Hello everyone, so sorry it has been such a long absence, but things have been incredibly busy around here.  I’ve shot a number of projects with the RED ONE Digital Cinema Camera, (#213 for those of you who care) and hope to be writing about those experiences, workflow issues etc. very soon.

However, at the moment I thought you guys might be interested in a photograph I made last week.

I have been working on a project for quite a few months now photographing artists for an “Artists Trail” project that a group has gotten funding to create. The portraits will be used to promote the trail through the state tourism bureau.

I’ve completed five portraits so far and just did this one last week. I try as best I can to capture some “essence” of the artist. With that in mind I have no preconceived ideas when I go to an appointment.

I like to try to react to what I feel and see when meeting the person and seeing their space for the first time.

Gus Kermes is 84 years old. A long life in art, ranging from his days of layout and design, both graphic and industrial at New Holland Tractor Company to his ever present work in fine art. He also has quite an interest in antiques, and all of this is well represented in his lively space.

I just knew I had to photograph him surrounded by his art and objects.

The inner space you see in the photograph had a skylight which I used as the basis for lighting my shot.

There was also a large window camera left in the outer space.

I chose my camera position, using a Hasselblad H2 with a 35mm lens. It was fitted with a Phase one P45 back tethered to an Imac G5 workstation.

I placed one flash head inside the inner space pointed into the close left corner to add to Gus’s illumination which was otherwise all coming from the top skylight.

I spent about an hour photographing him in various positions, seated , standing etc. until I felt I had something.

I returned to the studio and loaded my session into Capture One. This frame was the obvious winner. I felt it truly captured him in a great body attitude and appearing to be examining his work. The pose was arrived at by my observing him standing as you see him during a quite moment, and remembering it, then coaxing him back into it when I was shooting.

The overall exposure was good, but lacked detail in the outer room’s shadow areas, and the bright area he is looking at was very bright as it happened to be getting hit by a direct bolt of sunlight.

I processed the file three ways, once for the normal, once for the shadows and once for the bright area. In Photoshop I stacked the processed Tiff’s and layer masked to reveal the areas I wanted.

 

The flattened file was good, manageable but lacked drama and contrast. But keep in mind, this was my intention at this step in the post process, as I had in mind my later steps.

Next I duplicated the blue channel, and copied and pasted it into a layer on top of the original, ran a pretty aggressive high radius, low amount unsharp mask on that layer and set it to luminosity.

 

 

After that some selective denoising using noise ninja was needed as this file was shot at ISO 400. I simply used the lasso tool to draw loose selections well feathered and then removed the noise.

Then began a process of isolating various elements in the photo and brightening or darkening them, and lots of Burning and Dodging using a mid gray softlight layer.

Sorry, I have no screen shots of these steps, as they move pretty rapidly and it is somewhat of an intuitive/interactive process, pushing and pulling, you know?

Finally, I increased overall saturation by about +8

Hope you enjoy!

As always questions are welcome.

Check out my interview on www.studiolighting.net. It is a cool website for info.

 

Bill

 

 

 

 

 

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Good day to you Bill. How are y
ou doing? I am a huge fan of your work! I saw your website on Flickr and have going on it almost everyday
I am particularly intrigued by the boxer girl photo. I am new to STROBIST and the HDR stuff. I work as a graphic designer so I get to do some cool stuff too sometimes.

I just had a super quick question for you, well I went through the boxer girl tutorial you were talking about in your blog and I had a hard time seeing the layers that you used in PS.

I am trying to get the same kind of look and was wondering if you would be so kind as to maybe send me the layers screen shot so that I could read what’s there.
I want to set up my PS file the way you have. I have included a screen capture to show you what I am talking about.

Thanks kindly,
And I hope to hear back from you.

Best regards

______________________________________________
SAMIT BHATIA

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Hello Samit!

Thanks for your
interest and inquiry.

As I was able to read the layers pallete in the email you sent to me, I will try to describe the layers from the bottom up.

The first layer is not relevant it is simply a merge of all above.

