I am very pleased to hear about some of these new features in Adobe Camera Raw 7 and Photoshop CS6. I think a lot of you will appreciate the c, but watch the video below direct from the product managers to see what they are up to!
Category: Photoshop
Vin Diesel fan? Well the ladies certainly are and that’s exactly who Top Shelf Entertainment (TSE) are out to please. TSE are the dancing/stripping group from Australia who late last year hired me to shoot their entire arsenal of content for their new website.
Part of their business is doing themed dance/strip shows for various ladies nights and stage shows and this one above is for their Riddick theme.
Ok now onto the photography part. This was obviously a composite of a number of photos. Firstly we have the subject Camille who I photographed on a gray background and extracted out. The second image is the cracked grungey surface which was a stock image. The mountains in the distance were another stock image that I modified quite a bit to suit, and finally the night sky and planets image completed the composite. It’s a fairly simple composite just blending a few seperate images together and colour correcting the whole peice to fit together better.
For Riddick himself, I applied some detail enhancing techniques to get the most out of the image, accompanied with some light dodge and burning.
So I think this is a pretty good result for a fairly simple approach. I had about 12 or so of these to do so I had to keep it as simple as I could.
B.
This is one of my favourite composites that I did for one of my clients Top Shelf Entertainment. It was part of a series of images I had to do for the launch of their new website. Originally this photo wasn’t meant to be a composite, I was simply going to utilise the gritty concrete wall but after some further consideration we decided to turn these into some more creative and visually interesting composites!
Thanks to Photoshop, extracting someone off a background is fairly easy these days, but it still requires you to know what you’re doing and I’d definitely shoot it on a grey or plain background if I had the choice.
TAKING THE PHOTO:
So lets look at the lighting setup first. I had two big softboxes setup behind my subjects. They were 120 x 80cm sotboxes from a very old Visico studio kit I purchased years ago. being a location shooter I never invested any further in studio lights, I opted for battery powered packs instead. The lights these softboxes were attached to were also Visico, and were capable of about 400 WS each. These required power so I ran a couple extension leads to them from the kitchen of the warehouse we were at. Now these two softboxes were my rim lights and I used softboxes so the light would wrap around my subjects a bit better. They were sitting roughly on a 45 degree angle to my subject.
Up front as my main light I had my Elinchrom Ranger RX Speed AS with one Action head firing through my 100cm Elinchrom Deep Octa rotalux softbox. I had it positioned fairly high and angled downwards.
I chose the 100cm Deep Octabox over the larger Octaboxes because for male models I don’t want the light to be too soft. If the light source is too large and soft then it will fill in all the shadows around the subjects muscles and you will lose all that definition that you really need!
CREATING THE COMPOSITE IN PHOTOSHOP:
Unfortunately I don’t have time to go into all the details but I’ll run through the basics. I started off by using some various techniques to extract as much detail from the photo as I could and then proceeded to clean up the image such as a lot of the creases in the clothing and also fixing the shoes.
To place my ninjas on a different background, I didn’t actually cut my subjects out. I used a different approach. An approach where there is no need for any pen tools or selections or anything like that. How did you put them on a different background I hear you ask? Well I actually used a much different technique which works really well but only if you take the photo correctly. I originally learnt the technique off a friend of mine, German photoshop guru Calvin Hollywood. The technique makes use of the blending modes offered to us in photoshop, more specifically the overlay blend mode. If you can shoot your subjects on a 50% grey background or at least as close as you can get to that, you can use this technique.
In photoshop, place your NEW background on a layer, above your original photo with your subject. Then simply set the blending mode of this top layer to overlay. Yep, that’s it. So easy! So all the grey areas in your original photo will now be replaced by the new background image, at least it will look that way. The best part about this technique is that it retains the shadows created by your subjects in the original photo. If you look at my final ninja image, the shadows from the two ninjas were from the original photo! Once you perfect this technique it saves so much time. Obviously it isn’t a solution all the time. In this particular instance it didn’t work perfectly. I never intended to use this technique so we didn’t have a nice grey background, it was a very textured light grey background. So once I applied this technique in photoshop, I still have to create a mask and just mask out a few bits of the new background so it didn’t block my ninjas at all. Still much easier than having to cut them out.
Once that was all done I added some subtle colour to enhance the image. I applied a yellow to blue gradient across the image to establish each ninjas territory and help emphasise how they are clashing together. Finally some dodge and burning and some sharpening and it’s pretty much done.
Thats all for now…
Brodie.
Follow me on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/brodiebutler31
Follow me on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/brodiebutlerphotography
Perth’s all-male entertainment company Top Shelf Entertainment have just launched their new website to a crowd of industry affiliates and special guests over the weekend at The Basement on Broadway in Crawley. As the official Top Shelf Photographer since their humble beginnings, I was there enjoying the social atmosphere in my spiffy new suit and it was a nice change from a solid few months of working.
