Re-thinking the old stuff

I admit it - I've been a bit lazy and havn't been shooting nearly enough as of late but that hasn't stopped my desire to fiddle in photoshop. My good friend Carly posted an old shot of mine of she and her finance on her Facebook page. I'd forgotten all about the evening we took those photos so I went back through the set and found tons of great shots that I'd forgotten about.

Nick and Carly are a very dynamic couple, and its rare that there's a serious look on either of their faces at the same time and as you'd expect, I found many shots where Nick was being a goof ball and Carly was looking rather angelic.

I came across this image and liked Carly's expression very much, but Nick had his finger up his nose (ok, not really).




Time then, for some work in Photoshop.

Here's what I did -
I took the original, and cropped Nick out (sorry man).
I then copied it into a new document leaving me with a much smaller image than I wanted, more square than landscape. I widened the canvas and selected a strip of canvas with the marquee tool. I then used the free transform to stretch out the white wall on the left side of the image and finished with a little blending using a soft brush to deal with the artifacting that the Free transform left me with.

From there, I moved onto cleaning up the rest of the image and making it a bit more presentable. You can see my various layers and layer masks on the right that I've used to complete the final image.



Here's a shot of the work flow:



Generally, I was looking to add a little punch and sharpness to the image. It was taken on my old 30D, 28-135mm lens and my 580EX bounced off the ceiling. I needed to fiddle with the levels, and he hues a bit to offer a more accurate representation of Carly's skin. All in all, pretty basic on the editing front, nothing particularly crazy going on. I did learn a bit more about using layer masks, something that I've really not used to this point in my work flow process.

I think the point here is that just because you don't like the WHOLE original image, it doesn't mean you can't take part of it, and make something out of it. I really think this is a weakness of mine that I really need to work on. Too often, I write off an image looking at the whole thing, rather than thinking in terms of what actually is pretty good about it, and then moving forward with that aspect of the image and creating something pretty good.

Finally, I'd advocate for taking a second look through your old work - Too many times, I'll shoot, and disregard most of the work and only use a couple shots rather than thinking a bit more dynamically about what I captured.

Thats all for now!

Follow me on TWITTER
My Flickr Stream