#2 Is the HDR room scene background.
#3 Is a duplicate of the Room Scene Background desaturated and changed to multiply blend mode. Then a layer mask was applied and a hole
“punched” in it with a large soft edge brush. The purpose of this layer is to softly darken the edges, a “vignette” if you will. I like this method as it does not add any weird
saturation.
#4 Is a curves adjustment layer activated after a selection was made. It creates the beam of light crossing behind her.
#5 Is the previously masked model on a transparent field.
#6 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, some simple additional face retouching.
#7 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment layer adjusting the shadow contrast on the face.
#8 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment of a selection of the eyes to brighten them.
#9 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment of a selection of the left eye only.
#10 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment of a selection of the hand tape on the right to darken and add contrast.
#11 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, same tape on left.
#12 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a curves adjustment layer to darken the model overall slightly.
#13 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a hue saturation adjustment layer to slightly alter the hue of the model.
#14 Is a layer affecting only the model layer, a layer set to color on which I painted some warm tint into the ropes.
#15 I copied and pasted the ear and hands onto this layer and pulled out red. The hands and ears were a little too red.
#16 Is a layer set to color on which I painted the yellow into the windows on the right and wall on the left.
#17 Is a curves adjustment layer adjusting the yellow painted on the layer below.
#18 Is a softlight layer filled with 50% gray to burn and dodge the shorts to add to their dimension.
#19 Is the new catchlights in the eyes.

So thanks to Samit for his question and I hope everyone can benefit from this.
I think by far the most important thing to take away from this is that their is no “formula”. Each of these are subtle yet important details that contribute to the whole.
None or some of these may show up in another image. It all depends on what is required.

Thanks

Bill

The images:
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - - 8

From Bill:
Thanks to all of you who enjoyed the tutorial on my photograph “The Boxer”.
I thought it might be nice to follow that up with some insights into producing an ad using similar techniques, but not involving people.

I was approached by a high end graphic design studio whom I work with often to produce a series of ads for a consortium of tool manufacturers. Tools in the sense of machining tools. I know these look like drill bits, but they are actually machining tools, and are widely used in the aerospace and defense industries.

During preproduction meetings we were all given the opportunity to look at competitors ads and a variety of other work current in the industry.
The client wanted something “different”, dramatic, eyecatching”.

The designer showed them several concepts and examples of my work and everyone liked the idea of some sort of a composite.
The idea of making it look strong and dramatic like a movie poster was suggested.

The client supplied us with some of their favorite tools, and suggested that it would be appropriate to feature somehow a fighter jet.
The designer and I got together and brainstormed and sketched until we came up with several basic sketches of approaches we both liked.

This is my favorite one. It was the idea of the airplane in some “batcave, ominous location”. We talked about how it might evoke feelings of someone hiding the jet. Crazy minds huh?

The designer asked me if we should look for a stock photo of the jet. I suggested that he try to locate a detailed model, feeling confident I could make it look cool in the final composite.

I began by photographing the tools in a nice arrangement we had previsualized. I placed them on the metal step like piece in the photograph both to get variation in height, and also because I intended to actually show it in another version of the ad. I photographed the small tool on the left separately so that I might insure a highlight running the full length of the right side. When it was in the real arrangement the other tools prevented it from having a nice highlight and it looked rather dull.

They were photographed using lots of large diffuse light sources. Two 5′x10′ Chimera F2 banks (www.chimeralighting.com) each with two comet 2400 watt second heads were arranged left and right and behind the tools. These provided the full length highlights on the tools. A 2′x3′ Northlight(www.northlightproducts.com/) with a single comet 2400 watt second head was arranged above and slightly behind the tools. The camera, a cambo 4×5 fitted with a phase one h20 digital back, was placed slightly low to add to that “monumental” feeling for the tools. (www.cambo.com, www.phaseone.com). This was tethered to a Mac G5 workstation with a 23″ cinema display calibrated with eye one software/hardware. (http://usa.gretagmacbethstore.com/)
Finally, an 8′x8′ matthews (www.matthewsgrip.com/) diffuser was arranged angling from over the tools to just above the camera lens.
Behind this was placed a single comet 2400 watt second flash head with a 7″ reflector on a boom. This is the source that creates the nice gradated highlight on the front of the tools.

