Adam Sund Photo Blog Photography is the new black.

My first Tutorial

I decided to dig up a few old tutorials I had laying around on some of my photos.

Here is the first one for the photo Vampire Submerged

In this and the other tutorials, I will be using diagrams to illustrate light setups - it's a simple .Psd file which can be opened in photoshop. Get it here:

http://www.kevinkertz.com/

The finished image looks like this

I'll be doing a step-by-step guide on how I got to this point.

Here you can see the setup of the model, me and the lighting.

I shot it on a white backdrop, but it could have easily been done on a white wall.

The unedited shot looked like this, and yeah, actually still does:

As you can see, the hair is still doing crazy stuff on the original image, so I'm gonna have to reveal the secret of having a good and enduring model. Nynne, who posed for this shot, kept throwing her hair back, up , around and down for me - kudos sent her way.
If it all seems a bit gray, it's because I had a smoke machine on - but really, don't pay much attention to that - it just confused us more than it did anything good here.

But now, straight to the editing, which is more of less the essence of this shot.

What you see here is a screen shot of my inner most sanctum - the .psd file.

It's taken from when I made this tutorial in Danish, so the embedded comments on the left remain in Danish - I'll see if I can translate the most important stuff.

Take a minute to gaze over the layers, where most of them still have their original name.
There are some stock photos of textures used to get it a bit more grainy.
Color balance has been used to bring out the green glow.
Curves has been used to add contrast.

But aside from the overall adjustments, are the more specific ones applied to the image.

Each time I upon up an image, I duplicate the layer twice and make the lowest invisible. That way, no matter how much I screw up, I can always go back to the original. I start up with a new layer for Healing/Spothealing/ Clone tool to remove spots and small skin differences.
I merge that clone layer with the layer below with CTRL+E.
After that, I duplicate the layer again, so that I have 2 of the newly clonefixed layer and one original in the bottom.
After that I do as follows:

Filters - noise - dust and scratches - Radius 5, threshold 0.

Filters - blur - gaussian blur - 2pxl

Now I add a Layer mask which allows me to "paint" things off the layer with erasing it completely.
Use paint bucket and fill the layer mask with black - this way, all the effects just added dissappears, and you can paint them back on with a white brush. I'm doing this on the skin in this case.

When you are satisfied, merge the top two layers. If the skin remains a bit murky, repeat the process, but this time, use higher values in the gaussian blur.

Always Merge (ctrl+e) the top layers after this. At least, thats what I do.

Next step will be High Pass:

Filters - other - high pass:
In short terms, this effect will make outlines more visible, and in some cases, this can be used to make images sharper. We will now be using it to make it a bit cartoonish.
Depending on how much effect I want, I shift between 5 and 20 pxl and that in between.
Now put the blending mode of that last layer to overlay (soft light and hard light also works from time to time). Now adjust the opacity to control how much the effect shows. You can also add a layer mask in order to paint away that effect.

All in all, this should provide a look into how a fairly simple image shot in a living room can turn into a vampire submerged.

PS. Her teeth has been done with liquify tool.

(just found out that it has been featured in an online magazine - page 204)

Tutorial 2