miércoles, 18 de abril de 2012
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/02/tips-pro-de-clutter-background-using-strobes
Tips From a Pro: Use Strobes to Combat Cluttered Backgrounds In Portraits
Bright lights, positioned correctly, offer the perfect solution to an ugly background
Gibson exposed for 1/200 sec at f/18, ISO 100. He adjusted color and contrast in Adobe Lightroom and cloned out the light-stands in Photoshop.
Photo: Ryan Gibson
Ryan Gibson, an editorial photographer from rural Georgia, specializes in athletic portraits. One of his favorite places to shoot? Locker rooms. “When I’m working on a feature story, I want to get as much variety as I can from a sitting,” he says. “After we do the field, stands, or courtside shots, I like working in the locker room. Depending on how I use my lights, I can get a lot of different looks there in a short amount of time.”
You can see one of those looks in the above photo: With a creative camera angle and lighting, Gibson produced a near-black background that draws the viewer’s attention almost entirely to this high-school defensive end.
Ironically, to create this darkness, Gibson cranked his location strobes up to their brightest power settings. By doing this and by moving the lights close to his subject, Gibson could expose using a fast shutter speed, small aperture, and low ISO, all of which worked to render the background almost completely black and locker-free.
But because entirely feature-less black backgrounds can be boring, Gibson added some pop to the background by once again getting creative with his lighting. He mounted two small strobes on stands behind his subject and aimed their output directly at the camera. “The background lights add an intensity to the shot and lend an almost theatrical ‘star power’ to the athlete,” the photographer says.
This strategy, however, introduced a problem: flare around the edges of his subject. “There’s no way to avoid it in a shot like this,” says Gibson. “To control it, the small aperture helped, but we also played around with the positioning and direction of the lights. Even tiny adjustments made a big difference in reducing the flare pattern.”
Another challenge? Elimin-ating the lightstands in Adobe Photoshop CS5. “If I have gear in the frame that I’ll clone out in post, I usually shoot from a tripod and make an overall shot of the scene without the equipment. It makes eliminating it later much easier,” he explains. “But because of the low camera angle, that wasn’t possible here. Instead, I arranged the lights and exposure to minimize the length of the stands that had to be cloned away.”
Kris Holland/Mafic Studios (ILLUSTRATION)
A low camera angle helped Ryan Gibson visually elevate and enhance his subject. Working this low required putting his Westcott 5-foot Octabank softbox (A) close to the ground and aiming it slightly upward to get light into his subject’s eyes and chin. His main light was an AlienBees B800 monolight (B) that he powered with a Paul C. Buff Vagabond II portable battery pack (C). The Vagabond also powered Gibson’s two background kickers: 400-Ws Westcott Strobelite Pluses (D)aimed directly at the camera position. He fired all three strobes using Paul C. Buff CyberSync flash triggers. Gibson shot with a Canon EOS 7D and 11–16mm f/2.8 Tokina zoom (E). “For this type of low-angle shot, I always ask my subjects to stare directly into the center of the lens as though they’re trying to see right through the camera,” says Gibson. “This helps to produce an intensity in the facial expression.” The ground-up point of view also helped the photographer crop out background clutter.
Ryan Gibson is a portraitist who also freelances editorially for publications such as ESPN HS and Atlanta.
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/04/software-secrets-pros-mat-baker
From Shutter Press to Finished Image: Mat Baker
Three top professionals share their best tips and tricks for retouching
Mat and Carl Baker retouch on a Mac Pro tower with 2 x 2.8GHZ Intel Xeon processors, 10GB RAM, a 2TB scratch disk, and another 2TB of hard-drive space. The image at top comprises six expos-ures, plus some mist from earlier frames.
Photo: Mat Baker
Shooting a champagne commercial near the Milford Sound in New Zealand’s South Island, Mat Baker and his brother and digital collaborator, Carl, had a day off. They asked a boat captain to take them to a great spot to shoot the iconic Mitre peak, but soon realized he had dropped them at the wrong place. After a hike through freezing-cold, waist-deep water with only headlamps for light, they found the location and spent the next 6 hours with shoes full of water and nothing to eat but a “little bag of nuts.” Still, they knew it would be worth it for the picture.
Once they set up, the brothers decided a panoramic HDR would be the best solution, given the near 5-stop difference between the brightest and the darkest areas in the composition. The six frames that make up this panorama were shot on the Phase One 645DF body with a Phase One P40+ digital back and Phase One 28mm lens. Mat photographed the scene in two sections of three exposures each. Even when far from civilization, Mat always shoots tethered. The brothers swear by a 17-inch laptop so they can quickly see exactly what they’re capturing in the moment—a must for commercial jobs, where there’s no time for surprises in postproduction.