Meanwhile the designer got online and tracked down some very nice metal scale models of airplanes and ordered an appropriate fighter jet.
I simply photograped it on a neutral gray surface lit from above and behind with a 4′x4′ Northlight Bank with one comet 2400 watt second head installed.
Also with a Phase One H20 Back on a Cambo 4×5.

I have mentioned this before, and it is worth saying again. When compositing I try to use surfaces and make shadows that I can blend into the background shot. I used no fill light on the plane, only that single source so as to create an eerie, dramatic feel and to create a shadow that could be carried forth onto the surface it would be composited into.

I knew of some very cool abandoned industrial buildings close to me and secured permission to shoot. Inside one of them was this interior and I knew as soon as I saw it that it was perfect. I loved the strong perspective of the long space and also the skylights up top. Yes the tire tracks in the dirt floor were actually there and right away I thought how perfect to our concept that would be also. I made exposures to execute an HDR. These were done with a Canon 1DS. I believe I combined 5-8 bracketed frames. Bracketing with the shutter speed so as not to disturb focus.
I used Photoshop CS2’s merge to HDR function, and the photomatix tonemapping plugin. (www.hdrsoft.com/)

On the airplane I did a lot of contrast work with curves isolating areas with TK Luminosity masks available at http://www.goodlight.us/writing/luminositymasks/luminositymasks-1.html.

I like these alot as they allow me to work specific areas of the image. So let me take this opportunity to thank Tony Kuyper for providing all of us these fine tools. Visit his site www.GoodLight.us and see his awesome photography of the Colorado landscape. I also did a lot of airbrush and burn and dodge work and sharpening to “grit up” the airplane and help it to look like it belonged in the environment.

I extracted it primarily with photoshop’s pen tool carefully drawing a path. I did however keep the bottom intact so as to blend the natural shadow into the dirt floor. I did this using a layer mask.

The tools were enhanced through sharpening and burning and dodging, and localized increases in saturation. Primarily the copper and gold and blue.
The bottoms were gently blended into the scene using a layer mask.

This one involved many layers and lots of blending, and was very challenging and fun. All this work was executed using 16 bit tiff files. The final layers file was 886 Mb.

If anyone has any specific questions fire away!

Enjoy the music playing in the background at the studio?  Hehe.

Stay tuned for an edit to this post this weekend that will include the video file Bill created!

- Before/After

- Before/After

- Before/After

- Before/After

- Before/After

In order to give the skin tones pop while editing RAWs, I use the Color Editor feature in Capture One PRO to make a selection of the skin tone, then boost the saturation and/or lightness depending upon the lighting conditions.  Afterwards, I just save the ICC profile and am able to use it again for other images.  I have created several of these, all dependent upon the lighting of the image, the skin tone of the model, and various other criteria.  This method helps greatly helps minimize steps that would later be taken in retouching the file.

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SETUP 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7

POST WORK 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 -

And, an explanation straight from Bill:

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The Boxer

Shana and I thought her readers might enjoy a detailed description on the making of this photograph.

My first step is always a solid visualization of the photograph, complete with rudimentary sketches which are so bad I won’t even bother to show them. But I believe this is such an important skill to develop. If you can visualize the finished photograph, and progress to visualizing the set, and subsequent steps, you are then able to solve many of the problems of the shoot before they occur. This always contributes to smooth shoots.

So I wanted a model that looked “tough” enough to be a boxer yet had a note of sex appeal about her. Athletic and pretty. Longer hair that could be pony tailed with random strands and frizz escaping to contribute to the working out look. Hands taped in boxing fashion, drenched in sweat.

The model would be positioned leaning over the top rope looking directly to the camera. I planned to shoot her in the studio so as to control a number of factors.

While I could have sought a boxing gym itself, I planned to composite her over a separately shot background as my visualization for the background was overly rough and worn. That thought was inspired by an old third floor I had the opportunity to see about three years ago which once housed a boxing ring. It was ravaged by 40 years of decay and had quite alot of character.

