In the Studio
Again I’ve used a 3 light set up for this shoot made up of two strip boxes slightly behind and to the side of the subject and a medium octa to the front and camera left. The great thing about this set up is that it works for great for both full and 3/4 length composites by helping in the ‘cut out’ process but also used to mimic light hitting your subject from things such as the sun, the moon, street lighting and so on. Plus changing the look and feel of the lighting is a breeze by simply turning off one of the rim lights, the front light or indeed a combination of both…

The Composite
I certainly find that knowing what you want your final image to look like even before you’ve photographed the subject in the studio helps a great deal. You’ll go into the shoot knowing the angle you need to shoot your subject at and where the lighting needs to come from for starters and this alone can save you hours when it comes to editing as you can immediately start putting the elements together as opposed to trying desperately to find something that fits…if that makes sense.

Putting it all together
Below you can see the stages that the image went through from it first of all being opened in Photoshop to the final composite….

In the past I’ve mentioned about a stage in editing that my good friend Calvin Hollywood calls 20/80 meaning where the final 20% of the editing stage takes 80% of the entire time, and that’s exactly how it was in this case too. Putting all the elements together was a relatively quick process but it’s achieving the final look (colour, contrast, detail etc…) that takes the time and that was achieved by playing with a combination of Photoshop techniques and using some filters that come in the Nik Color Efex Pro 4 plug in, and when I say playing I mean exactly that…trying this, trying that, deleting this, deleting that, until finally I was happy and said enough was enough.

Knowing when to stop editing in my opinion can be one of the hardest things to do because there’s always that thought in the back of your mind of “I wonder what it would look like if I did this” but again, this can be helped by having a clear idea of exactly what it is you want to achieve before you’ve even started.

As for how long this composite took from star to finish, well I couldn’t tell you but what I can tell you is that it certainly wasn’t done in one complete sitting but rather quite a few short bursts in between other work.

Creative Composite Workshop
So there you have it…a quick look at the kind of work that went into putting the ‘Homeward Bound‘ composite together. Now if you’re interested in taking a closer look at what goes into an image like this from the photography and through all the editing in Photoshop why not come and join me at my new Creative Compositing Workshop where we’ll do exactly that and more.

Full details can be found on the Creative Compositing Workshop Page here [Link]

As always if you have any questions or comments then please feel free to make use of the comments section below but in the mean time,
Enjoy

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Unlike my day long Concept to Print workshop, this particular workshop runs for half a day with the focus on photographing and editing images to give them the Character Portrait look.

Each workshop has a theme and for last Saturday’s we went for a Newspaper Editor kind of feel with my great friend and N.A.P.P. Evangelist Dave Clayton stepping in as model for the day; and any day when Dave’s around is always sure to be fun

The workshop starts off with me first of all going through and setting up the lighting which sees us using 3 lights: two strip boxes and one beauty dish and shot against grey seamless:

Now, this is all well and good but my feeling about this is that what’s covered in the workshop needs to be something that can also be replicated outside of the studio because not all attendees will have access to or maybe the inclination to use a studio. So with that in mind we also replicate the set up using Speedlights and the new Hot Road Stripboxes and an Ezybox from Lastolite

This is very much a ‘hands on’ workshop so once I’d gone through photographing Dave to give me images to go through and edit later, it was then attendees turn to make use of both set ups to then Photograph Dave and each other.

Following a short break it was then time for the editing and although not essential some attendees bring along a laptop with Photoshop installed so that they can follow along each of the stages to take the image from out of camera to final edit. Like I said though, this isn’t essential as everything is covered step by step making it easy to follow along:

To give you an idea of what’s covered and what goes into creating the ‘look’ in Photoshop here’s a sneak peek at the Photoshop Layers I made that went into Dave’s edit.

Now just one thing about this particular image…there are some techniques in here that wouldn’t necessarily be needed to give the Character Portrait Look, such as the cartoon/painterly effect and of course lighting the unlit cigar, but that being said after we’ve finished the main edit we then move onto some Photoshop Tips, Tricks and Special Effects:

Giveaways
Each attendee will be receiving the Workshop eBook very soon, but also on the day Dave very kindly ran a couple of competitions with numerous gifts and give aways donated by the great folks over at the N.A.P.P. and Kelby Training plus there’s exclusive video content that attendees can access showing some of the Photoshop techniques.