We unveiled the website and launched it during the actual event and Leigh (Director) gave us a quick tour and showed off the goods the new site offers. The new website is a massive improvement on the last and offers so much more, not to mention it is sporting my photography on just about every page. Check out the Top Shelf Entertainment website here at www.topshelfentertainment.com.au
Speaking of photography…
I have spent the last few months working closely with Top Shelf. Photoshoots, endless phone calls and doing a lot of retouching and post production work. It’s been a lot of fun and we’ve got some great results. From what I heard at the launch party, all the boys are stoked with the results and everyone else seems to love them too which makes me a happy camper. I cant wait to do more.
The new website is part of their new approach to the industry and their enthusiasm to start 2012 with a bang. The website is far superior to anything else I’ve seen in their particular industry and it looks great.
From a small beginning in Perth, Top Shelf have already captivated Australia with their unique choreographed dance/strip shows and earned themselves a place touring Australia with Sexpo. I look forward to working them all again next year.
This photo above is for one of their DUO shows. (see website) We shot it indoors on a grey background and superimposed the background to make the composite. Combine that with a bit of brodiebutler.com magic and we get the result above.
I’m going to be posting more of these images over the next few weeks and maybe giving some insight and behind the scenes!
B.
Last year when I was at Photoshop World in Las Vegas it seemed the number one tool every photoshop guru couldn’t live without was one of these Wacom Intuos4 tablets. I had known about them for some time but I had never considered one, and I have never even seen anyone using them much before back home. I didn’t even recall ever seeing them for sale anywhere but that could have been ignorance on my part. They are very popular among graphic designers, artists, and now photographers due to the huge adoption of Adobe Photoshop into the post production workflow.
Some people that I spoke to couldn’t even comprehend the fact that I didn’t use one, it was weird. If you were a photoshop user, you used a Wacom and it was as simple as that. I paid a visit to the Wacom booth after meeting the Wacom team the previous night over a few drinks and they gave me a full demo and I was pretty impressed. I love new gadgets and after a little bit more persuasion from Calvin Hollywood throughout the week I decided to get one. I had to listen to the guru right? So I now own a Wacom Intuos4 Medium sized tablet and I’ve been using it for just over a year now. It fits nicely into my laptop bag, I just slide it in underneath my Laptop, keeping it in its soft cover just to help prevent scratches etc.
I have to say, it was a worthwhile purchase. I love my tablet and I always use it.
I really like the two buttons available to you on the actual pen itself, which can be programmed to perform any function you like, in any application you like. For Photoshop I have set one of them up as the undo function so I can quickly step back any changes I don’t like since I’m always making mistakes. I do a lot of retouching, and I use the clone stamp, healing brush and brushes in general a lot so I have changed the other button to be a custom modifier. I programmed it to perform a CTRL + OPTION + CLICK. This is a fairly new feature of photoshop, and by moving the pen left or right, I can now change my brush size. By moving the mouse up or down, I can change the hardness of the brush. This is one of the most common actions I need to perform so it speeds up my retouching enormously! Check this out, you can even invert the pen and use the other end as an eraser! How cool is that!
You can use the tablet in right hand or left hand mode. The buttons on the tablet itself have an LED display which tells you what they each do. You can quickly and easily configure the tablet to display in left hand mode and the LED display flips itself. This was handy for me since I am left handed! I tried to use my right hand since I’m pretty good on the mouse with my right hand, but holding the pen is a whole different story. I had to switch to my left hand. All of these buttons by the way, can be customised to be whatever you want.
Dual Screen user? Me to. Don’t panic, the tablet caters for multiple screens. You can choose to map your tablet to both screens, or just a single screen. It’s really good that way.
There is a new dial on the tablet which is reminiscient of an ipod dial. It works well for zooming in and out and changing your brush sizes but it can be configurable to anything you want. That’s the best part about the tablet, you can make any button do anything you want.
I bought the USB version, but there is also a wireless version available for some extra dollars.
So a year on, I have to say I really love this tablet. I have always used it for my post production work. I never really understood how much I loved it until I went back to using the mouse. I will use the mouse for all of about 30 seconds and then I will grab my Wacom tablet back out and use that. It really is much more efficient. I often catch myself using it for everything after I have just done some post production work, but I do eventually switch back to the mouse for general tasks as I want my Wacom to last.
How do you have your Wacom tablet setup?
I’m always looking for creative new ways to use my Wacom, so I’d love to hear how you have set your’s up and what custom functions you used! Drop a comment!
So I’m a big tablet fan, you can go out and get yours from Camera Electronic. Give them a ring on +61 8 9328-4405
B.
