Tag Archive for: Photoshop

How to murder your Husband, a Halloween Frank Doorhof Special

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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.

The most amazing deal of the year

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It’s time for the 5DayDeal again

If you want to get the most amazing deal for your photography, I think the 5daydeal is exactly that.
Every year they deliver the goods and also this year the deal is jam-packed with awesome tutorials, e-books, filters, presets and software.

We made a special page for the 5 day deal.
If you use our link you also support our work.

This year you will also find 2 of my new tutorials in the deal.
Did you know… Lightroom
And
A full length lighting tutorial for portraiture and fashion.

Add those two together and you already have the value of the total package 😀
So head on over to the page and order your 5daydeal today and start learning for.. well at least another year (yep it’s that jam-packed).

That setting that drives you nuts during the calibration process on Mac (and windows)

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Calibration is important

I think most of us will agree on this. If you want proper colors and happy customers (depending on the assignment of course) it’s very smart to calibrate your monitor at least once a month, but preferably before every important retouching job. But what are the important settings during calibration?

Calibrating your monitor is super easy.

I’ve been using Calibrite (X-rite) products for years. They are easy to use and compatible with the hardware calibration options inside my BenQ monitor. This is a big plus because although the software from Calibrite is great, hardware solutions are always better, of course. Most professional and semi-professional monitors support hardware calibration.

By the way, if you are in the market for a new monitor and you live in the EU drop me an email, I have a few 10% discount codes from BenQ
They have been supporting my work with Digital Classroom for years and love to give you guys a nice discount.

Anyway back to the story.
Even with easy software, it’s sometimes easy to get an error that… well you can’t fix.
You checked everything, and although you know your brand new monitor should really be perfect, it’s far from.
Or maybe you don’t know how to read the rapports and just wonder why there is so much fuzz about professional monitors.

Step 1

This one is for all systems.
When you are using the HDMI connection make sure your monitor is set for 0-255 or FULL RGB.
If it’s set up for 16-235 (video) you will get all kinds of weird behaviors, very noticeable in the dark and bright areas, but in essence, your whole image looks way off.

When you are using USBc, TB, or Display port you don’t have to check this.
Those connections automatically select the right output.

So is HDMI bad… absolutely not, it’s just as perfect for what we do as USBc and Displayport, you just have to check that one setting.

Step 2

And that’s the nasty one.
In the Mac, there is one setting that will almost certainly have you scratching your head and probably a little bit in panic mode.

If whatever you do, you can’t pass the final certification from your calibration and the errors are constantly changing per calibration, there is probably one setting you forgot the turn off. You can find it under “Displays” in Mac OS.

important setting during calibration

This one will give you A LOT of issues when you want a stable and trusted display.
So turn it OFF.
This goes for all settings with labels like “auto”, “Enhancement”, “Super”, “Real”, “natural” etc.

Just turn everything off and run the calibration software.
You will see that you will pass the certification without any problems now 😀

Don’t forget this important setting during calibration!

If you have any questions, feel free to leave them below, or reach out via our social media.

Read more about colors in this blog about Working with Colors 

 

Getting outrageous skies without Photoshop but with gels

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Color manipulation is fun, get outrageous skies without Photoshop

Today another part in our series on color and color manipulation.
part I
Part II

We all love easy to do tricks of course, so I thought today would be the perfect time for just such a tip.

When we look at the color triangle we can see that all colors are connected through the white point.
We talked about this in the first blogpost in this series.

This also means that we can manipulate our white point by choosing a whitepoint that is way off the black body curve and choosing this as a new white point.
So let’s take a look at how this works in real life.

Look at those skies

Let’s take our model Lois on location.

Yeah, well….
There is nothing wrong with this shot but it isn’t really popping right?

So first let’s add some strobe power.

Ok that’s a LOT better, love the sky and the model really pops out.
But what if….we want to push the creative factor up.
Let’s add a green gel to our strobe.
You can use the Rogue magnetic system for this.

Of course it’s vital to shoot a color checker for this.

Now click on the whitebalance part and look at what happens.

Don’t you just love the effect.
In essence it’s very easy what happens.

Normally the white point is on the black body curve.
By using a green gel on the strobe we are now placing the white point above the black body curve, by correcting this to the correct white point everything else drops down, meaning white becomes more magenta. Enhance the colors a bit in your favourite editor and you can have loads of fun with it.

 

An extra tip

As you have read Key is the luminance of a color.
This means that if you don’t have a correct exposure of your shot the colors will not look accurate.
Now of course sometimes you want a more moody look, but it’s important to understand the basis of color to be able to manipulate them the way you want.

To be able to judge your colors correctly you need a proper workflow.
For me this contains a lightmeter and colorchecker.
This means I get my exposure correct and with the colorchecker I can create a profile and white balance for that series.
And do remember this is just to get all the images looking the same so that all the presets you run or anything else in your workflow has an expected outcome.

On the side of the monitor I’ve been using BenQ monitors for years and can highly recommend them.
They have a great line up of professional monitors and a great line of P3 colourspace monitors (in between sRGB and Adobe RGB) for very affordable prices.
Besides great quality most BenQ’s also support hardware calibration. Which means you don’t calibrate your operating system but straight into the monitor.
This is a much better way of calibrating your screen than via standalone software and of course the software is delivered for free.
We have a few 10% discount codes for our European vistors, please contact me for more info.