First workshop compositing

A while ago I got some questions about compositing.
At first I thought that this would not be something for me to teach, you know my motto “why fake it when you can create it”, however soon I realized that in some instances compositing would be the only option, and the more I experimented with it the more I fell in love with it, I do have to add that I did not do a lot of compositing yet for commercial work and things I post online but the options seem to be limitless and I’ve already got some nice ideas.

During Photoshop World I made sure to watch Joel Grimes doing his compositing work and of course chatted a lot with Matt Kloskowski during his visit to Professional Imaging last year (his books rocks by the way on the subject and I highly recommend you to buy that one). So the idea grew in my head to do something with this during a workshop, and a few weeks ago due to a weird combination of circumstances I got my change, original planned as a workshop Advanced II that workshop grew out to a compositing workshop and the students loved it. So we changed the title of workshop advanced II to Advanced II compositing and the theme for that workshop is now working with compositing.

As with all workshops I start out with a seminar that is aimed towards making shots better by adding elements, choosing the right angles, posing, expressions, reaction time etc. I love to teach this seminar because it’s not only aimed at model photography but also street and even some sports photography, and it works great for the compositing idea, because in the seminar itself we are adding more and more elements over time till we end up with a photo that contains everything.
But there is also attention to understanding the way light hits a subject to make a standard snapshot much better if you choose a different angle, and this is something that can also be used during compositing, make it convincing. For example watch out for the direction of light etc.

Of course there is not enough time for a perfect composite during a workshop, but as you can see here it’s not all that bad (I hope). During the workshop I will first show a simple light setup that works wonders for compositing, but also explain to think ahead and change the backgrounds according to the final image, for example when shooting against a dark background I will try to shoot  my model also against a darker background, unless her clothing (or hair) is dark, then I will have to select something that will give me the contrast I need. This is all very important for a good composite.

Also I think it’s very important that everyone can make the composite, that’s why I choose to not use any plugins during the workshop, in other words, everything is done in Photoshop CS5. Although I did use some NIK effects on some images to give it a “look”. The fun thing about this workshop is that between 12:30 and 15:30 we made three different setups and while the model (Nadine) was in makeup (thanks to Linda) we did the compositing in Photoshop. In other words the three images you see in this blog post were all done in the time period of the workshop, so they are a bit “rough”. But it does show that compositing now a days doesn’t have to take days to complete, although more complex ones will, these are very simple.

It’s a workshop that without a doubt will continue in the coming months and I will think of more ideas for the themes to make it an interesting thing to keep me on my toes 😀