And ofcourse as is now tradtition at the end of the workshop we all then reconvened at a local curry house for a bite to eat a drink and a good natter

Feedback

• Been on an amazing photoshop workshop run by the talented Glyn Dewis with the outstanding model Dave Clayton :0) ~ Lee Ramsden
• Just home from the best photoshop / retouching workshop ever. Very slick and professional a credit to Glyn and superb facilities at the studio ~ Graeme Clark
• Glyn, brilliant Character Portrait Workshop mate, really enjoyed it. Dave Clayton did a fantastic job as the model and a cracking studio. Cheers guys – had a great day ~  Steve Bryson
• Thanks Glyn for a great day yesterday. Was good to meet everyone. Loved the curry  ~ Colette Wilks
• Thanks guys, had a great afternoon,was good to meet you both! Learnt a load of cool tricks, and enjoyed it!! ~ James Hole

So there you have it…a quick look behind the scenes of a recent Character Portrait Workshop

Come Join me in January
The next Character Portrait Workshop is set for Saturday 28th January 2012 and I’m really looking forward to revealing the theme for the day.

So why not come and join me and learn how to create your own Character Portraits; a look that one attendee suggested would also be great for photographing children or maybe even animals too.

The latest workshop date was only announced a few days ago and already spaces are filling fast so be sure to book your place real soon! [Link]

See you there,
Glyn

Check out the Workshop link at the top of the page or use this [Link] for more information.

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To give you an idea of what my tutorial is about, here’s the picture of my good friend and NAPP UK Evangelist Dave Clayton who stood in as a model for me.

Now Dave isn’t, has never been and never will be a smoker but for this shoot I was kind of working on the theme of him looking like a newspaper editor and if Peter Parker’s Boss in Spiderman smokes a cigar, then I guess they all do…right?

I’m going to be really creative here and call this technique Lighting an unlit Cigar as it’s all about making a cigar or cigarette look as if it’s alight when at the time the photograph was taken, it wasn’t.

So, looking at the images below here’s how we can take the cigar from being unlit to lit using a technique in Photoshop that’s not only easy but incredibly fast; here’s what we have to do…

STEP 1: Make a Selection of the end of the cigar and copy this to a new layer using the keyboard shortcut CMD/CTRL + J or by going to the LAYER MENU…NEW…LAYER VIA COPY. I used the Eliptical Marquee Tool, but any selection method you use will work fine.

Now that we have the end of the cigar copied onto it’s own layer we’re going to apply a few Layer Styles. So, to do this we need to first of all get to where the Layer Styles are and we do that by double clicking on this Layer in the Layer Panel.

STEP 2: Now we’re there, we’re going to add 3 layer styles:

*Outer Glow with it’s Blend Mode set to ‘Color Burn’, Noise at 75% and Opacity of 100%

*Inner Glow with a colour of Black and Size of 25px

*Gradient Overlay with it’s blend mode to ‘Overlay’ and a Black to Red Gradient

Ok, so now the cigar kind of looks like it’s lit and you can change the opacity of this layer to suit how strong you want the ‘lit’ part to look.

However, there are a couple of things we can do to really finish off the effect…

Add some Noise by going to FILTER…NOISE…ADD NOISE ( 15% should do the trick) and then to really complete the look simply get a Red Brush, change it’s blend mode to Overlay and paint over some of the ash behind the burning section of the cigar.

And that’s all there is to it. Of course you can always go one step further by adding some smoke and this is easy to do by using some Smoke Effect Brushes that are available for free all over the internet.

Right, that’s all for now so I’ll catch up with in a few days, but just to let you know next week I’ll be posting a look at what went on at the workshop plus an insight into what kind of retouching goes into giving an image the ‘Character Portrait’ look. In the meantime, as always if you have any questions then feel free to shout them out in the comments section below.

