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I’ve received a lot of requests from people asking about my work flow and how to achieve the same results. I’m going to show you how to recreate this image:

The hard work was done with my lighting set up in order to get the right shadows and highlights. The lighting set up that I used is called butterfly lighting, where the soft box is in front of the model, pointing down at a 45⁰ angle approximately a foot to two feet above the camera. I also had a hair light with barn doors on a boom directly above the models head, so that her hair wouldn’t disappear into the background and to give highlights across the shoulders.

You can also add a reflector at the front to bounce the light and fill in the shadows under the nose and chin if you wish.

This is a beautiful and flattering light, which enhances the right features and smoothes out others. Also depending on how the model poses, you can achieve different effects with the same set up.

1. As you can see the image on the left is a perfect example of butterfly lighting and how beautifully it can light the subject, when they are facing straight on the camera.
2. In the centre image that we’re working on, you can see that the lighting still flatters when the model turns her face to the side.
3. In the image on the right, the same lighting was still used, but the model leaned forward creating a harsher effect that is still striking never the less.

All three of these photos were edited in the same way.

This is the image as shot in camera:

You can see that because we got the lighting right in the studio and the exposure correct, the raw image doesn’t need a lot of work, ie playing with adding in shadows, highlights or fixing spots that are too dark or overexposed etc.

The next step is to do a quick correction, where under eye circles are minimised and blemishes retouched. The model is a bit rosy as it was hot the day this image was taken, so I’ve gone through and evened out her skin tone and then did an overall skin softening.

So the layers that have been created so far:

• Skin retouch with the clone tool set at 50% opacity
• Color fill layer, set to blend mode hue and 50% opacity with a mask for the skin only to reduce redness.
• Skin smoothing layer that softens the skin.

All of these layers are in a group labelled skin retouch.

I applied a channel mixer adjustment layer to convert the image to black and white.

I then created a composite  layer of all retouched layers, excluding the channel mixer layer, placed on the top of the layer stack and changed the blend mode to overlay. This increased the contrast and saturation of image in a controllable way.

Final step here is to fill in the colour of her lips as they seem to fade away into the background. I did this with another colour fill layer, with the blend mode set to soft light.

So the layers that you will end up with are the following:

• Skin retouch with the clone tool set at 50% opacity
• Colour fill layer, set to blend mode hue and 50% opacity with a mask for the skin only to reduce redness.
• Skin smoothing layer that softens the skin.

All of these layers are in a group labelled skin retouch.

• Channel mixer layer
• Composite layer of all the retouched layers with blend mode set to overlay
• Colour fill layer, set to blend mode softlight with a mask for the lips only.

So there it is, from start to finish. You can add in a few extra steps, such as a curves adjustment layer underneath the overlay layer to bring out the shadows a bit more, or you can run a high pass to sharpen the image up or just selective sections of it, such as her hair and necklace with a mask, the possibilities are only limited by how you envision the final product.

Happy Shooting!

Been a little while since I have written a tutorial, so I thought I would make it a good one

I’ve been thinking again about the earlier Dave Hill tutorial that I have written and I don’t think that I did his work justice, so here’s take two Again I’m using the Topaz Adjust Filter to speed things up a little.

I looked at the Dave Hill website again (nice upgrade btw!) and carefully studied all the elements again:

• Everything is usually in focus and sharp, so foreground and background and of course the people.
• High contrast of colour
• Faux HDR look of everything

So lets get to work Firstly I thought about the kind of photo that I wanted to create and for some reason I came up with a street fighter styled idea. Here are the three stock images that I used:

Each image above links to the stock images that I used.

And here is what I ended up with:

So let’s break it down.

1. Cut out the two fighters in each of the stock images. I used the pen tool and then channels for the hair. Save the two original files with the layers and the mask in case you need to make adjustments to them.

2.Drag the two fighters to the new canvas  and resize to make them fit the background image.

3. Create two folders and name them Fighter 1 and Fighter 2. Drag each fighter layer into its own folder. This will make it easier to edit them both later on. Turn both of there folders off for now.

4. Duplicate the background layer. Now its time to make it a bit more detailed. Go to Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 3. From the side menu, choose the preset Crisp, then click ok.

5. Turn on Fighter 1 folder. Create a layer below the cut out  in the same folder and with the brush tool, with the opacity set at 25%, draw in a shadow.  Start darker at the foot, the lighter as it end. Apply a guassian blur of about 5px, then turn the layer opacity down to 50%.

6. Add a curves adjustment layer. Create a gentle S to bring up the contrast. Right mouse click on the curves layer and select create clipping mask from the fly out menu.  On the mask of the curves layer, mask out the pants of the fighter.

7. Add a hue/saturation adjustment layer. Lower the saturation to -50%. Right mouse click on the hue/saturation layer and select create clipping mask from the fly out menu.

8. Alt-click on the fighter layer so its the only layer active. Then hold crtl-alt and press the tilde (~) key. This will select the highlights in the image. Set this layer’s blend mode to screen and opacity to 65%. Apply a layer mask. On the mask of this layer, mask out the pants of the fighter again. Then turn the background layer back on.

9. Repeat steps 4 to 7 for Fighter 2 folder.

10. Now its time to blend the fighters a little bit more into the background. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift and E at the same time to create a new merged layer of all the layers below. Go to Filter>Topaz Labs>Topaz Adjust 3. From the side menu, choose the preset Neutraliser_by_JorgeDiaz, then click ok.

11. Create another Curves Adjustment layer and pull it down in the middle to darken the whole image a little.

12. Create a blank layer and select the elliptical marquee tool and draw a big oval. Then press crtl-alt-i to invert the selection and fill it with black with the paint bucket tool.

13. Apply a Gaussian Blur of 70 px and lower the opacity of the layer to 65%.

14. Create another blank layer and fill it with 50% grey. Turn the layer’s blend mode to soft light. With the brush tool, set to 30% opacity and 30% flow and with black as the foreground colour, go over all the shadows on the two fighters and darken them a bit more. Switch the colour to white and go over the highlights to bring them out some more.

15. Press Ctrl-Alt-Shift and E to create another merged layer copy. Then hold crtl-alt and press the tilde (~) key to select all the highlights of the images. Now press crtl-alt-i to invert the selection and hit crtl-j to create a new layer from the selection.  Change the layers blend mode to multiply and lower the opacity of this layer to 65%.

16. All done

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.

$5.00Price:

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Dave Hill is one photographer that I have a lot of awe for. I love the way he creates his images. Some people may say that they are too stylised or cartoonish but after trying to recreate his work, I found that its a lot of work! Even a lot of the tutorials that are around don’t come close to what he does. I believe that I may have cracked it the Dave Hill secret finally. I do welcome feedback in regards to what I have created.

Here are the two images that I used to re-create his look. Please keep in mind that it was hard to find evenly lit images, so I just worked with what I got

Stock Image 1 for Dave Hill Tut

Stock Image2 for Dave Hill tut

Also keep in mind to achieve the best results from this technique, its best to use well lit, low noise images as when you begin to enhance them, the noise can really show!

Original Image and Final

Step 1

First thing to do is to even out the lighting in the image so that its more evenly lit. Create a curves adjustment layer. Fill the mask with black with the paint bucket. Choose a soft brush and switch the colours to white and paint in the sections that look too dark. You will end up with the following image:

You can see that the girl looks more evenly lit now.

Step 2

Create a new layer by pressing crtl-shift-alt-e and name it High Glamour. Next step is to apply the Imagenomic Filter Portraiture. Use the default setting High Glamour. Next step is mask out the back ground. Switch into quick mask mode and paint over all the skin. After all the skin has been masked out, exit quick mode. Invert the selection by pressing crtl-shift-I, then click on the mask icon to apply the mask. You will end up with the following image:

So you can see here that the skin has a higher contrast and more of a glow compared to the original image.

Step 3

For the next step, press crtl-shift-alt-e and create a new layer that is a merged version of all the previous layers and call it base. Now click on the channels tab, click on the green channel to activate it.

Then crtl click on the green channel thumbnail to select it. You will see a selection of all the light areas of the channel.

Now click back on the RGB channel to turn all the channels back on and go back to your layers palette with the selection still active.

Now press crtl-J to create a new layer with the selection. Crtl click on the new layer to select it. Crtl-shift-i to invert the selection. Click back on to merged layer that you created earlier and press crtl-J again to create a new layer. change this layers blend mode to multiply and change the layer above it to screen. Delete the layer named base as you don’t need it any more.

Put the two new layers into a folder and make the mask selection for this folder by crtl clicking on the high glamour layer mask, the with the folder selected, click on the layer mask icon. Viola new mask for the layer group in no time at all! You image should be looking like this now:

Step 4

Now it time to HDR up that background! Press crtl-shift-alt-e and create a new layer and call it Psychedlic. Use the topaz labs filter psychedelic setting to create a HDR looking background. The filter was just applied on it default setting.

You will notice now that the skin and the sky looks really yuck.  Time to mask the skin out using the same technique in step 3.

Looking pretty good so far?

Step 5

Now the sky doesn’t really look very HDR does it? Take the second photo that you downloaded and drag it across to the photo you’re working on. Make sure that its on the top. Apply the Topaz Labs filter setting detailed on the sky. This just brings out the details subtly without being OTT.

Mask the sky out, easiest way would be to do with a channel mask, but that’s a tutorial for another day.

Now you’ve got an awesome sky and your photo should look like this:

Step 6

One last step, press crtl-shift-alt-e and create a new layer and change the blend mode to Overlay and change the layer opacity to 50%. Now add a Hue/Saturation adjustment mask and put the saturation down to -100. Right click on the adjustment layer and create a clipping mask, so that the Hue/Saturation layer only affects the overlay layer.

And there we go Dave Hill syled image: