I was asked to shoot some photographs for a local ballet school - the plan is that the school will use these photographs on its new web site.
It was a lovely shoot; the girls all seemed really comfortable in front of the camera and were able to pull off extraordinarily elegant positions without any difficulty.
Then I had to PP them. I used a HiLite (with two strobes) and a further strobe mounted camera right. But in most of the photographs, some limb or other protruded beyond the confines of the HiLite, so I had to do some (for me) heavyweight post processing.
This normally entailed using Topaz ReMask2 to cut the girls out from the background, and using a Photoshop Density Mask to past vaguely realistic-looking shadows on top of the gradient that formed the new background. Luckily the gradient is on a separate layer, so changing colours and so on is pretty easy.
C+C would be much appreciated.
1. All the dancers in a pose
2. Another group. I didn't like cutting off the legs of the girl at the front, but couldn't see what else to do.
3. Ouch...
4. Ouch again... This time the shadows were done using Paint Shop Pro, and I have to say that I think I prefer this result over the Photoshop one.
5. And ouch again. I mean, seriously... how can she be smiling?
6. A beautiful pose
7. Here I've tried using Colouring Pencils from Photoshop with it. What do you think? I rather like the softening effect
8. One of the early set-up shots included a close-up of this dancer. I processed the picture in Portrait Professional, and was rather pleased by the result
regards,
/alan