Enjoy

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Studio Shoot
Ok, the lighting set up for this shot was identical to that used for the other images I took of Tristan during this session [Link] but knowing how I wanted this particular image to look before it was shot meant a couple of extra things were thrown into the mix.

I knew beforehand that I wanted this picture to have Tristan walking along a cobbled street out in the open air with a city scape behind him in the distance which in this case ended up being London. Anyway, as he was going to look like he was outside and as if he was mid stride, we placed a couple of fans into the set so as to blow his clothing and look as if it was a little on the windy side:

Also, just to add a little more interest into the picture I wanted to include some old newspaper or rubbish being blown around too so to do this, again keeping the lighting and camera settings exactly the same, with the fans still blowing a few torn out and screwed up pages from a magazine were dropped into the set; but not when Tristan was in place.

So, now with Tristan and the rubbish photographed, a few days later it was up to London to gather some shots to be used for the background:

The Background/Scene
Here’s a look at what images were used to build up the scene:

• The roadway came from a side street opposite the London Dungeon
• The City Scape is made up of 3 different shots taken from The Embankment across the River Thames towards the Houses of Parliament
• The Sky is one that I happened to have on my hard drive from off a Joey L DVD 
• The birds came from a few taken off a stock image
• The newspaper was photographed in the studio once I’d finished photographing Tristan

So there you have it…a quick look at what went into putting this composite image together. As always, if you have any questions or comments then please feel free to make use of the comments section below but just to give you a ‘heads up‘ all this compositing and more is covered in my From Concept to Print workshop and I’ll be posting the new workshop dates in the very near future, but in the meantime,
Enjoy

I’ll often add in a faux spotlight when I’m editing the Character Portraits; a technique that I picked up from my buddy Calvin Hollywood and takes literally seconds.

However, when we add in the spotlight you’ll likely see what’s known as banding appear as in the example below…

So, how do we Reduce/Remove the Banding?
Well, here’s a technique that just couldn’t be simpler…

Go to FILE…NOISE…ADD NOISE and add in just 1 or 2% of Gaussian, Monochromatic Noise as shown below…

So there have it…couldn’t be much simpler than that huh

Just one thing before I sign off…I’ll be opening up tickets for the first Character Portrait Workshops of 2012 real soon but just to give you a heads up we’re looking at Sunday 29th January 2012.

I’ll post more details here on the blog in the near future but in the mean time,
Enjoy

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This project has seen me again working with Actor/Model Tristan Roper, having first met him when I joined my Buddy Noel Hannan on a photo shoot. You may recognise Tristan from off the poster for my Character Portrait Workshops and I’m really excited that he’s now going to be modelling for the next series of my From Concept to Print Workshops; the dates of which I’ll be announcing real soon.

In the Studio: Lighting Set Up
Ok so all the shots of Tristan were taken against slightly darker than 50% grey seamless and with a 3 light set up:

Strip Lights either side and slightly behind Tristan: These were positioned quite high up on their stands and then angled downwards, I guess with the bottom of them at about shoulder height with the intention of mimicking the effect of street lighting.

Medium Octa: This was on a boom to the front and off to one side slightly to add a little bit of interest to the light from the front; powered down so as to add a little bit of fill and with the outer diffusion panel removed so that the light which did come out had a bit of punch to it.

The Background
When it came to shooting the background I already had in mind the kind of look/feel that I wanted but rather than search a few well known sites for suitable stock images I decided to get out and shoot it myself…

(By the way, that’s my buddy Gareth Davies who owns the studio I shoot in and run my workshops from in the photo on the left…an absolute star and great friend! ) 

I wanted to find something that gave the feel of Old London Town…you know dark alleyways and cobbled streets so after a little bit of research, Noel and myself decided that Whitechapel in London would be ideal.

Made famous from being the haunt of the infamous Jack the Ripper, it promised to have a few of the remaining cobbled streets you’ll find in London that haven’t yet fallen fowl of building work and renovation…

This particular alleyway I shot as a HDR image taking a series of photos all in quick succession (handheld) and combined  later using Photomatix.

