The People Collection in the main site gets a new image
I have been working on this image for a few hours today in between work on my Module. The image was shot as part of a series whilst I had the studio set up. The subject, ‘Matty’, has appeared before in the portfolio and being a black belt in his style of Karate, makes the shooting of the subject so much easier as it is not staged.
I have various images that I shot of him, of which some were ideal as test shots for another shoot I have planned shortly. More about this later though.
I wanted to produce something that wasn’t just to standard portrait shot taken in a studio, so I began to play around with the image a little. The workflow here was complicated due to the amount of layers and masks that I had to incorporate into it. I made the first audjustments in Lightroom 2 and then exported the image as a PSD into Photoshop CS4.
In PSCS4 in then began the work of cleaning up the image, skin tone, contrast and changes to the light. The easiest way to do this was to add a silver refelctor glow from camera left and drop the opacity down to 48%.
The main subject was altered first, duplicating the image and converting it to black and white through Nik Silver Efex Pro. I then dropped it ontop of the original, masked it and added a gradient fill from the top right showing the Silver Efex Filter underneath.
Using another duplicate I then altered the left eye by making adjustments to the Hue and Saturation Layer after making a selection with the Polygonal Lasso Tool and feathered the selction by 2 pixels.
Again, dropping this over the original, adding a mask and then using a paintbrush with a soft edge I painted in the eye colour. I then made some general alterations to the skin colour and tone, adding some defintion to the muscle area. A hue and saturation levels adjustment was added to the hair following a selection with the Lasso Tool and then I dropped it back over the top of the image. I then painted with a hard brush bringing the new colour to the top layer.
To finish the image off I added a fence by bringing it into the image as the top layer, changed the image layer to multiply, showing the original underneath and then set about bringing out the detail of the fence. This was done by numerous layers set between overlay and multiply modes. I created the hole in the fence to show the main area of focus and then tidied it up. Back into Nik Colour Efex Pro and I added a white vignette filter dropping the opacity to all three layers I brought in. I then addeda mask to them all and painted back the inversion in deifferent flows and opacities.
Two unsharp mask filter were applied, one to the hair following a tonal contrast adjustment and then the other to the face and eyes. Flattened and exported. Set on a black card the image pops more than the standard white card.
I am working on some other images similar to this and once completed I will post them on the blog for comments and feedack.
Filed under: Collections, People
