I was born to learn.

Since childhood, I have loved school and learning more than any vacation lasting longer than 4 days. I am in my element in the classroom, and thrived on the freedom to do work with the gentle guidance of teachers and advisors. I get very caught up in focusing on my own ideas that sometimes I need a little nudge to get me started in a new direction.

Enter: Vision Quest Photo Assignment Cards. 

Beautiful and useful...

These little cards are not only beautiful with their Japanese influenced pattern on the one side, but also very functional in the sense that the set of 36 cards offer individual assignments for you to try out. Although the level of difficulty in each assignment varies with your interpretation, the assignments vary in simplicity from “Photograph the color red” to “Interpret the subject Love. No kids, pets, parents or partners. Go deeper…”. They are printed locally on recycled paper with an environmentally-sensitive coating, so your green trigger finger will be pleased.

These cards are part of a featured project on KickStarter, raising money to make this useful little tool a reality. Currently, they are 144% funded, but you can still donate money and get little pressies as thank-you’s (even a deck of these cards).

Here is a video to tell you more about it.

Day 9: Old Timey Portrait Retouch

Old picture? Or new picture and old fashion?

I have to say that old photos are probably my favorite to retouch. Why? Well, to be honest, they mix retouching, restoration, and history all in one. Restoration of damaged art and goods has always fascinated me, and in the digital age, this is as close to being an art restorer that I can get.

This was a simple yet time consuming piece. First, I created adjustment layers for both the saturation (0%) and curves to bring the white paper as white as I could without ruining the picture quality. Then, I took out the painful like scrapes, bumps, smears, and dirt one by one with the healing too, then hit them hard with the healing tool and cloning stamp on lighten, then normal to even things out. Lastly, I put in a few curve adjustment layers to bring in the dark qualities of the jacket to create a more even shot. Lovely. Simple. Done.

Day 10: Fur Shoot

HLM and Moho Makaya Fur Shoot

What an awesome shoot to work with! Just had to put a mask on the subject, put in a black background behind her, and put in a texture background (layer set to ‘Lighten’) after adding in some color for the eye makeup, and the normal amount of fixing little bits here and there.

Here’s to the photographer: HLM photography
You can find her work here: http://www.modelmayhem.com/2125275

And the lovely model: Moho Makaya
See her here: http://www.modelmayhem.com/2279040

Dragon Compact Mirror

I have always loved little knickknacks you find in vintage shops and garage sales. I have become much better at selecting good-quality items I actually have a use and need for, which is good for my house and wallet.

Anyways, I’ve been wanting to whip out some nice shots of this for awhile now, so I set it up with two LumiQuest softboxes and went wild on it with my fixed 50mm lens. 

There is a catch, sadly. Seems that either my lens or my camera sensor suffered some condensation last winter and has since decided to wreak havoc on my product shots. Here is what I get for that:

Camera Condensation Spotting - Ouch!

Really, ouch is the word. Each one of those buggers has to be removed, and that sucks. However, I have determination for a spot-free shot, so I went at it, stylius flying, with the clone stamp and healing brush, and squashed those little dots. I corrected the white balance – a bit too warm for me, and gave the etching a bit more oomph with the old duplicate layer->high pass->overlay->masking trick. Overall, a simple shoot and edit, just annoyingly time consuming with all those little dots.

Also, to pull a bit more color out of areas you’d rather not have it, use an adjustment layer with the saturation/hue function, pulling down the saturation to 0% and painting the effect in via a mask.

Enjoy!

Adrian, The Fitness Trainer

So on Saturday I had the pleasure of meeting an awesome model/actor/fitness trainer who needed some shots for his work and profile. He was looking for dramatic lighting that would show off his hard work, so I set up two naked speedlights at about 20-30 degrees behind him on either side, and hoisted a 2×2 softbox with a grid over his head (not an easy feat for me, as he was super tall and I… well… am not…). I set the speedlights to about the same power, as the naked lights would appear brighter anyways. I was shooting with about 7.1-8 f-stop, ISO 200, and a focal length of about 38mm with my Sigma 18-50mm.