My producer researched and contacted the owners of an old industrial building that was soon to be renovated. He secured permission for me to make photographs of the interior spaces. I spent several hours making available light photographs using a Canon MKII and bracketing
as many as 15-20 exposures of each view as I planned to do an HDR of the background image. The views were carefully focused and then autofocus was turned off and bracketing was done using the shutter speed only with the lens set to approx the mid range of the fstop scale. The shutter was
released using an electronic remote release so as to minimize camera shake. The exposure times range from 30 sec to 1/30 sec.

Back in the studio I began planning for the photograph of the model.

I researched boxing ring rope and construction and hand taping, both on the internet and also spoke to several friends who were involved in the sport.

While competition rings’ ropes generally are covered with a leather sleeve, practice rings vary greatly, often being whatever the gym owner can muster. I selected a rope that fit my romantic visualization. I also got a quick lesson in hand taping for workouts.

The first problem was stretching the rope taught enough that the model could lean on it and it would have the proper amount of “give”. I did not want her to have to fake her lean so it had to support her and give a little.

I discussed this with my staff and most importantly the guy who generally handles my set construction. He fabricated an approx 6′x6′ square of 4×4 lumber with an ingenious little method of tensioning the rope. We knew it would need mechanical force. The second rope down could be simply tied in place as it required no tension. (see photos of the set)

Knowing I was going to be compositing her over a dark background we hung a large black background in the studio. A bit of further discussion is warranted here:

I have been compositing in Photoshop for many years. The two most difficult things in compositing people are hair and where the feet hit the floor/surface.
The remainder of the body is generally simple, and can be extracted using a variety of methods.

My experience has taught me to make sure the hair is shot on something close to the color/value of the intended background, and to have any full length shots arranged on a surface that is as close as possible to the intended background. This will often enable you to use all or a portion of the natural shadows from the feet.

I knew that all of my background options from the old industrial plant had plenty of light and light sources present in the photographs. This dictated using strong rim/backlight.

My model had a somewhat long thin face. I knew for that reason I wanted any 3/4 view of her face to be broad lit. (if you do not understand broad/short light, drop us a comment and I will write more about that subject).

I also wanted the main direction to be slightly overhead to enhance the gym feeling, but still light her nicely.

I selected a 34″ Mola reflector mounted on a boom. It was equipped with a 1200ws comet flash head. It has the internal diffusion disc as well as the diffusion sock. It is a nice face light as it produces a sort of “cone” of light that falls off rapidly to the edges. That center opal glass internal diffuser makes the center hotter than the edges. The fact that it would drop off rapidly at the edge of the face and especially down the torso I knew would work well with the hard rim light.

I knew I would be adding considerable contrast in post, so I wanted to provide enough fill to have workable values in the shadow areas.

(This is a fundamental premise of digital sensors. They don’t reproduce well in the bottom end as there just aren’t as many pixels there. So if I know I am planning extreme contrast/post work, I tend to light a little more open than say a photograph that will only undergo simple adjustment. It is way better to “push” something darker in post than to try to pull up detail from an area that is too dark.)

Fill was provided by a Bowens Ringlight at about half the power of the main source (the Mola). (http://www.bowens.co.uk/ http://www.mola-light.com/)

Two flash heads in 7″ reflectors were arranged slightly to the rear and left and right of the model. They were gelled warm amber to complement the warm sources in the background I had selected. A third was positioned high and directly behind her head. It was not gelled so as to simply appear as if coming from another source.

They were all carefully flagged from flaring the lens.

I was especially careful to make sure I had black behind her backlit hair.

These heads were all roughly the same exposure as the main source, although during a shoot I will sometimes deviate from that on the fly.

We selected her garments and I taped her hands.

We did not use any makeup by intention.

We had the model ride a stationary bike and do random exercises for about half an hour to warm up. (a person just looks different when they are warmed up). In addition we added to her sweat with a spray bottle of water.

She was photographed with a Hasselblad H2 equipped with a Phase One P45 back tethered to a Mac G5 workstation running Capture One Pro, 50-110 mm Hasselblad Lens at approx. 60mm F11.5 (http://www.hasselbladusa.com/ http://www.phaseone.com/)

We went through multiple rounds of exercise/spraying/photographing capturing about 188 frames.

I rough edited my captures down to about 10 or so, then ultimately two that were processed out of Capture One as 16 bit Adobe Photoshop Tiff Files. This produces a 225 Mb file.