Today I am putting my feelers out there in the Perth community to see if anyone is willing to help me locate some studio space (or any large office/warehouse space) for a 2-day workshop. I know I’m well overdue to run another workshop and I’m very sorry but this is not actually for one of mine. This is actually for someone else far more exciting! An international world renowned photographer/retoucher friend of mine is coming to visit Australia for the first time and he wants to visit little old me here in Perth. I can tell you first hand he was one of the most popular instructors I’ve seen at the Photoshop World Conference in 2010.
Now, Perth is an long and expensive trip to make for a single workshop, so it’s the same old “we have no budget” story. Usually in all the countries he has visited around the world he has been fortunate enough to have a studio provided or sponsored for him, however the one thing I don’t have is a studio.
We intend to run a two day workshop, consisting of shooting with different lighting setups along with a retouching session and presentation. We do need a bit of room to move and setup multiple lighting setups if possible. We also need the ability to use a projector and have table and chairs to fit up to 15-20 people. It would be held over a weekend. Originally it was to be late 2011, but it is likely to be pushed into 2012. The date is not set yet.
I would be very grateful and interested to speak to anyone that might be able to help me and I’d love to know if there is anything I could do for you in return.
I will release further details when we are a bit closer to a confirmation on the event going forward.
Please contact me by email on brodie@brodiebutler.com with details on you and your studio.
Brodie.
A lot of work I’ve been doing lately (and haven’t been able to show) has been composite work. Superimposing portrait images onto alternative backgrounds. It’s something that I enjoy doing because I get to play with Photoshop a bit more and be a little more creative.
This self portrait image above was yet another one of my tests. This time I was testing out a new post production photoshop technique I am using to do my composite work which involves shooting on a seamless grey background. The technique means I don’t have to do any cutting out of people! Maybe I’ll share it on the blog at a later date.
So my new grey seamless arrived, and I had just set it up in my garage and I needed to test it by capturing a couple of really quick shots. This happened to be one of them, and I have no idea what that pose it meant to be. I never intended to use the photo so I just sat my butt down and looked away from the camera.
After I superimposed myself onto this gritty background, I played around with the whole desaturated, contrasty, grungey look and threw it through a couple of NIK Software filters and it was done. I’m only sharing it because I really like how it turned out.
Anyway, just a fun update. Check out my Terminator basketball Self Portrait I took a couple years ago, which was the result of another simple test. Photoshop works wonders eh!
Adobe MAX 2011 was held in Los Angeles recently, and in this video above they demonstrate a new image deblurring technique which the crowd seems to be amazed by. Quality isn’t great but check it out.
Photoshop is just going to do everything for us soon.
When I was in Los Angeles in late 2010 I caught up with ICEMILK, an up and coming rapper originally from the Ukraine. ICEMILK’s music is just hilarious and in some cases quite explicit and not for the kiddies. You need to have a good sense of humour to like his material which you might compare to the likes of Lonely Island and Weird Al Yankovic but with his own twist.
This shot was taken just after the filming of his debut Music Video on location in Las Vegas….
Here’s another image I wanted to share with you from my Ninja creative shoot earlier in the year with Tiffany Baker. I retouched this image in Photoshop, cleaning up the skin a little bit using the healing brush and clone stamp tools, as well as a little bit of dodging on the highlights. Then I enhanced the details in the shadows as much as I could and added some sharpening.
Then I applied a gentle colour gradient across the image, fading from a warmer orange tone on the left to a cooler bluey/cyan type colour tone on the right.
To complete the image I turned it into cinema widescreen mode. I created a video tutorial on how to do this to the correct ratio here.
Check out other photos of Tiffany from the same shoot here and here.
Enjoy.
Top Shelf Entertainment (All Male Entertainment) have just announced a brand new stage show for 2011 and as you can see in the image above they have targeted the ever so popular vampire theme. They are creating their own rendition of the True Blood rseries for their new stage show and from what I’ve seen already the ladies can’t wait for it!
I love being the official photographer for Top Shelf as we get to do a lot of fun creative stuff and it lets me have a bit more of a play in photoshop and I can be a little more experimental. This image hasn’t had a huge amount of post production. I have manipulated the colours and enhanced all the details as much as I could and after some sharpening that’s about it.
This was shot with 4 lights. We had two big soft modifiers in front illuminating our subjects, then I had two canon speedlights in the background acting as a backlight and giving us some edgey highlights on the models. I’ll run through the photo in much more detail including a run down on the post production right here on the blog very soon.
Ladies of Australia, check out www.topshelfentertainment.com.au
PERTH FOLKS: You can catch all the Top Shelf boys on stage twice a day at SEXPO all weekend!
B.
Sean Armenta who is a fashion photographer from California is now creating Photoshop tutorials exclusively for Fstoppers.com. In this particular tutorial he has got some great tips on using the healing brush for skin retouching which I wanted to share with you all. It’s always good to have an insight into how someone else does things.
Check it out…
b
