Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Before & After, Episode 14 | WESLEY CHAPEL MATERNITY PHOTOGRAPHER

In continuing with this recent maternity kick I'm on, I'd like to show you yet another example of an image that was heavily manipulated to achieve the final effect.  While I'm a huge advocate of getting things right in-camera, sometimes knowing a thing or two about Photoshop can come in really handy.

One of the first things I noticed about this image when I pulled it into Lightroom was that the hand and flower weren't in the ideal position vertically on her belly.  When I was originally taking the shot, I told my subject to just let her her arm hang fairly loosely, which put her hand (and the flower) in a much lower position.  I thought it would look better in the final shot, but it turns out that I was wrong.

To move the hand & flower higher up on my subject's belly and  into a more visually appealing location, here's the procedure that I used:
  1. Duplicate the background layer
  2. Drop the opacity of this new layer down to around 20%
  3. Use the Move tool in conjunction with Free Transform to reposition the hand/flower in the new location
  4. Mask out everything but the hand/flower
  5. Go back to the background layer and clone out the original hand/flower
Aside from that, I performed some light "digital plastic surgery" to alter the shape of her belly, and of course I reduced (but not removed) some of the skin blemishes that I found to be rather distracting.  The background is nothing more than a lavender-to-white radial gradient, with the subject, hand, and flower masked out.  Please let me know if further detail would be helpful.

To see the before & after, just move your mouse pointer over the image for a few seconds until it changes. Then you can switch them back and forth as much as you like.

Maternity Pregnancy Photography
For further examples of my work, including high school senior pictures, baby & family portraits, and fashion & glamour, please visit my website at http://RussRobinsonPhotography.com









3 comments:

Unknown said...

Beautiful as always! I would like to know a little bit more about how you make the background snap to white? (before the gradient) I always find this very time consuming.

LIFE_REFACTORED said...

Beautiful! Flower repositioning was a good decision. Looks much better.

Tampa Band Photos said...

@Tiffany: I actually didn't alter the background before applying the gradient....I simply dropped the gradient on top of what was there and masked out my subject. However, making a white background snap to pure white is a good topic for a future blog post. I'll get to working on it.

@LIFE: Glad you agree-- thanks for your comment.

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I'm a commercial photographer in Tampa, FL specializing in band & musician promos, CD covers, press kits, posters, and the like. Please feel free to check out my website/blog using the link below, and give me a shout if I can be of service to you!

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