To help with the realism of the final composited image, I made sure that my shooting height/position was the same as when I’d been photographing Tristan in the studio. In addition to that I also kept the Aperture setting on my camera the same so that the Depth of Field would be as it would have been had I actually photographed Tristan in situ.

Basically all I did was get in the same shooting position/height, set my camera to Aperture Priority Mode (f/16), have Noel stand the same distance from me as Tristan had originally been and then locked my focus on him. Noel then moved out of the frame and I pressed the shutter release to take a series of shots; 7 in total with my Nikon D3 in Continuous High and Bracketing Mode (1 stop difference between shots).

The same was repeated for the photographs of the brick wall although these were taken facing straight on at normal standing height…

Post Production
Once back in the computer, the background/alleyway images were combined and Tone Mapped together using Photomatix and from there taken into Photoshop to remove unwanted/distracting items, change the colour/tone etc so that it looked like late evening/night time etc… but only up to a point as the rest would be worked on once it had been added behind Tristan.

With regards to the shot of Tristan, I worked on it to a certain point before compositing with the background to get it looking a particular way…

• RAW Conversion
• Tidying Up (Removing Dust Spots etc)
• Enhancing Details
• Skin Contrast
• Dodging & Burning
• Selecting (Quick Selection/Quick Mask/Refine Edge)

Once the images had been composited it was then a case of going through a whole series of steps and techniques to see what could/should be done to complete the image: positioning Tristan, adding shadows, adding lights, adding the smoke/mist, vignette and also what can only be described as ‘playing’ until the colour/tone felt right. Oh, and making sure I took my own advice of walking away from what I’d done and coming back to it some time later to avoid becoming ‘Pixel Blind’; nothing beats looking at what you’ve done with fresh eyes…you’ll know straight away if you need to do anything more or indeed if you’ve done enough.

So there you have it, a complete run through of what went into putting these images together. Of course I can’t include all the editing steps involved and that’s not because I don’t want to, but more a case of there being rather more than I can remember, but hopefully this is helpful in some way.

As always if you have any questions or comments then please feel free to make use of the comments section below and I’ll be sure to answer them asap, but in the mean time,
Enjoy

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Lighting Set Up
Ok so it was actually lit with 2 Nikon Speedlights; one into a 60″ Shoot Thru umbrella and the other on the ground behind Keith to give a little bit of separation on him and the dark walled area behind.

At the time (just before midday) there wasn’t enough natural/ambient light coming in through the window to light both Keith and the corner of the workshop so that’s where the umbrella was positioned. Also because this area of the workshop was quite dark, a second Speedlight was placed on the floor behind Keith to throw just a touch of light behind him and on the cupboard doors beneath the work surface.

One last bit of techno: The speedlight being fired into the 60″ Shoot Thru Umbrella was triggered using a Pocket Wizard Transceiver II and the flash on the floor was set into the SU-4 mode and fitted with the diffusion cap. (Both flashes were on Full Power).

In the couple of pictures below you can see on the left how dark the corner of the workshop was with just the natural/ambient light and on the right is how the image looked ‘out of camera’ once the lights had been put into place:

In the ‘out of camera’ shot the area behind Keith and the cupboard doors beneath the work surface were still too much in shadow. So, during the editing  in the computer I added some more light into those areas using the Never Ending Lighting Rig technique that I wrote about a few weeks back [Link] and you can also see in the video that I recorded below:

Editing in Photoshop
Once there was enough light in the shot it was then a case of working through the rest of the editing stages so that I could hopefully end up with an image that gave the impression of being taken on a summers day in the late afternoon/early evening:

• Double Raw Conversion
• Enhance Details
• Remove unwanted items (Cloning)
• Never Ending Lighting Rig
  
• Change Colour of Keith’s Shirt
• Colour/Tone/Contrast
• Cookie Lighting & Vignette
• Sharpening

As always if you have any questions or comments then please feel free to make use of the comments section below, but in the mean time have a great weekend and I’ll catch you back here in a few days.

Enjoy

*You can check out more images from Spillers Farm taken earlier in the year here [Link]

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In the video I go through a couple of my ‘Quick and Easy’ techniques for brightening and colouring eyes adapted from ones I learned from my Buddy and Photoshop Legend Calvin Hollywood.

