Making Your Photographs Better, I wrote about what I look for in the post-production stage of my photo shoots. In this article I share small things to look for in the production stage and a little bit of post-production editing. If doing things on set (in production) saves time in post-production why not do it; time is money, keep that in mind.
The photograph is a portrait of my friend, Christian Carabias; actor for Telemundo’s show, Mas Sabe El Diablo and Sacrificio De Mujer Univision.
I finished setting up lights two hours early of my shoot. Christian was at the pool when I asked if I could use him to test the lights. His name is Christian (emphasize Christ) and he’s an actor so I asked him to act as Jesus praying to the father.
On huge photo shoots when you are a big shoot photographer hiring a team you’re going to have a MUA, Stylist, Hairstylist and one or three Assistants; depending on what the shoot is for you might even have an Art Director, Creative Director, Copywriter, Graphic Artist, Photo-Retoucher etc. breathing down your neck as you shoot. However, a good team creates great work; those people are there for reasons.
Those big shot photographers don’t hire those people because they can. I’ve assisted on photo shoots with large teams as such. They the team members have titles for reasons.
I’m not considered globally a big shot photographer as yet. But, on my smaller commissioned shoots and some of personal shoots I’m working with a MUA, Stylist, Hairstylist and maybe an assistant to help with reflectors etc. Doing so now prepares me, and makes me feel comfortable when I’m working on my larger commercial client’s projects.
I encourage you to build a great team to work with because it makes life so much easier at the end of the day.
However, there are still times, like this one when I photographed Christian, when I need a fix for my addiction to photography. When this craving occurs, once again I’m the assistant, the MUA if necessary and the stylist.
I’m going to take you through the process of this quick image and simple things to remember when you are the team of your photo shoot.
First thing as a photographer, using a DSLR camera, please, please, please shoot in RAW. Shooting in RAW gives you complete control over your images in post processing. You are able to color balance your photographs, adjust / decrease the exposure, fill light, clarity, blacks, brightness, and highlight etc. To get the directional light I used honeycomb grid on Elincrome 500 strobe and positioned the strobe head above the model titled down about 45º.
The arrow above is pointing at those cutout-animal rubber bans that seem to be in fashion currently in Miami; everyone’s wearing them. I don’t really care much for them and I knew as soon as I saw the photographs uploaded to the computer I didn’t want them on his hand in the final image.
Stylists are a necessity. Even though the model doesn’t have a shirt on for the shot there are still minor distractions/considerations that the stylist would have to take care of. On these one on one shots you’re going to have to be your own stylist. Forgetting like I did, often results in unnecessary Photoshop time.
If I did hire a stylist for a shoot I probably would have asked them to bring the thorns of Jesus’ crown, drape a garment on him and the ask the MUA to make blood around his forehead.
If it were for a client, you’ve been your own team for so long, when a team comes along to work with you, you’ll know whether it’s good enough, or if you need to get some new team members.
For this shoot I was my own team, but now, that gave me a chance to collaborate with a really sick graphic artist if I wanted to. If I did collaborate I would have the artist put a crown of thorns on his head etc and the blood marks; making sure the artist is very professional and work is up to the industry level.
If you compare the last two screenshots you’ll notice that this one here is a bit cooler, not cool as in “duddeee” but cooler as in literally less warm. That’s called correcting your white balance. The easiest way/the proper way to correct the white balance would have been to have a gray card and take a picture with the gray card against the model. Leave your camera on a tripod with a sync cable, or a wireless remote, or putting it on self-timer, or if you have a really fancy trained chocolate-lab dog, or an assistant you call your dog (what-up dog) then have him/her/it stand in the frame with the gray card.
Next you would use the eyedropper tool in camera raw, drop it on the gray card and POW, there goes your white balance. If you have a client that’s going to be like, OMG you’re the final image is in black and white/ OMG the final image has so many gradients and photo filters on it did you forget to use a gray card?!” if so go ahead and get one.
If purchasing your digital camera and your tripod drained your pockets, $30.00 looks a lot like next months electricity bill and not a gray card. The next option to white balance the photograph is to find something as neutral (gray) as possible in the image and place the eyedropper tool on it.
The arrows in the last image were pointing to where I wanted the image to be brighter and darker. When in camera raw I like to open my photographs as an object in Photoshop, instead of just clicking the open key. The reason for opening as an object is because when you double click on the object layer you created, it will take the image back in to camera raw. (Step 1) I duplicate the image layer in Photoshop, hit (E) for the eraser tool, click on the image a message will come up asking to rasterize the image, hit yes. Now you would have an object layer below and a copy of the rasterized image above. The next thing would be is to double click on the object layer and bring it back into camera raw to fix the bright ness and darkness. Open again in Photoshop and repeat step 1.
You would now place a layer mask on your photograph then paint. The default layer mask it’s on the mask will be white. When like this you mask away the areas you don’t want. Example: I know I wanted his face to be brighter like the image but keep the other areas dark. I would have been time consuming for me to paint away the areas I don’t want.
To avoid this long process I simply invert the layer mask to white by selecting the mask then pressing command + i (control + i on a PC). When the layer mask is white, layer beneath it will be shown. Now here’s the thing to remember. When painting on a layer mask, if the mask is white you use the black paintbrush to show and the white to hide again and if the mask is black you do the opposite the white to show and the black to take the image back to its original look.
To make the image in black and white I press command + u (control + u on a PC) then the color balance window will pop up, you will see saturation use the slider and take it all the way to the left. Simple. There are other ways to make your image black and white this is the one I chose to go with.
Now we are almost close to the final image.
If you compared the screen shot to the previous one you will see I removed the rubber bands from his hands. It’s simple to do that. Get familiar with using the clone stamp tool, the patch tool and the healing brush tool. I use those tools to remove objects and work on skin etc.
The image is almost complete. I could leave it at that stage if I wanted to put I do a little something extra in the post processing of my images to give it a look I’ve locked down. It’s nothing genus like a Dave Hill effect, but it’s something I’m persistent with and here I’m now announcing it, “that, Dwayne Tucker Touch”.
Before I speak about that Dwayne Tucker Touch effect I want to point out something else I’ve adopted to my preferred style look. If you look at most of my portraits in my portfolio you will notice some of them are either in the left side of the frame or positioned in the right side of the fame. After shooting so many of them I filtered my images and noticed I like doing it and stuck that look.
The image now looks gray because I applied a high-pass filter. To access that you go to filters – other – high pass. When I apply this filter to my image then select overlay to overlay the layer it sharpens the photograph and gives some really cool highlight effects. After working with it several times moving the sliders back and forward, you’ll notice how sharp is harp enough for you. For females I like to keep the skin unsharpened because it looks nasty, but I do like to bring more highlights in the hairs and eyes etc. Play around with it and you will figure out what works for you.
Now Christian Carabias is a black and white Jesus in my photograph.
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