I was encouraged by a friend to write a blog on the process of my shoot, workflow and edit. So here it is, and I am going to use a recent conceptual portrait shoots I did with my friend, Cat (with her rabbit, beetroot) as an example from start to finish. (*This photo is now published on Photoshoot Magazine - Issue 13)
The shoot was actually quite ad hoc with no planning, we just decided to do something fun on an afternoon. Cat love her rabbit and wanted to have a portrait with her. So we decided to do an Alice in Wonderland themed shoot at her home, using her fireplace as the background.
The gear I used was my Nikon D5300, 18-55mm 3.5 NIkkor AF-S, a foldable reflector, a Yongnuo YN-560 IV speedlite and a remote flash trigger. I shot tethered to my notebook in Lightroom. The first thing I did was to go to HSL in lightroom and changed the hue, turning the dress from green (original) to blue. All the dresses became the same hue in blue from every shot.
There was lovely natural light coming from the window behind her, but to add more softness I used a speedlite as a fill, bounced against a white reflector. I shot quite a few as I know I can pick and choose and composite these.
This was my favourite shot on the left (straight out of camera), because of the innocent yet mysterious expression. I however preferred the posing of the rabbit and dress in the photo on the right. I therefore picked these 2 for my composite.
After minor adjustments to exposure, shadow etc in lightroom with, I exporting these to photoshop. I had photo 2 (right) as the background. Picture 1 (left) was pasted as a new layer. I used the layer mask to keep the top half of the body and also the jug on the right which resulted in this.
I made a copy of this layer and then used the heal brush to clean up any distractions, especially the marks in the back of the fireplace. I used the liquify tool and made small adjustments to the arms and dress.
I then added an adjustment layer to increase the brightness and contrast slightly. I also added a separate group with brightness / contrast, and hue /saturation adjustments to match the skin tones of her face (which was darker and more red) then her body which was mostly lit by natural window light.
The changes are very subtle, but that is important to make the photo believable. My next layer is Dodge and Burn (D&B) using a 50% grey layer (set to overlay). To explain it simply, I dodge (brighten) anything that is already light, and I burn (darken) anything that is dark. This gives more contrast, but in a controlled way which make the transition between light and dark soft. To show you which parts I dodged and burned. To give you an idea, this is my 50% grey D&B layer, the before and after D&B.
This is the before and after Dodge and burn. You can see Im not really going crazy with the changes, but just subtly enhancing it.
The next part was the complicated part. I basically shot many photos of me holding some playing cards at different distances to get different depth of fields. Here are some straight out of camera shots of me holding the playing cards.
In photoshop, I chose a few of these shots and pasted them as separate layers (all grouped together). The unwanted parts of these photos were masked out. To match the lighting and hue with each card, I added individual layers of hue, brightness adjustment layers linked to each card layer.
Now, im pretty happy with the composite, I made a stamp visible layer and put that into AlienSkin Exposure 7. I used the filter “Color Films - Print - Kodak Portra 800”. This adds a bit more contrast and sharpness. I take this layer back into AlienSkin and add an overlay with flare. I choose the one with a rainbow "reflections 2"
Next, I added some vibrancy, and a colour balance layer (blue added to shadows and slightly to highlights) to give a colder feel to match the dress and the natural light. Finally, I added a curves layer to give a muted magazine look.
And there we have it, the final image. (click to see it in high res in Flickr). If you liked this post, please follow me on facebook for regular updates with my work. :) More behind the scenes and tutorials to come!