Photoshop and Photography

Over the years we’ve had a love-hate relationship with Photoshop.  When we were first introduced to it we were in it for the quick fixes and the easy ‘wow’s.  As time passed we started experimenting with everything Photoshop could do.  This was followed by a short but intense phase of composite creation.  Here are a few examples of some of Layton’s early composites:

After Adobe released Lightroom a new love love affair began and Photoshop was quickly left by the wayside.  Lightroom allowed us a more organic digital darkroom experience and we tended to opt for the filter-free approach to processing rather than editing.

However, as time has gone on and Photoshop has become much more Lightroom-friendly it has become easier to switch between the two seamlessly.

Recently Layton’s found himself dabbling in Photoshop more and more often; especially given recent upgrades with Photoshop making it much more powerful than those early days when Photoshop didn’t even have layers or ‘undo’.

As part of this dabbling Layton’s been doing a few photo fixes in Photoshop.  This is a recent example of a ‘rescue image’:

Permission for use of this has kindly been given by the photographer Brittany Guy Kittrell – Check out her page on Facebook.

Here’s a quick run-down of what he did: The quick selection tool was used to select the fallen strap, which was then copied to its own layer.  It was rotated vertically to match the other strap and moved into place.  A mask was added on the strap layer and used to help the strap fit into the new position.

The clone tool and the content aware healing tool were used to cover the strap as much as possible.  Then localised dodging and burning to match the shadows and highlights of her skin and that of the boy’s arm beside her.

It was all finished off with a lot of healing and cloning to cover any artifacts or repeated patterns.  To finish it off the whole image was sharpened with high pass sharpening – using a duplicate layer with the high pass filter on it and a blending mode of soft light.

As this was an uploaded Facebook image the DeJpeg filter from Topaz was run to remove the artifacting and fringing caused by the jpeg compression; followed by a bit of localised tonal adjustment.

The combination of this continued dabbling, our desire to explore our creativity and inspired by Renee Robyn’s work we are looking forward to getting back into some composite work next year (which is now getting extremely close) – but this time shooting all the elements ourselves to create the whole scene.