New Years Eve all dressed up and no kids for a night out.
Ok, a little back tracking on this photo and the processing. My wife and I had an invitation from friends to go to a 50th birthday party on New Years Eve. (Which by the way was a lot of fun and a good time had by all). The dress was formal so we got all dressed up and sent the kids to Grandma's house for the night. My wife thought that since we were dressed up why not take a few photo's. The reason I like photography is so I can take the pictures and not be in the pictures. So I begrudgingly agreed and set up the tripod and we took a few shots before we left.
Weeks later my brother in-law asked me to take some photo's of him and his girlfriend and also asked me kiddingly if I could make them look a little cartoonish/surreal. So after searching the internet for tutorials on how to do this I came across a processing I liked. I tried it on his and then did it also on mine as well and then decided to post my results. I did do the process twice because I thought after the first time it wasn't effective enough.
Now I realize there are many that do this and in no way is my processing the optimum way to do this. But without others posting there technique who do it better than I, this is what I have come up with to share.
The Shot:
Single Exposure, F/4.0, ISO 250, 1/100sec, Flash fired with Gary Fong Lightsphere
Post Processing:
ACR-Adjusted Exposure and Contrast for more Contrast, Over Noise Reduction (Process makes photo over grainy, you need to adjust for that early in the process.
CS-5
Duplicate Layer-High Pass Sharpen 4.0-Blending Mode to Vivid Light-Flatten Image
Duplicate Layer-High Pass Sharpen 6.9-Blending Mode to Color-Opacity 30%-Flatten Image
Duplicate Layer-Gaussian Blur 9.4-Add Noise 3.0-Layer Mask Hide all-Lasso Tool around eyes (Lasso tool 1 eye press Shift and do all other eyes) Select-inverse, Brush tool 30% with white Foreground color choosen brush over entire image-Flatten Image.
Duplicate Layer-Sharpen-Unsharp Mask (Amount 100%, Pixels 30, Threshold 0) Adjust opacity if needed. I usually leave at 100%.
Duplicate Entire process-Unsharp Mask at the end I will adjust opacity to taste.
I will Dodge and Burn with Non-Destructive Process areas of face, hair and cloths to taste. I will darken wrinkles and smile lines, creases in clothing and shadows on face.
I will lighten highlighted areas of face and cloths and a lot of the hair.
I will save all of this and go back into Raw and possibly Noise Reduce again if needed (I like a smoother look)
I will bring into CS-5 and adjust contrast and Hue/Saturation to taste.
That's it, it seems like a lot but it really isn't and for me it is fun because it takes a regular photo and turns it into something different.
I posted all of this not only to share but in the event I forget how to do it I can always visit my own blog and read how to do it again without searching the web.
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