Back at the studio, they would normally convert their RAW images in Phase One’s Capture One software. But in this case, because they were shooting an HDR, Carl brought the RAW images directly into Photoshop CS5’s HDR Pro tool. They processed each half of the image separately and tonemapped with an eye toward a photo-realistic look.
Carl prefers to merge panoramas together manually because, he says, he always ends up manually adjusting the automated merges anyway. To bring the two halves together, he created a new document large enough to accommodate both frames, then dragged them both in. Next he switched the blend mode of one side to Difference, which turns a layer black when it aligns exactly with the layer below. He used a combination of masks and transformations to create a seamless blend between the left and right sides.
After trying a few options, the Bakers found the color grade they liked, but it still wasn’t quite right. Says Mat, “I wanted people to look at it and see unicorns dancing over rainbows.” In other words, something more ethereal.
Checking shots from earlier in the day, they noticed a little mist and decided to add some. Carl cloned it in and used the blending mode Screen and some opacity adjustments to composite. He also painted some in with a white-loaded brush on a separate layer.
Though some may see an image like this as highly manipulated, Mat Baker views it as fairly photographic. Makes sense, given the brothers’ stylized advertising work: Next to an image of a giraffe up a tree that had “2,000 components and took three months to do,” he says, “this is light-handed.”
About the Photographer:
New Zealand-based Mat Baker has been making images for 17 years or so. Despite his passion, talent, and drive, he attributes his success to being in the right place at the right time. He began in straight photography, shooting for newspapers, then moved to fashion, then to advertising, which he loves for the freedom to do anything with his pictures that he can imagine. From the beginning, his brother Carl has done all his retouching and acted as his creative partner. You can see some of their commercial work in the March/April 2012 issue of American Photo and at matbaker.com.
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/04/software-secrets-pros-raïssa-venables
From Shutter Press to Finished Image: Raïssa Venables
Three top professionals share their best tips and tricks for retouching
Venables shoots the whole room from a single perspective. She prints her photos, then assembles a sketch (top); as her retouching progresses, her image begins to come together (above). She works on a Mac Pro with 2 x 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and 16GB RAM, with an NEC Multisync LCD 2690 monitor for color and Apple Cinema Display for toolbar panels, plus a Wacom Intuos 3.
Photo: Raïssa Venables
In Her series “All That Glitters,” Raïssa Venables takes what she calls “excessively opulent” spaces and uses a combination of photographic technique and imaging software to make them even more so. The rooms become surreal versions of themselves—the real thing taken to an extreme.
Her process begins with the capture, and she always shoots in the highest resolution available to her. This image was shot with a Mamiya RZ and 50mm lens on Kodak’s 160 VC medium-format film. (When she has access to a medium-format digital back, she shoots with that instead.) Venables sets up her tripod, then pivots the camera around the room, capturing everything from this vantage point to assemble into a mega-panorama. And she brackets, big time—not only for exposure, so she has access to as much highlight and shadow detail as possible, but she also brackets her focus so that all components, near to far, stay sharp.
When she gets her film back, she scans it on a flatbed scanner and makes work prints of every frame. She prints out each frame, then labels the back of each with a numbering system that lets her keep track of them all. With these ready, she makes her first “sketch,” a mock-up of her image, cut with scissors and assembled with tape, that will help her set up her composite in Photoshop.
Once Venables is happy with her sketch, she makes new high-res scans of her photos in an Imacon Flextight film scanner. Each individual file is about 100MB in 8-bit mode; the final image shown here contains a total of 17 scans.
Next, it’s time for Photoshop. She typically begins by opening the first image and expanding the canvas around it to the approximate dimensions she plans for the final print. Because she wants this to have a nearly life-size relationship to the actual room, she measures an element in the foreground and bases her print size on that. In this case, she noted that the tiles were each about 8 inches wide, which ultimately made for a 79x62-inch print.
With the images laid out in Photoshop, she brings them together and gets rid of the seams. Venables relies heavily on layer masking for this, and she makes a lot of use of the Transform tool as well as a bit of warp.
Her imagination takes over next. In this picture, the room’s vaulted ceiling was plain white, but she continued the green detailing all the way up to the top. She copied and moved areas of the room, rotating and erasing at will. She felt there was too much white on the floor, so she added black octagons by making a selection and using an Adjustment Layer to make those areas black.
This image took about a month to composite, though sometimes she works on one piece for a week and then switches to another. She considers the process like painting—except, she says, everything in the room makes up her palette.
