I've been itching to use my 5D on some more portraits, so I dragged my boyfriend out with me to Pacific Coast Highway (PCH) over in Santa Monica. Unfortunately a lot of the photos which I LOVED didn't survive as my CF card did something very weird. He and I previewed all the photos on my camera just fine, but the moment the card was put into the computer (via card reader) it showed up as being full of a bunch of funky folders with weird, encrypted characters. It turns out a HUGE chunk of photos is just..missing, yet the photos that are present are numbered consecutively. I am baffled, and none of the data recovery software I ran has been able to salvage anything thus far so I am just calling it a loss at this point and will just re-shoot with him later this week or next week. Still I was able to process/work with the leftovers I do have, so I'm going to share my favorite one here, and also take this opportunity to show everyone just how much post processing I perform on my photos at times. The style I like to use most is the same style as seen in some movie posters, video grame promotional 'art', and some celebrity/commercial photography (such as album covers, promotional photos for movies/tv series, etc)
The specs for the image are as follows:
Canon EOS 5D
Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 EX DG
AlienBees ABR800 ringflash
Tronix Explorer 1200WS battery unit (to power the ABR800)
Shutter Speed: 1/15 sec
ISO: 50
Aperture: f/11
Focal Length: 24mm
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A closer crop here, showing the details of his face:
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And here is the original photo, out of camera, RAW conversion, no PP work. As you can see I made a lot of changes and airbrushed it quite a bit to get it to where I wanted it to be.
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A basic guide for an image like this is as follows:
1 - Open the photo in Adobe Camera RAW. Tweak exposure and such if needed.
2 - Convert it to an HDR image in Photomatix PRO
3 - Take it back into Photoshop and proceed to tweak it a bit and 'accentuate' the grit the HDR conversion has added with the Curves tool.
4 - Continue color tweaking a bit with Curves.
5 - Start airbrushing in elements you wish to change (in this case, darkening the sky, turning on the light down stairs, and making his shirt black. Skin blemishes are left alone, despite the fact that by this stage they are just JUMPING out at you. All your edits should be done in layers though, as various layer styles (Overlay, Color Burn, etc) are needed.
6 - Flatten layers and apply more Curves tool effects. Continue this for a few more steps until the colors start to look the way you want.
7 - Go in and airbrush out skin blemishes, correct background elements and further airbrush/refine any areas that need it.
8 - More Curves to unify the effects and add the final color effect.
And you're done
Basically the main things are layers, layer styles, and the curves tool. The airbrush, clone, and gradient tools are your friends, too Use them!EDIT: added another photo on page 2!
I see a bunch of the hip hop albums out my way(bay area) using this technique and would to know how it was done. INFACT I was going to post a thread asking how it was done/