As always if you have any questions or comments then please feel free to make use of the comments section below but in the mean time,
Enjoy

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I was asked to speak about how I first started off using Photoshop, moved onto becoming a retoucher and then made the transition to becoming a Photographer.

As well as talking through the stories behind some of my images I also showed a Character Portrait Retouch using Photoshop and then demonstrated what I call the Invisible Black Backdrop technique, and this is what leads me onto the title of this blog post…

It’s no secret that I love Photoshop; in fact recently I was chatting with another Photographer and explained that I have no issue with some folks saying that some of my images are Photoshopped. Now this hasn’t always been the case believe me but of late I’ve kind of taken a different view of these comments and think of it like I used to when I used to compete at Bodybuilding; let me explain…

You see most ‘laymen’ view Steroids as something that makes you big, strong and packed full of muscle so even though it wasn’t the case, for someone to suggest that I must have taken some when I was Bodybuilding I viewed as a compliment because that must be how they saw me…big, strong and packed full of muscle

Of course it isn’t quite that easy as what people don’t see are the hours spent in the gym, the strict diets and everything else that comes with it and that’s the same with Photogtaphy: hours spent learning your craft (continuously) plus the money invested in equipment and continuous education in the form of Books, DVD’s, Online Training and Workshops so that we have the skill and knowledge to get it right ‘in camera’.

Anyway, getting back to the talk and this Invisible Black Backdrop technique…

Last year I posted a tutorial here on the blog showing this simple technique which allows you to create ‘black backdrops’ to your shots no matter where you are i.e. in the studio or in the great outdoors; so more for those who are new to the blog I thought I’d include a link back to the technique so you can see it for yourself [Link]

Demonstrating the technique to the camera club made me think that despite having a good grasp of Photoshop and all manner of editing, retouching and compositing  techniques, sometimes Just because we can, doesn’t mean we have to…

As always if you have any questions or would like to leave a comment, then please feel free to make use of the comments section below. Also, if this technique is indeed new to you and you do give it a go, I’d love to see some of the results you’re getting so please do post a link in the comments section or email me directly.

In the mean time,
Enjoy

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Now Noel concentrated on photographing the group in a whole series of full length poses and guises whereas for this shoot I concentrated on taking a series of head shots; some of which are included here…

The first series of head shots are of Tristan, one of the group members and someone I’m definitely looking to have modelling for the next round of Workshops which are set to kick off in February 2012
*(I’ll be posting the new workshop dates up on the blog as well as Facebook, Google+ and Twitter real soon)

The set up for taking this series of head shots was real simple: 2 Strip lights from either side and a beauty dish fitted with a honeycomb grid high and to the front.

Now in the studio I’m using the Profoto heads and modifiers but this is a set up that can be pretty closely replicated using 2 Speedlights and the new Lastolite Hotrod Strip Boxes either side of the model with another Speedlight in a Lastolite Ezybox to the front. In fact that is the exact same set up I use if I’m out on location because it’s light and very portable.

The Background
For this particular kind of look, slightly darker than mid grey(ish) background is needed but rather than set this up in the studio each of the subjects were positioned roughly 6ft away from the white studio walls. That, combined with the way the lights were positioned meant that the walls weren’t blasted with light and consequently turned grey.

*If I’d wanted the walls darker I could move the subject and lights further away from the background and if I wanted the background lighter, I’d do the opposite…simple

The spotlight however is a different story, as it’s been added during the post production phase in Photoshop…

Post Production/Editing
Each of the head shots regardless took no more than 15 minutes working through the following steps…

• RAW Conversion
• Tidying Up (Removing Dust Spots, Blemishes etc…)
• Eyes (Whitening, Colour, Contrast, Sharpening)
• Adding Texture/Details
• Dodging & Burning
• Extraction/Cut Out
• Background (Add Colour and Spotlight)
• Add overall ‘Painterly’ Look/Texture
• Contrast using Unsharp Mask

Well, the weekend is upon us so have a great one and in the mean time if you have any question/comments then as always please feel free to make use of the comments section below,
Enjoy

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