When Weather Won’t Cooperate.

Through rain, clouds, wind, and more rain, professionals stick it out and get it done. This shot for Ply Gem in Virginia happened to be photographed on a rainy day. We managed to sneak in a few angles between the showers, but there was quite a lot to do on the retouching end because of that. In order to make this image look like it was shot on a bright and sunny day, a sky had to be dropped in (obviously). That was a bit of a challenge because of all the leaves overlapping the sky. The color temperature needed to be shifted, the windows had to be colorized, the grass had to be replaced, a new driveway was dropped in, the tree on the left had to be lightened up considerably, and handles on the garage doors were comped in as well. There was a total of about 6-7 hours of retouching in this one shot alone. There are times when mother nature just doesn’t let you get what you want in camera. 

Credits:

Photographer: Alistair Tutton

Assistant: Adam Caselman

Retoucher: Adam Caselman

Author: Adam Caselman

Client: Ply Gem

Client: Blacktop Creative

How do you retouch a cup of coffee?

Ahhh, smell that? That’s the smell of coffee brewing and Photoshop layers. This was a shot we did in studio while experimenting with different beverages. Trina Kahl was our food stylist extraordinaire. What might appear to be a cup of espresso is actually a mosh pit of a few images and lots and lots of cloning.

To get the swirls, we shot the coffee as the milk was being poured into the glass. It mixes quickly so you only have a second or two before the coffee and milk merge. I took these shots of the coffee and milk mixing and cloned them over and over. It would have been a lot easier to use the liquify filter to make these swirls look genuine, but because of the design of the glass I had to alter the liquid without altering the shape of the glass. Arrr, photography, she’s a cruel mistress! Oh, and of course the reflection had to be added in after all the swirls were done. I would love to say that I had an exact image in my head, and it was a symphony of retouching, but to be honest, it was a whole lot of trial and error, and what I like to call the “optometrist method”. What is the “optometrist method? You know when you go in to the optometrist’s office and they put that eyesight machine up to your face and ask you, “Better or worse? Better or worse?” That’s what I did with this image. I would manipulate for five or ten minutes, then turn the layer on and off asking, “Better or worse?” Occasionally the image will get worse before it gets better, but that’s for another blog post.

Sometimes an image is retouched without an exact destination. Alistair knew what he did and did not want out of the image, and that was enough for me to create this delicious composite. Excuse me, I think I’m going to go make myself a cup of coffee.

Credits:

Photographer: Alistair Tutton

Food Stylist: Trina Kahl

Retouching/Assistant/Author: Adam Caselman

Fruit Flies

A few months ago we were inspired by some work we saw in PDN and wanted to shoot some food photography using a fish tank and some fruit. The post processing on this shoot was pretty complicated and worth revisiting.

When you know you will have a complicated retouch ahead of you, its important to simply keep this in mind while you are shooting. This might sound obvious, but there are some things you can do during the shoot that will help on the back end. In this shoot we tried to get as many different shots of clean water lines as possible to use for composites, generally the more you have the better. We also tried to keep the water as clean as possible. Changing out the water to get rid of orange pulp is generally easier and less time consuming than taking it out in post. As much as I like pulp in my orange juice, lets face it, floaters aren’t attractive.




Once we selected the most interesting splashes, opening them in Photoshop and fitting them all together to form the composition we wanted was a somewhat subjective group effort. Several variations were made before we came to the final image. Doing things like converting the layers to smart objects to avoid data loss, masking out everything but the focus of each layer, and lowering the opacity of each layer until you have everything in place can help keep from spinning wheels. Otherwise it can be difficult to visualize exactly where to place things.



The next step in the retouching process was definitely the most time consuming. Taking out all the dust specks and orange pulp looked pretty daunting at first, but I saved a bunch of time by just making a solid black layer rather than trying to use Photoshop’s clone stamp to take out every speck. By making a black layer as the top layer and using a mask to cover the dust specks you don’t have to flip between different layers or tools. I find that simplifies things. You could also flatten the entire image and use the brush or clone stamp, but I like to keep the layer separate as long as possible just in case I need to go back and make another edit to the layout.
The only thing left to do then was cleaning everything up and making sure all the lines connect properly when moving from one composite image to the next. In the end the composited image took approximately four hours from start to finish. All said and done, we had a few new images for the portfolio so needless to say, we were excited about the results.