ALBUM COVER PART DEUX

Yesterday I posted this picture:

in Album Cover. This is Album Cover Pt. II so I’ll explain how I came to this final image with a focus on post production. Then, at some point I’ll write a Pt. III and explain more about the space.

Light: The lighting set-up for this shot is super simple. It consists of two flashes–one behind the keyboard, pointing at the camera, and another to camera-left snooted to the chair. The only other light source is a reflector that is low on camera-right. This gives some detail to the visible side of the chair.

Shooting: I left my camera on a tripod, tethered into Aperture. As a virgin tether shooter I have to say I was pleased, although it’s not the bang bang bang fast paced shooting I usually go for. I added crops and rough contrast adjustments while tethered in Aperture. It helped while creating the set, but turned out to be a bit impractical to do once I had people standing in.

Photoshop: I decided to do my final edit for the cover using just Photoshop.

This is the original image, the only adjustment being a square crop.

To make a long story short: I cloned out the tripod leg from the bottom right corner, sharpened a copy of the background with a high-pass filter, covered the gap in the floor with a grainy gray brush, brightened the floor with a selected curves adjustment, added contrast to the shadows in the floor with a selected levels adjustment, added contrast to the green walls with a channel mixer green channel on overlay, changed the colors on the stripped wallpaper with a hue and saturation adjustment, added contrast to skin tones with a channel mixer red channel on overlay and a typo, warmed the mid-tones with a color balance, added an s-curve contrast adjustment with curves on luminosity mode, and finally added a vignette via selected curves adjustment and another typo. Blah. Blah. Blah.

So there you go…

to

ALBUM COVER

Here are two photos (first for the front, second for the back) to be used as a CD album cover. My brother has been making some music so we set these shots up yesterday for his first packages. The story, more about the space, and a few extra pictures will be up tomorrow.

GOYA AND FRAMES

Here are some pictures from two GOYA assignments I gave myself about a month ago. I got up at 4:30, rode my bike to town, and shot in the early light. I was going to just throw them up here until I saw Scott Kelby’s framing tutorial and thought– hey, I might as well. So I spent this morning making some frames in Photoshop, one landscape, and one vertical, then dragged and saved each image inside. [Video tutorial from Kelby at the end of this post]

Click for larger views:

Video Tutorial: