Time for Lesson #1

Ok, so earlier a photo of Caiti was posted showing a scene that is not commonly found in South Carolina. The photo can be found in the post directly below this one but for those of you who may be feeling a lil lazy, here it is:

The way this photo was accomplished was with the use of some photoshop muscles. The one thing about this photo that is definitely a reality is that it was cooold out there! (Well, Caiti was cold ) This photo was taken at approximately 8:30 in the night. Now this time of year in the southern hemispere it starts to get dark at around 5:30, so you can only imagine how dark it was by the time we took this photograph. Because I knew how the final image would look I took the picture in a way to simulate the look of sunlight. Three lights were used: Two on either side and behind Caiti and one in the front. The two on the sides and behind were going to simulate being outside on a sunny day with your back facing the sunlight. The one in the front was to let us see Caiti’s face and the front of her. Here is what the original photo looks like:

So, as you can see from the original it was definitely dark outside. In order to make it look as natural as it does, it involved some imagination and steady hands in photoshop to get a selection or trace around what we wanted to keep in the image. Well, the steady hands wasn’t exactly needed since the discovery of a new photoshop plugin called Fluid Mask. It makes the tracing very simple, clean and quick. So, once that was done it was simply a matter of putting the photo of the wintery wonderland behind her! So there you have it. No green screen or anything fancy, just a little bit of planning ahead and having a workable idea!

Hope you enjoyed the lesson!