (over/under softboxes) we get a nice even lighting that provides a perfect palette to paint shapes on.
If you think it’s easy to get hair to look this perfect think again, Janae Johnson had to spend a long, long time perfecting nearly every single strand! Lucky for me Paula Dahlberg’s incredible makeup skills combined with Sarah’s statuesque looks makes for an easy retouching job, making this out-of-camera shot nearly too perfect for a “before” image… yet that’s exactly what it is.
First Lightroom Export to Photoshop
Basically I wanted to shift the entire color palette around making her skin a near-neutral white. To do this I adjust the Temp/Tint along with the exposure, vibrance and saturation sliders in Adobe Lightroom. I would give the exact values I shifted but they wouldn’t translate correctly to an image with a different starting point so if you are truly interested in experimenting then you’re going to have to do just that, experiment!
Obviously shifting the yellow in her skin to white requires adding a blue hue to the entire image which is how the white wall changes to blue. Once the image was brought to this point I exported it to photoshop where it became the bottom layer soon to be joined by…
Second Lightroom Export to Photoshop
I loved the blue shift on the entire image and how it created an understated quality to it but I wanted to bring back some vibrancy to the hair, which I would later match the color of the patterns with. So I brought the color balance back to where it needed to be but this time I increased the vibrance and saturation in all the colors to give it all an other-worldly pop in saturation.
First Layer Mask
This step is simple, I overlaid the new vibrant layer onto the first layer and using a layer mask I hid everything and “painted” back her hair and a white gradient into the blue-ish background. Incidentally, I did all the masking by hand using a very precise Razer mouse. I’ve seen some promising shortcuts but nothing beats good old fashioned manual masking… though it seems CS5 may have made some progress in smartly refining masks… but I didn’t use their new tools for this, just good old fashioned painted on mask.
Third (and final) Lighroom Export to Photoshop
Basically I adjusted the white balance to get a color that matched the hair, then I dropped the exposure way down which made an all around darker tone, using the tone curve in Lightroom I brought the highlights up a bit to give it a more shiny appearance rather than just a darker appearance.
Second (and Final) Layer Mask
Using only the default brush set in photoshop I hand-drew all these shapes, once again using a highly precise Razer Mouse. It will be stated (I’m sure) that I should have used the pen tool and created the shapes using bezier curves which would have resulted in a much cleaner vector shapes. Though I am quite proficient with bezier curves (from my days as an Adobe Illustrator guru) I find whenever I’m creating vector shapes they lose a certain organic appeal, all the curves become a little too precise, a little too polished. For that reason I opted for the old fashioned process of simply painting in the crazy shapes and allowing my imagination to stay less focused on the details.
A look at the Layers
Here is a closer look at what my final PSD looked like, notice I added a heal layer so that I could do some slight touch up on the hair fly-aways, other than that you can see the three images with the two layer masks. Very simple.
Thoughts or Questions?
I’d love to hear them! Leave a comment and I’ll respond, and if you liked this series of blog posts on Photoshop Forensics let me know because I could definitely be talked into doing more in the future!
I used a couple very simple techniques to create these images and rather than offer a post-processing tutorial I’m going to turn the challenge back onto you, my blog readers. Sometimes the best way to learn your tools is to imagine how other photographers are using them, so in that spirit look at these images carefully and leave a comment describing the post processing techniques you think I used to ‘paint’ these images, if someone gets it right I will be sure to let you know!
(Click the images for a larger view)
Hair by Janae Johnson
Makeup by Paula Dahlberg
Models Sarah Whitmer, Crystal Coleman, Alexandra Mathews
I am nothing if not a mad scientist, had I any talents in biology or any sort of life sciences I would be the guy in a lab that accidentally created a super hero/villain out of myself and at this moment a blockbuster movie would be in production about my life. It would be a massive success and I would be stumbling out of the car with Paris Hilton as we speak… and my wife would be pissed but she’d understand because I wasn’t myself, it was the mad science that made me freak out.
Alas, I have no biology skills whatsoever… but that doesn’t mean I can’t mess around in a digital lab.
Earlier today I thought to myself, what if I took five beautiful women and combined them into one face. Would the resulting image be some sort of super-villain or simply an ode to the simple beauty that exists in every face, in every girl, in every country of the world. You be the judge.
Lighting Diagram and walk through of a studio lighting setup using a borrowed studio and borrowed lights.
Jake Garn gives a video tour of one of his fully retouched photoshop files, layer by layer. A quick way to pick up on some techniques you may have overlooked.
Filmed at the 2011 Shoot For Love workshop this is a great overview of basic lighting principles and available types of lighting equipment along with a slew of sample images showcasing different lighting techniques and equipment. We talk about the first step in learning light and that is understanding yourself. A must watch for any photography lighting enthusiast!
Filmed at the 2011 Shoot For Love workshop Jake Garn shares posing tips and techniques to get the most flattering looks from your models, also a discussion on inspiring (and stealing) the perfect expressions.
