Tag Archive for: Photoshop

TIP : Not everything is Photoshop

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TIP :
Not everything is Photoshop.



A lot of the shots I post online are 99% in camera shots. For some people this is very hard to believe, I sometimes think that if someone sees something that “looks hard” they always think it’s Photoshop.



In my opinion this is limiting yourself, always believe in the power of timing and of course planning ahead. Although it sometimes seems like I just throw together some lights, place a model and shout some funny remarks to my models and press the shutter the truth is very far from that.

Every shot I take I plan ahead, I carefully place the lights under the exact right angle and move my model in the angle so that he/she is hitting the light just perfectly (or as good as you can get it).

This however doesn’t mean I plan a shot ahead in the studio, during my workshops it has become a personal challenge to NOT plan anything, in fact I often let Annewiek or organizers pick the spots for the locations and I don’t want to see anything from it (except a general idea), this way I can be 100% creative on the day itself, and I strongly believe that by showing it this way to the students also gives them the confidence that they can actually pull this off if they understand their light.

Light is our language as photographers, this is where we create our poems/photographs and this is how we tell our stories.

Photoshop for me is an awesome tool but I always get way more satisfaction when I “nail” something in the camera instead of add stuff in Photoshop.

let’s take this example.

Enka workshops Augustus 15 2014 222

This was shot during the Enka factory workshops last friday.
This shot was 100% unplanned, we saw the pool of water and 45 minutes before the end of the workshop I thought it would be cool if we would do something with this water, so I asked our model Lenaa if she would mind to get wet (and I checked with Nadine if the clothing was allowed to get wet, another tip.. always keep your models and stylist on your good side).

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A tip on skin retouching

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One of the most made mistakes during retouching is “overdoing it” on the skin.
In my opinion the final image should have nice skin, not a barby doll.

 

You always have to see skin as 2 separate things.
1. the pores and details
2. the color

 

The biggest problem is often the color.
When you look at a models face you can often see many different colors, sometimes in smaller areas next to each other, sometimes in bigger areas, overall it makes the face often look very “uneven”.

 

For years people have been trying to counteract this by blurring, putting in new details by adding noise (a very nice technique overall) or using plugins like Imagenomic Portraiture or Topaz Clean 3 (2 which I often use). The results are often very nice, especially the 2 mentioned above can give you great results and they are very fast (Imagenomic can be even done as an action for the same model, making retouching a series very fast). When you wanted perfection there always was/is dodging and burning, a very time consuming process that can easily take you up to 3-4-5+ hours to complete.

 

A few weeks ago I got into the whole “Frequency Separation” technique for skin technique and must say that I’m very impressed with it, at the moment it’s my main “to go to” technique for a “perfect retouch”.

 

In essence you split the details and the skin tones making it possible to literally blend the skin tones into each other creating a very nice and even skin appearance, but because the details are on top you don’t loose these. Now because the details are separated from the skin tones you can retouch all you want on that layer without worrying about “infecting” tones and luminosity.

 

Of course I first have to try out techniques before I share them, but at the moment I feel more than confident that this is a very powerful and great technique that can benefit every fashion/portrait/etc. photographer so I created a small video on the use of this technique for the Quite Frankly series.

 

You can find it here :

 

Remember that the retouching in the video is rather “sloppy” when using this technique you can do a pretty good retouch of the face in about 5-10 minutes, and ok it’s a lot longer than running Imagenomic Portraiture (10-15 seconds) but the results is A LOT better.

Webinar DxO

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Today I share the webinar I did for our friends at DxO in December.
Now normally webinars are sharing a desktop and sharing some tips and tricks for lightroom and Photoshop, however in this webinar we decided to do things a bit differently and we used cameras in the studio to show what I’m doing during a live photoshoot, but you will also see the whole process of selecting, retouching etc.

 

I’m joined in this webinar by our good friend Hector from DxO who also shares some of his secrets.
So check it out

 

X-rite webinar online

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Last week I taught a free webinar for our friends at X-rite.
Today you can find the link to the webinar here :

 

 

http://www.xritephoto.com/ph_learning.aspx?action=webinarsarchive&eventid=1501&eventdateid=5526Safari 2