I came across “Dave Cross’ Fix it challenge” via Scott Kelby’s blog. Basically each week Dave posts an image in need of some serious retouching, participants fire up photoshop and do their worst, posting the resulting images in the pool from which winner is chosen. I had been on the look out for something to practice my photoshop skills on, and being a highly competitive person I couldn’t resist having a go.

This week’s image is a period photograph of a woman standing in front of a painted background. My immediate thoughts were, on top of fixing the obvious damage, I would attempt to restore the colour that would have been present - had colour film been invented at the time! This is something I’ve not attempted before on a photograph so it’s an ideal learning opportunity. In the end it turned out to be somewhat more challenging than I had expected! What follows is a step by step breakdown of what I did and why I did it…

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I was going to call this post something like “and ace up your sleeve” but yeah, it’s a shot involving cards that I thought would make a good behind the scenes post.

Lighting plays a key role in determining the mood of a photo such as this so that’s the first thing to sort out before the shoot begins.

To give a contrasty yet flattering look I decided to go for a strong directional yet soft light for the model. The background was hit with a spotlight on the curtain - to compliment the theatrical setting. Read the full post for more details setting up lighting in two planes:

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I had to post this as soon as I saw it - vandals/subversives/pop-culture philosophers/bored design students have pasted photoshop toolbars and menus over heavily airbrushed advertisements displayed in the city’s subways, in a bold and candid statement about the spurious nature of the images beneath.

Or so it seems. The cynic in me at leasts entertains the idea that this was in fact carried out by the Ad agencies themselves as part of some guerrilla marketing campaign. Weclome to the age where nothing is real and even some of the hoaxes are a hoax.

It’s fairly clever either way, I’m sure it brightened the odd commuter’s day! And before anyone accuses me of referring to a cream cake in my headline, take a look at this.

MG

In November I did a shoot to promote a new student night in York called Tequila. Amonst other things the images were going to be displayed on a large plasma screen in the venue so I wanted them to carry maximum impact so went with a bold white background look. I was uploading a few of these images to flickr and thought I’d write a short post about how I set up the shots.

Zack Arias has a written very good set of tutorials on working with seamless backgrounds in this way. The background is lit separately from the subject to make it easier to get the exposures right and to “blow out” the background (make it show up pure white in the camera). Gobos (go betweens) are used to stop background light hitting the subject:

It is stated that three lights is basically a minimum for this (two for the background, one for the subject) however it’s not an absolute necessity as we shall see…

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