Before & After, Episode 17

Here’s another great example of the sheer power of Photoshop, and a case where a little bit of forward thinking on my part really paid dividends once the shooting was complete.  If you’re a regular reader of my blog, then you already know that when I’m commissioned to produce promo images for a band, I almost always shoot each band member separately in the studio.  It allows me to work within the confines of my relatively small studio space, and affords me much greater latitude in post-production.  But here’s a case where I took things a step further….

LIGHTING

When I was originally planning this shot, I decided that it might look really nice if there were a gorgeous sunset behind the band, and I knew I could accomplish this later in Photoshop with a reasonable amount of effort.  However, I also knew that folks with sunsets at their backs tend to have an orange “rim light” that appears along the edges of their clothing and hair, and this, on the other hand, is *extremely* difficult to simulate in Photoshop.  So I knew that I’d have to find some way to produce an orange rim light around each person in order for the final composite to be believable.  As you’ll see from the “before” shots, I accomplished this by placing a strobe behind each person….but the key is that I placed a full CTO gel onto each strobe to color the light orange.  If you look closely, you can see that this does in fact give the resulting light the appearance of a sunset.

POST-PRODUCTION

Using Photoshop CS5’s new Refine Edge tool (which, by the way, is an absolute godsend for digital compositors— I hardly ever have to rely on channel masks anymore), I extracted each band member from their respective original shot, and placed them all into a new blank document.  I then dropped in a new sky with a nice glowing sunset, and proceeded to really increase the light intensity in the sun area by applying a Levels adjustment with a radial gradient mask.  I also increased the lightness levels along the sides of the two band members’ faces who are standing right in front of the sun.  Next I added an artificial lens flare to really drive home the effect.  I also had to add a couple of shadows, since band members standing that close to one another would undoubtedly cast a shadow on the adjacent person.  I dropped the exposure of the bottom quarter of the image to draw the viewer's eyes upward where they need to be.  There were LOTS of local contrast adjustments along with the usual dodging and burning, and finally I introduced a slight orange color cast to the entire image with a warming photo filter.

Here are the before shots. Notice the light stand on the floor behind each band member (with the full CTO gel, as previously discussed).

And here is the final composite, complete with all of the adjustments mentioned above:

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