About the Photographer:
An artist and university professor, Venables has three degrees: a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in ceramics and sculpture, an MFA in photog-raphy from Bard, and an MPS in digital photography from the School of Visual Arts, where she also teaches. She’s been creating strange spaces like this one for more than 12 years. Venables has exhibited her artwork internationally. Her images are held in public collections in the United States, Switzerland, and Germany. More images at raissavenables.com.
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/04/how-to-software-secrets-pros
From Shutter Press to Finished Image: Romain Laurent
Three top professionals share their best tips and tricks for retouching
Laurent’s final image looks so seamless and so simple that it’s hard to believe it comprises so many elements. But it actually contains parts of more than five other photos, among them the leaning model, the backdrop, and a shot of the woman’s right hand that worked better than the hand in the best shot of her face and body.
Photo: Romain Laurent
One morning, Romain Laurent woke up with vertigo. Instead of calling the doctor, he thought, Hey, this is fun! And in that moment the idea for his “Tilt” series came to him. He saw the image in his mind’s eye almost exactly as it appears in his actual photographs.
Mostly a commercial shooter, Laurent periodically dedicates time and resources to personal projects. Basing this one on a skewed perspective, he needed a city with lots of straight lines to make it work. Paris’ lines didn’t emphasize the tilt enough, so he headed to New York City for its narrow streets and tall walls of buildings as much as for its indifferent passersby.
Laurent sketched his concept, then planned his shooting technique, scouted locations, and cast models. For commercial jobs, he usually employs lots of assistants, lights, and people for hair, makeup, and wardrobe. But for this shoot he wanted more realism, so the models wore their own clothes and were lit only by daylight.
Each image from the series was made from at least two shots: the background and a leaning model supported by an assistant. But because Laurent is a perfectionist—and because he could—he patched in other elements from the shoot that would make the final image even better. The picture here uses a perkier bow from another photo of the dress, a different view of the model’s tote bag, and a more elegant capture of her hand and sunglasses from yet another take. Since an assistant would be covering up part of her left shoulder, he first captured her shoulder while the model stood upright, then patched this in, too.
When Laurent got back to his studio, he had to convert the RAW files from his Canon EOS 5D Mark II. The primary task here? To match the color of all the images as much as possible. Only then could he bring them into Adobe Photoshop, layer them together, and begin the compositing process.
The empty background shot provided the base layer—its iconic New York taxis make for a more compelling scene than what was in the best photo of the model.
The next step was to cut out the figure. Laurent used Photoshop’s high-precision Pen tool to separate her as smoothly as possible, then layered her on top of the backdrop.
Next, using a combination of the Pen tool and masks, he disentangled the shadow of the assistant from the shadow of the model. Because he had the background image to work with and everything lined up, he could keep cloning and healing to a minimum—he mostly used masks to show or hide the areas he needed. His final layered file contains many masked Curves Adjustment Layers that tweak areas of the image to get the right balance of brightness and contrast.
Laurent calls his aesthetic “real-world illustration.” It is just far enough from reality to give the viewer a jolt of the impossible. For him, retouching software is a tool to realize the amazing, crazy pictures he sees in his imagination.
This photographer’s post-production setup includes a Mac Pro tower with a 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor, 16GB RAM, and four 1TB hard drives. He views his images on an Eizo 21-inch CG21 display and keeps his Photoshop panels on a second, moderately priced monitor. Laurent also considers his Wacom Intuos 3 tablet essential to retouching.
About the photographer:
Born in the French countryside, Laurent moved to Paris 10 years ago to become an industrial designer, but, as he puts it, “the dream wasn’t as interesting and creative as I thought.” Frustrated with the lag time between design and product, he turned to photography for its immediacy. He was drawn to heavy-duty postproduction because it allowed him to make images that looked pricier than his budget allowed. His clients include Coca-Cola, Epson, and Microsoft. See more atwww.romain-laurent.com.
POP PHOTO.COM
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/04/how-to-software-secrets-pros-0
Masters of their art, three pros show us how it's done
In fine-art, advertising, fashion, even landscape photography, the distance between a single press of the shutter button and the final image has never been greater. Here’s an inside look at what some master manipulators do to create their work.
We spoke to three top photography pros who have skillfully mastered the art of both shooting and editing. Click the links below to view breakdowns of some of their most complicated images:
POP PHOTO.COM
Tips From a Pro: Using Lens Flare to Your Advantage
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/04/tips-pro-using-lens-flare-to-your-advantage
http://www.popphoto.com/how-to/2012/04/tips-pro-using-lens-flare-to-your-advantage
Virtual Studio Lighting
Aplicación que simula el efecto de las luces de estudio en el rostro para pre-visualizar la toma y tener los diagramas de luces listos optimizando el tiempo de la toma en estudio.
http://www.zvork.fr/vls/
http://www.zvork.fr/vls/
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