Studio: Vampires....

Vaporous · Oct 23, 2007

Well I decided to try out the self timer in the studio and use myself and my husband as the subjects. I thought they had kind of a romantic/vampire theme to them. I had alot of "fun" running back and forth to the camera then trying to pose in the studio waiting for that timer:lmao: The only thing that bugs me just a bit would be the slight orange tint to the skin tones, I need to work on that.....anyway thanks for looking as always C&C.
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wildmaven · Oct 23, 2007

The last one would've ROCKED if he was looking at you instead of the camera!!! Can you try that one again?

Marian

Vaporous · Oct 23, 2007

Thanks!

I looked through the all the shots again on my computer. Nope....I didn't see one similar to that one where he's looking at me *snap*!

Christina · Oct 23, 2007

These are nice. Ive never really tried self portraits but i think you just made me want to give it a try.

Number 5 is my fav-o-rite. Again good job

NJMAN · Oct 23, 2007

These are pretty cool and stylish Melis! You 2 are quite the photogenic couple, I must say.

I noticed the black and white one was underexposed. I would like to show you an edit I did of that one if its okay with you. I know you have the "do not edit" on your profile, so I wanted to ask your permission first. Is that okay?

Vaporous · Oct 23, 2007

NJMAN said:
These are pretty cool and stylish Melis! You 2 are quite the photogenic couple, I must say.

I noticed the black and white one was underexposed. I would like to show you an edit I did of that one if its okay with you. I know you have the "do not edit" on your profile, so I wanted to ask your permission first. Is that okay?

Thank you and yes that is ok by me I love your post process :thumbup:

NJMAN · Oct 23, 2007

I thought I would give it a bit of extra punch of contrast that it deserves. What do you think?

NJ

Vaporous · Oct 24, 2007

Uh wow thats fabulous NJMAN!....I'll have to send that to my husband:hail:

Can you give me rundown of the PP so I can relay that to him along with this picture. Looks just ever so slightly HDR'd as well. Superb:heart:

Thank you:thumbup:

NJMAN · Oct 24, 2007

No problem Melis! My pleasure. Glad you like it.

The image was already very classy and sexy as it was. All I did was push up the light values to where they should be, so that the viewer gets all the effect of the shadows and highlights. With black and white images, contrast is really important. It looks best if you push the highlights as far as you can without blowing them out. The midtones and shadows will work themselves out in the process.

My workflow on this particular image was:
1. Adjusted Levels in PS. I saw that it was underexposed, so I pulled the righthand notch until it was up to the right most edge of the black part (its hard to explain without looking at the histogram).
2. I upped the contrast with the Contrast/brightness filter in PS. Settings were Contrast +10 and Brightness +10.
3. One very important thing about the contrast boost though...I made a selection around the white silky material and selected Inverse, which in doing so, selected everything else except the material. Then I made the contrast adjustment. The reason I did that is because the material was already bright enough, and I didnt want to include that in the overall contrast boost. Make sense?
4. I used the dodge tool at 15% opacity and carefully brightened the eyes, and the whites around the eyes. Be careful not to go too far with that, because it can look fake very quickly. It only takes a couple passes with the brush.
5. I used the burn tool at 20% opacity to tone down the white material even more. This allows the viewer to focus more on you, the subjects, and not so much the bright material.
6. I then took it into Neat Image and cleaned up the slight noise in the image. The Noise Levels (luminescence channels) were reduced about 50%, and the sharpening amount was set to about 75%.
7. Lastly, I took it back into PS, and used USM and sharpened again at settings 75%, 0.3, and 0 (to give it that extra pop for web viewing).

Hope this helps. This is just my process, and it changes somewhat with every image, depending on whats needed IMO.

Oh, and by the way, there was no HDR tone mapping done with this at all.

NJ

Vaporous · Oct 24, 2007

Thank you! My husband and I are going to try an experiment with some of the other pictures when I get home today. I forwarded your tutorial to him today since he's knows quite a bit more about Corel/Photoshop than I do.

Mucho thanks NJ!