Hey everyone, sorry that its been so long between updates, so I’ve decided to make this a good one ^_^

For a while now I have been fascinated with the style of Jill Greenburg. Such beautiful emotive portraits, set against beautiful backgrounds.

After studying the key elements of her portraits, now its time to unlock the secrets. If you look at her work, the backgrounds are usually one colour lit with a spotlight an the people have been photoshopped to varying degrees of glowyness.

So this is what we want to retain when recreating her portraits:

• boldly coloured background with a backlight.
• glowing beautiful flawless skin.
• all those cute flyaway hairs that make the image look like that’s how it was shot.
• Netural skin tones.

Now to recreate the look, you can go out and buy a fantastic studio set up with five plus lights, with different coloured backgrounds, learn the different intricacies of photography and lighting, or we can weave a bit of photoshop magic. Lets do that ^_^

So here what we started with:

And this is what we want to end up with:

1. The first step is to cut her out from the back ground. The method that I used is channels to create a mask. You can use other methods to cut the background out, but you want to retain the little fly away hairs as it will produce a more realistic result in the end.The end result is the following:

2. Now that we have her cut out from the boring white background, we can place a Jill Greenberg styled background behind her. Create a new layer and fill it with a radial gradient going from white to dark blue. Try to aim to have the backlight or white part of the gradient just over the shoulder.  So now we have this:

At this stage we have a preview of how the final image will look. Pretty close to what we want but a little bit more work still needs to be done.

3. Looking at the photo, her arm look a little bulgy, so with the liquefy filter lets make it a bit thinner, like this:

This is just a small adjustment but will make a big  difference in the finished photo.

4.  Now its time to just clean up her skin a little bit. I used the clone stamp to take away the dark circles under her eyes, then reduced the opacity of the layer to 50% so that it looks a bit more “real”.

5.  Now its time to prep the skin for the shadow and highlights that we are going to add later. Here I used the surface blur filter. Apply the filter at the following settings:  Radius-7 and Threshold – 27. Lower the opacity of this layer to 25% to preserve her freckles and press alt and the mask icon in the layers palette. This will give you a black mask. With a soft brush and set to white, begin to mask in the skin, avoiding eyelashes and eyebrows and anything else you want to keep in focus.

6. Now lets start to accentuate the shadows and highlights in the image. Start with a new layer and fill it with 50% grey, set the blend mode to softlight. With a medium sized soft brush, with the following settings: opacity-25% and flow 25%, switch between black and white to accentuate the shadows and highlights that already exist in the photo.

Don’t go over the top here as we will refine these shadows and highlights later on.

7. Lets bump up the highlights a little more. Create a new layer, set the blend mode to Overlay and grab your soft brush again and stroke over the highlighted sections with the same brush settings as before.

8. Create another new layer, set the blend mode to Overlay and grab your soft brush again and stroke over the eyes and teeth until they are whiter but still look relatively natural.

Remember its the little details that will give your image a professional look.

9. Create a curves adjustment layer and pull it down a little in the centre to bring out the shadows a little bit more.

10. Then create another curves layer and pull it up in the centre a little bit to bring out the highlights. Fill the mask with black and paint the highlights back in with a soft brush with the foreground colour set to white.

11. Now press crtl + alt+shit+E to create a new layer made up of all the underlying layers. Go to Gaussian Blur and apply with filter with the following settings: Radius – 2. Set this layer to overlay and the opacity to 50%. Double click on the layer and move the blend if grey sliders to 25 then hold the alt key to split them and move the other slider to 100 to bring out the details in the shadows. This is very important as it will give you details in the dark areas.

Now the image still looks a little bit too saturated, so create a hue and saturation layer and clip it into the blur layer and set the saturation at -75.

Also the background looks a little funny, so go back to the original mask that you created and ctrl click on it to make a selection. Then just click on the mask icon in the layers palette to mask out the background and here is the finished product!

Have fun recreating this popular look I welcome any questions or examples.

Here’s another example using the above technique, so its not just limited to pix of gals ^_^

Jill Greenburg Backgrounds

Recreate Jill Greenburg Backgrounds quickly and easily using these gradients. Also included with the gradients is a handy tutorial showing the a few simple techniques to achieve the best of the backgrounds provided.

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