My photoshop workstation is a G5 Quad processor w/8Gb Ram. I currently use CS2.

I had already completed the HDR of the background image using CS2’s merge to HDR function with about 8-10 exposures, and Photomatix’ tonemapping plug in. (http://www.hdrsoft.com)

After those steps I continued the finalization of the background with mixture of Hue/Sat softlight/hardlight layers, sharpening, mid tone sharpening for contrast and dodge and burn techniques.

These are all well covered in detail in various internet tutorials.

The model underwent preliminary retouching, then similar treatments as stated above until her look was roughly in place.

I like Fluid Mask (http://www.vertustech.com/) for lots of my masking needs especially hair. She was separated from the studio background using this plug-in and the pen tool in PS.

The background file is actually somewhat smaller and differently proportioned to the model file. I think it contributes to the “grittiness” to enlarge this file. It was scaled up to fit the model using the Transform tool.

A layer mask was added to the model layer and lots of careful detail work was executed to make sure her edges and hair were well blended.

The edges of the background were darkened by making a dupe layer of the background, desaturating it to B&W, and adding a layer mask to reveal the center with a large soft-edged brush, with the layer then set to multiply and the opacity adjusted to taste.

At this point it becomes simply working locally and globally using adjustment layers and masking to bring the overall look to where I want it.

I like to use luminosity masks to isolate and work specific tonal regions of the photograph. A very nice set of masks actions can be downloaded at http://www.atncentral.com they are call TK luminosity masks.

I removed the ringlight reflections from her eyes (in some cases we may want to keep these for effect but I felt it was not suited to this image) and enhanced the catchlights created by the Mola.

I also added the beam of light coming from the left by drawing a path to define the desired shape, making it a selection feathered by about 15 pixels and using a curves adjustment layer. I then masked away it’s effect from areas I did not want it.

I used a layer set to “color” to paint the warm yellow into the windows on the right and the wall on the left.

All work was performed as 16 bit RGB Tiff file in the Adobe 1998 color space.

Questions are welcomed.

Thanks for visiting us!

Bill

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By the way, I had hoped to get video of this shoot but unfortunately was unable to. However, thanks to Bill’s detailed description I think that works better than any video could have :)…it’s so hard to grasp what goes on in them sometimes.

For the past two weeks I’ve been working on a retouching job shot by Bill for one of our clients. They’re a great store which carries high-fashion clothing, jewelry, shoes, and other products; not to mention they have a wonderful restaurant with delectable food. These are before/after pictures of some of the work I did to them:

The first step I took was to clean the model’s faces by removing blemishes and dark circles under their eyes (without making the eyes look like plastic or fake). My favorite tool for this in Photoshop is the patch tool, it’s so quick and if you use it in the appropriate areas it will keep texture to areas you fix and also gradate much nicer than using the clone tool. For circles under the eyes, however, I like using the clone tool at a low opacity to help soften harsh lines.

The next step I’ll take is to remove wrinkles or straighten clothing as requested by the client on the proofs we give them. Sometimes this also includes thinning parts of the clothing that may appear too big on the model. This tends to be more difficult to do when there are patterns involved or texture is a big part of the fabric. I rely heavily on the patch tool, clone tool, and liquify filter. Often times I have to almost make up part of the fabric in order to make it blend well, so I recommend a steady hand and good coordination with your eyes. Sometimes the wrinkles would merely need to be minimized instead of removed. In theses cases I would make a soft light layer filled with 50% gray and paint in white over shadow areas of a crease then use black over the highlight area to help reduce it’s appearance. If there’s a moire pattern in the fabric make a selection of the area it appears and place it on a separate layer. With that layer selected check each individual channel (red, green, & blue) and where it is shows up apply first a gaussian blur and then add a little noise.

Generally the final step I take is to correct the skin tone/color and also the color of the clothing if needed. While there was no problem with the outfits in these shots, I did do work on skin tones to help unify them when they’re on a spread and also give them more kick of contrast if needed. The hue/saturation softlight layer trick I mentioned in THIS POST is one method used, and sometimes I’ll also do a curves adjustment. While these are the general steps I took in retouching for this job, it certainly varies on what you’re working on.