Editing-wise, this particular portrait was easy, but brought some challenges. For example, you’ll notice a shadow on his neck. I wasn’t fond of it, so I later moved my flash to compensate for it. That being said, I liked this pose more than the others, so I got creative and copy/pasted a neck from a better-lit shot onto his shadowy neck. After a bit of tweaking via the transform tool and masking it in, it was good as new.

I also took my favorite light sculpting tools for a joyride on this one, defining shadows and brightening highlights on both his body and clothes by painting in black and white at 8% on an overlay layer. Great trick, learn it. I had to fix the background, as on one side it was brighter than the other. Just had to put up a new layer, paint in some black, and I was done!

Adrian, The Fitness Model, Shot #2

For this second shot, I had the same lighting set up. As you can see, I was too short, he was too tall, and my backdrop was just not high enough. How could I fix this, other than using stilts to heighten my backdrop? Post!

So first we isolated the background, then created a new masked layer from the selection, and added in a gradient. All looked well, but there was gradation lines – the bane of my existence. After looking through countless solutions that did little more than frustrate me further, I found that if I make a duplicated masked layer, then add a slightly different gradient inside, then reduce the opacity to about 50%, it does a pretty good job of covering up the painful effects of gradation.

For both shots, I used the overlay highlighting/darkening mentioned before, some cloning/healing to fix any blemishes, and used the duplicate layer->high pass->overlay masked technique to give a certain sharpness to areas like the hair and eyes. You may notice that I also filled in parts of his under-eye circles witha clone stamp set to a different layer, then changed the opacity layer to make the effect subtle.

Enjoy!

The Big Wig

May the fourth be with you! Couldn’t help retouch this awesome shot from a big wig series from a great fashion photographer in Tenn. What do you think?

This was a pretty simple retouch. First, take out the little blips in the background to make a uniform black. Next, the usual cleaning up of stray hairs and blemishes using the healing tool and cloning stamp where necessary. Then, I worked the skin with my usual two layer process, added in some highlights in overlay, and plopped in a texture background on Lighten for a fun effect.

Watch me work it here:

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to ask or share!

Awesome work is from Photographer Miss Ernie Passwaters – you can find her work here: http://www.modelmayhem.com/773590
And here: http://www.erniepasswaters.com/
Wig and dress designed by Aria Darling
MUA: Sarah Marie Gilliland

Major props to Clarabellafaire @*DyingBeautyStock for the great color texture. Find her work here:http://dyingbeautystock.deviantart.com/

Retouch of Frozen Female 4 by Della Stock

Decided to try out an ice and snow look.
This look took about 10 layers of colors, hues, levels, not to mention a slew of snow and ice brushes.
There was a video in the making, but was lost when the program malfunctioned. Sad.
Many thanks to Della Stock for their lovely stock photography.

Retouch a Day May: Day 2

This was a fun retouch – any chance to take on facepaint, I am in!

First, it was pertinent than I clone and heal as much of the stray color  and use the liquify tool to change the proportions of her face. Mind you, she was beautiful before the proportions shift, but this was for a personal preference.

I drew in some red and yellow for the paint to make the areas more uniform and matching color patches. I redrew her yellow eyelashes in, and added a bit of eyeliner by painting a line of black, then setting the layer to multiply with about 50%. To fix the discoloration on her neck, I painted in some flesh color I sampled from her skin, then set it to “color” and set up an adjustment layer to keep track of the color and lightness.

Also took care of the blur and sharpness by duplicating the main layer twice, adding masks, and applied the filters Surface Blur and High Pass (on overlay mode).

If you’d like to see the video of this retouch, feel free to watch it below or here on Youtube. You’ll have to excuse the absence of techno music you normally find in retouching videos, I rather liked this song for retouching, and it was the only one in my library long enough, so enjoy!

Many thanks to Niniel Stocks for their lovely shots.

Hi Everyone, and welcome to my new series, Retouch A Day in May!

