Brad.Wagner

24th November 2011

Post with 3 notes

“Green” Tutorial

So for this photo I used a little strategy I used for the other photos in the color series for the expansion. I put the camera on the tripod backwards so that the handle would be facing forward so that I could move it around while in front of the camera. I set it to manual focus and got into position close enough that I’d me able to move the camera. I got the main image and then switched it to manual focus. But before switching the focus or moving the camera at all I made sure to make note of things like my body rotation and exactly where I was looking. Trying to not move the rest of my body I moved the camera with my free hand, hit the 2 second timer button on my remote and put my hand back down. Then I just repeated moving the camera and hitting the button without moving. If doing this I would suggest not doing anything with your hand up, mine went numb from staying up so long haha. 

This was the main image

Here it is after all the expansion. (I plan on making a tutorial on expansion soon!)

And here’s what I cropped it down to.

As you can see my skin is definately not that great at all, so I did some skin retouching using the technique in this video- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNB9Mepi1VI.

Here I am all touched up.

As usual I started the editing with my basic RGB curve.

I brough the red curve down to cool the colors a bit 

I brough down the green curve slightly to give a bit of contrast, since there’ so much strong green adding some of the opposite (magenta) has a nice effect. As you can see I did bring it up just a bit in the middle to bring out the green in the trees. With this photo I was basically able to treat the lighter area of the curve (the right side) as mainly being just my face since it was the whitest part, the middle as being mainly the trees, and the darker end (left) as being mainly the my clothes and parts of the background.

The blue curve I brought up in the darker areas to cool things down a bit making them a bit more green, and up in the high areas to brign out the color in my face and hair.

here’s what we have after the curves.

After my basic curve layer I usually like to use a hue/saturation layer. I like going through each color and first bringing up the saturation all the way for a moment so that I can see exactly where each color is so I know how to work each. I pretty much ended up doing the same thing to all the colors as what I showed in the yellow above, blue and magenta were darkened a bit more though. 

Here it is after the Hue/saturation layer

I then decided my face was too yellow so I did another hue/saturation that applied just to my face and desaturated the yellow.

In the same layer I decided to deal with the issue of that bit of blue from my shirt showing. I would have done it in a separate layer but since there wasn’t any blue or cyan in my face i figured I’d just use the same layer. I usually stay away from messing with the hue but it worked nicely for making my shirt green so it’d blend in.

Here it is with my face lightened and shirt corrected.

I then decided to see what would happen with a vibrance layer. I really like playing with vibrance layer, I never have any idea how they’re going to work but it usually has a very nice effect. I really liked what it did to my face but wasn’t entirely sold on what it did to the back ground so I partially masked it out and liked the result.

And here is the final result! Hope it helps!

If you have any questions or want to request a tutorial you can do so on my <a href=”http://www.formspring.me/iambradical” rel=”nofollow”>Formspring</a> =)

Tagged: tutorial