Major Project - Combining Images

After spending my whole life on photoshop i finally got there. This is the before and afters

Background

Start

I then HDRed the image to give it the very grungy mood

I then played around in photoshop using adjustment layers to create a more contrasty dark moody background. I added a bit of vignette to focus on the middle, i then used ALOT of cloning to create the dark centre because the sky and rusted box in the middle were too distracting.

I then shoot my mate jacob on the cyclorama using two soft boxes on the background and two to light him. The background lights were also flagged to stop light hotting the subject. I choose a very hard outfit for the model as i was shooting white on white. This made me have to make the background a bit darker making it grey to heap cut out my subject. I made the lighting very evenly lit and from above as i shot myself in the same position while at the background location and this is the lighting at that location at that time. This image is already cropped in more than the original.

I then had to HDR this one aswell so they fit together better, i used similar setting in photomatix but not exactly the same. I also cut out the shadows around the floor and used them as shadows in the final image.

This is the final image but i still need to retouch a few thing before printing such as burning in the axe and lessen the vignette as it is a bit heavy. I did want the dark style with the deep blacks as it added to the mood of the image.

Here is just a cropped version, i like the versions without the feet in it as it looks a bit more seemless

Panaroma Assigment

This Panaroma was shot the same day as the HDR and i also HDRed this one. It was pretty hard to HDR a panorama so i edited it source files in Lightroom then took them into photomatix. I made the panorama in photoshop using photomerge. I used the Perspective layout to merge the photos then photoshop pretty much done the rest. I choose perspective because of how is shot the image.

HDR assignment

This HDR was done using Photomatix, I was already very familiar with HDRs and photomatix before starting this assignment. I tried to achieve a more natural look to this HDR but i think the sky still looks a bit to HDRey. This was also a bit of a challenging HDR because of the moving grass everywhere.

Last Screenshot/Calibration

This was our last calibration on our CRT monitor. Everything went fine, not much had changed since the last calibration. Our luminance could have been a bit closer but wasn't to bad. The green was a bit out as was in the rest of our calibrations but was very similar to the rest of them. I believe we done fairly well in our calibrations all together, coming out with similar results each time.

I have learnt alot from calibrating these monitors and is defiantly something i will use in the near future.

3rd Calibration

This one was a bit different to the others as our monitor had been tampered with.

We had to adjust the size of the screen, positioning, warp etc

We then did the calibration and found the colour was way out and we had to fix that.

We came fairly close to the target luminous but will get closer next time.

2nd calibration

Our second calibration using the i1, it was a fairly successful calibration and not much has changed since the last one. The good thing is that we were only 0.3 off our target luminance and that is pretty much the best its going to get.

Sceen Calibration 1

This was our first attempt with the spyder and as you can see it was a fail as we didnt setup tne right legs for the CRT monitors.

Our second attempt was much better as we used the Eye one and we had a better understanding on how to use this one but i think we will try out the sypder next week and hopefully we get it right. Overall i think our 2nd attempt was much better and our monitor was fairly close to our target as you can se our Luminance is 92 when our target was 90 and our colour is very close also.

Imaging technique - Replacing Skys

I just used a few of my old photos and chucked some new skys in there. It was alot harder than i thought and had a fair bit to it.

Sometimes as a commercial photographer you may be asked to take a landscape shot and usually this requires having an amazing sky for a more dramatic effect so this is how you do it.

Fist you select the sky using whatever feels most comfortable to you, here i have used the quick section tool then masked it and fixed it up a bit using brushes.

Then you put in the extra sky as a smart object so you can warp it to however you like.

Then using your selection mask over the new sky this should slightly put in a new sky but it looks very bad at this time.

We then use Gaussian blur on the mask to get rid of the halos.

We then create a few curves adjustment layers to the sky and the foreground to make the sky and foreground look similar. We also use curves to create a polarising effect on the sky and using a gradient on the mask.

We then make another curves adjustment layer fill the mask black and use radial gradient on the mask to simulate light coming over the hills and whatever would be happening in the shot.