Everyday I will explore new ways to retouch skin, hair, clothing, and more. To kick it off, here is a retouch I did for yesterday featuring artwork from the talented S. Bourson. His work can be found at www.sbourson.com or on Model Mayhem. I love his work, and I highly encourage you to check it out.

Retouch a Day May: Day 1 - S Bourson, Argile Shoot

As you can see, the photo was a bit blue, so I first went about warming her up. Then came my favorite Liquify, then clone and healing tools to take care of little bumps and blips. Then I whipped out my newest weapon in my arsenal – new brushes.

Photoshop Digital Cosmetics Kit

The brushes were a mix of brushes produced by KeepWaiting of Deviantart.com. Here is a link to find them: http://browse.deviantart.com/resources/?qh=&section=&q=skin#/d22gvdf

You can also find the same brush set on Dirt2 - http://dirt2.com/photoshop-brushes/3-in-1-skin-texture-combination-brush-pack/

Even if you don’t care for the brushes, check out those websites for some great resources.

It took some testing, and I am sure the more I use them, the better I will become at making a smooth yet convincing finish.

Photo is Copyright: www.sbourson.com

Stay tuned! The next retouch will have a video so you can see my methods!

Abigail Curran of Crackin' Foxy poses with the mic.

This was a relatively simple set up, but many variations of set ups were tried before I settled on this one. The recording room is a small, freezing little room  windowless save for the observing glass. The lighting is sub-par at best (who needs light when your editing audio?), so I could should with the lights on and they wouldn’t even register. Good thing I use strobes, right? I first tried shooting through and around the looking glass, and I got this nice shot of her with the microphone. She was singing the entire time, as per my suggestion, but in the end we opted for a non-singing shot. Shooting while someone is talking or singing is always hit or miss – ever get one of those awkward freeze-frames that you would reserve for future favors and blackmail? Quite.

Abigail Curran of Crackin' Foxy on the Keys

I wanted a dramatic light, yet I wanted to mimic the lighting from a solo performance at a concert. How did I bring the concert to the tiny, cold, technilogical audio room? I whipped out my Lumiquest Soft box III and one naked flash. As you can see, the Lumiquest was up on the top left and a bit beyond her, while the naked flash went off a good 4 or 5 feet to the right and beyond. Swapped out my 18-50ml for my tiny 55ml fixed lens. Normally, fixed lenses give me stress and turn me into the Human Zoom for a day. In the end, I still had to be my own zoom, resorting to awkward  angles and standing on a plastic chair older than my sister, but the shots she gave me were more than worth the possibility of breaking my arm and dignity on the audio lab floor.

As for the legacy? This shot was chosen by a few higher ups to be used as the official background and screensaver for all the nice shiny new computers in the department. I was honored, but if this was to be in the digital lab, I felt it would be a bit more fitting with a bit of digital decoration. For this, I plastered up some cool round texture bubbles and added some text. Here is the final result, enjoy!

Abigail Curran of Crackin' Foxy with Lights and Bubbles

It was a relatively simple shot. Since I couldn’t transport him to the lighting studio, I brought my equipment with me to the Adirondack Wildlife Refuge in Wilmington, NY, and set up. Since I needed low light, but not too low as to frighten or blind the bird when my flash fired. Considering the power they have in their wings and their sharp talons and beak, the consideration was also given for the safety of myself and Steve Hall.

As the sun was setting, I went out with Steve and he brought Utah away from any walls or objects in his enclosure so nothing would be caught in my key light. My key light for the night, a simple YN-560 Speedlight paired with the amazing Lumiquest ProMax System (using the white insert and the diffuser). Set with that, I dialed in as tiny as I could f-stop wise (f-16), held my light about 2 feet to the left of the owl, and began. I loved the look the ProMax system gave me, and the f-16 gave me some wicked sharp detail of all those feathers. I have a slight fascination for birds, so this was a real treat.

He didn’t seem to mind once we got started. Although generally he looked very pissy, Great Horned Owls rarely look thrilled to be anywhere.