Tag Archive for: optics

How to murder your Husband, a Halloween Frank Doorhof Special

It’s Halloween so it’s time for horror

When it’s Halloween it’s time for some cool images of course.
We already showed you the video this morning but now it’s time to see those gory photos in full glory.
I hope you enjoy them as much as we did creating them, and trust me this was one of those workshops where the group totally went for it, I can’t wait for you guys to see the images popping up on their timelines 😀

But in this blogpost… well it’s time for my images.

DISCLAIMER
if you are easily offended don’t read the blogpost, it is Halloween so everything is in good fun of course.

Story time

Photography is paining with light, we all know that expression but for me personally it’s also a large part story telling.
You can do this with sets, lighting, expressions, props etc. but also with adding some special effects in Photoshop.

For this story we knew before hand it would rely heavily on using Photoshop and for me also Boris FX (totally love their optics software). That doesn’t mean however that you can just shoot it all against a blue/green screen of course.
For some images we needed smoke, and besides that I always try to shoot my images already in a setting so that I can use them if my Photoshop skills are not what I thought they were 😀

In this case, I think the images turned out pretty well.

So let’s start.

How to murder your husband

Of course we all love our partners, but what if you can’t stand your husband. And after years of hiding your anger one Halloween night it’s enough. You can’t face the truth yourself so you decided to go to the cellar and put on the mask.

“Honey, can you come downstairs please I need some help”
Yeah help you don’t really need right?
She already got something heavy and put on her wedding dress (because you can see the blood better, and it was more dramatic than jeans and a tanktop).

When the husband comes down the stairs he started laughing “What are you wearing, lol you think it’s already Halloween dummy”

“YES IT’S HALLOWEEN”
And that’s the last thing he heard besides the blows hitting his head.

After the fact she looks at the lifeless body and realises something terrible,….. it’s going to stink like crazy so we have to get rid of the body.
Luckily there is a forrest close by, and the drags the body behind her to a place where no-one will ever find him.

After she dug the grave it was time for the “till death do us part, part”
She took of her cheap wedding ring he got at the pawnshop in Vegas and after 13 years still read the name of that other woman you never met.

Closing up the grave she felt liberated, happy but… also a little bit sad. She did ruin a perfectly great wedding dress.

The grave is closed, the ring is gone, the wedding dress is soaked in blood (this will be a huge cleaners bill).
But one thing still has to be done.
One flower for total liberation

This is how the story end… or does it?

 

yes it does for now.
But I still wanted to share one more image from this workshop. It was actually an image to test a setup but I still liked it enough to include it into this post.

Bring some Hollywood in your images

Sometimes you come across software that is truly unique.

Most software that you find online are variants of each other, eg Lightroom, Photoshop or they are focused on a specific part of the workflow such as tinting, skin processing, etc. But there is always a variant of a variant to be found. That’s why I was really surprised by BorisFX Optics.

As a big film lover I regularly see light effects of which you as a photographer know that it is as fake as can be… but oh how beautiful it is in the context of the film, think of the beautiful glow around street lighting in the fog on a warm summer evening, realize that there was no fog at all but it was added through special effects….

When we think of special effects we often think of space ships, talking mice, etc. but what we often don’t think about is that special effects are also used to add fog, glow, lens flares, smoke, etc. to a scene to increase the atmosphere. in a movie, and it’s just often easier to add it later than to fog up an entire street perfectly.

But also fire and particles are part of special effects, just think of a scene where someone walks into a burning house, all those small fire particles of burning paper/material… huge chance that these are all special effects.

The software that is used a lot for this could be labeled as the big brother of BorisFX Optics. And this is also very clear by the huge amount of options and very realistic looks.

There is a lot of software where you can work with overlays for smoke, for example, but I have never seen software where you can literally let the smoke pass by like a movie via a multitude of sliders and choose EXACTLY where you want the smoke, and even then you can still change a staggering amount of things building the perfect smoke. And believe it or not but almost every effect you choose has a similar slider choice, if you don’t get the desired effect with this I wouldn’t know what to do.

Anyway, isn’t this “cheating”?
Yes and no.
What I personally have trouble with is when people make no effort at all for correct lighting or styling and then try to make a photo interesting through all kinds of filters, and although sometimes you can get some very nice results, it is a completely different result if what I have in mind when I shoot a scene.

Of course you can always say that if it is not caught by the camera, it is not real… but…. then I wonder how do you see a black mist filter, which makes a lens flare clearly stronger?

And that’s basically how I see BorisFX Optics too.
I’m still trying to get the photo 100% correct in the camera, I build the whole set, put the lighting in the right places, use smoke etc. etc. But after the shoot I use BorisFX Optics to turn everything “on”, the lens flare is already in the photo, but in the retouch process you can enhance it with eg BorisFX Optics and really give it your look and feel. The same applies to turning on a spot just a little bit extra, it is there, but you make it just a bit clearer, or enhance the glow of an old tube amp…  I personally have no problem with that at all.

And let’s be honest, in the end we still made the photo ourselves and went through the entire process in the software and that is a completely creative process, only instead of just colors we now also add atmosphere in a photo which otherwise would not have been possible, and this makes it possible for me as a film enthusiast to give photos a much more film look.

In the coming months I will make several videos about BorisFX Optics, you can find them on our YouTube channel and of course from this site.

► Get 20% off Boris FX Optics via https://bit.ly/3zpQLzZ and use coupon code: doorhof-optics22

Which RAW software DxO vs Capture One vs Lr

I think that on software this is probably one of the most asked questions “Frank which RAW convertor do you use and which one do you advise?”

 

Well let me start with saying that there is no 100% best solution, in this blogpost I can only tell you what my experiences are and my results, the problem is that all three convertors are strong in certain areas and less strong in others but none is the strongest in all. So in this post I will tell you my opinion and how I use them, this might differ from yours of course.

 

The contenders :
DxO optics 9.5
Lightroom 5.x
Capture One

 

First lets look at my opinion on them and when/why/how I use them.

 

Lightroom
Adobe-Lightroom-Logo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think it’s no secret that Adobe is a huge company and their products are among the best photographers use, in fact it’s the standard for most professional workflows. Adobe has several software packages I use including Premiere for video, Lightroom and Photoshop of course, and I have to be honest I LOVE all their products, and probably that’s also the reason that they are the standard in the industry for so many people.

 

Lightroom is where all my files “life”, it’s my hub where I keep everything combined, make smart albums, label and keyword my images, and yeah I’m even using their GPS map module. In short Lightroom is what is on my computer screen a lot and when I search the archives it’s actually the only software I use.

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