Gadgetory

vibrant colors dramatic makeup and some interesting paper play are all ideas I had in mind when I put together this fashion shoot for C net and now let's go behind the scenes and see how I got these shots now C net is not a fashion magazine so this is not the sort of thing I would normally shoot but we've been using this camera already for our show techadon and it seemed like a great idea to put it to use on a proper fashion shoot and I thought what a great opportunity to do a behind-the-scenes video on what I consider when I'm taking photos of people from the camera placement to the models placement to things like the lighting and the makeup so what you can see what I've done I've got rid of that big modifier it gives a really great light really really soft it falls beautifully over the skin but it's a little too broad so we've swapped it out going with this beauty dish there's a grid on it and that this helps focus the light straight down it's not just getting more spill in the background and it's coming up really nicely in the shots so I'm pleased and we're going to carry on and just get a few more in this position before we change out and try something else that looks great okay up into the light for me so when we look up into the ligh what we see as we get this really nice catch light in the eyes which looks absolutely great or we get some lovely shine on the lipstick it's got this big girl off that looks fantastic and now we're going to begin phase two then phase two involves all these triangles which I spent most of last night cutting out by hand so we have I reckon about thousands probably a few more the idea beings that we're going to solve glue these I'm afraid to your face and then layer these up almost like scales going all the way down those have this cascading effect of these paper triangles hopefully if it works out in my head then it's gonna look great but otherwise it might look pretty terrible and they all just delete all this and you'll never really see it off but Sam Ramez will try so it's taken a while but we have got our pretty much all of the triangles on that we wanted or feathers I will use using the air quotes I love the way that they also leave flow at the shoulder and up the neck so what I want to try and do with this is just using the one light probably with the beauty dish try and get the light in the right angle so that you get this bit of shadow underneath each triangle to hopefully give it some really nice depth and have a little really standout couldn't really cool we are in the final stages now I absolutely promise what we've got is got all the rest of the feathers coming around both shoulders now we've come away from the background so we can get some background light on they're using a second light and instead we've got this huge softbox here giving this really nice light spreading all over but crucially here we are using this piece of black card just to block off this light coming here so that you've got this nice fall off in the picture just below where the feathers go so when we take a shot we can see that the face is really nicely lit but that light just falls off gradually towards the bottom as you produce that again and we'll bring that up a little bit more to about there please okay that looks really nice yeah I'm really pleased with how that light looks okay I think that might be it for today we can go and take a look at the shots we've got in post so now we've done the shoot it's time to move over into the editing process now I will typically use Lightroom capture one if I'm shooting with that with phase one and Adobe Photoshop but for this edit I'm going to stick mostly with Photoshop to show you what I'd go about doing in terms of objects removal in cleaning up these stray hairs and of course in some of the color toning that I want to do let's go and take a look okay so here we are now the first thing we're going to do is just clean up the image a little bit any imperfections in the skin any errors that we've got in the makeup or stray hairs anything like that is what we're going to take a look at and the tool that we're going to use for this mostly is the Spot Healing Brush tool which we've selected here and we'll go for slightly larger brush size and what this brush allows to do is basically as you can see here just go and paint over any little spots if you want to get rid of and Photoshop will automatically look at the pixels surrounding that and just fill in that information with what it thinks it should be okay so on these bits of hair because it's a larger area I'm going to try and use a different tool that's the patch tool and with this you can basically draw around an area that you want to get rid of like this all the way around it'll select that area and then you can just basically drag and say I want this piece of area replacing it and if we deselect that you can see that that has even we zoom right in done a pretty flawless job of replacing those hairs with the background and there's just a little gap here and I'm going to try using the Healing Brush tool we're gonna see yeah I mean that replaces it if you look very close maybe he doesn't really make a lot of sense but that is more than good enough for me I'm happy with that and and I think that's it i think we've now looked so far because the first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to duplicate the background layers by dragging it into a new layer and you can see a background copy so that whatever editing we now do to this image we can turn on and off and we can get rid of and go back to our background if we want to now i'm gonna start by going into filter and Camera Raw filter and this is gonna bring up basically the same controls that you would normally find in Adobe Lightroom for high light contrast color toning and is where I'm gonna do the most of my editing for this image I'm gonna start by turning down the highlights because you can see around here in a forehead it is a little bit bright because her forehead was the part that was closest to the actual flash I'm literally gonna bring it down just a little bit like that - for at most and I'm going to bring my exposure down now only my exposure up a little actually I'm gonna bring my shadows down and that's just gonna give us a slightly more punchy contrast II look to this shot which I quite like that there um the whole point was really about punchy colors and so I went for basically a red and black color palette in here so it very much is the Reds that were going to be controlling now as you can see the main thing that we can do to control that color is in the red hue slider we can bring it very very far to the left all the way and we get this vibrant fuchsia color I don't particularly like that and it goes a bit far I do like it being this rich red color but I'm gonna see what it looks like going the other way because I actually really like these warmer almost autumnal orange tones that we get by pushing the slider the other way which actually wasn't what I was going for in the beginning so I am going to take that more into the oranges because I think actually gives a really nice look okay next thing I want to do on this shot is just to make some selective adjustments mostly to the eyes and the lips because I just want to brighten the eyes up a bit so I've selected up here the adjustment brush and I'm gonna set my exposure a little bit we'll start off with plus 25 as you can see from the cursor in the middle we've got the two rings the inner ring and the outer ring the inner ring is where the effect will be plot will be applied at 100% and then it will fade and feather outwards on the outside what that means is that you just don't get a very hard line from where you've applied that applied dye effect so it's a it's about being reasonably subtle with this I'm gonna keep that at about plus maybe + 2015 and then if we click new here to apply a new brush because now what I want to do is do some work selectively on the lips cuz we've got some great makeup being done on these so I just want to make sure that they're being brought out in just the right way so I'm just gonna start painting over this mask at the moment it's still set to increasing the exposure in increasing the shadows just because that is what we did we did before but now once that's applied but then we'll be able to see if you take a look at the mask you can see exactly where it's been applied and we can always refine that a little bit more later by using the arrays and just sort of taking out here where we don't want it where it goes a bit more onto your face and we're gonna turn the mask off so we can see what we're doing and the first thing I'm gonna do is bring that exposure back down because we don't want these layers to be too bright we want them to have a really dramatic punching lip so I brought those shadows right down which I already like the look of I'm gonna raise the contrast up there I'm gonna increase the whites mr. touch and show you the highlights I'm going to increase and bring those white back down and I'm gonna reduce the blacks not a lot but just by about that and clarity at this point actually is a really great tool for bringing out that mid-tone contrast which for these lips is where all the detail is coming from from the flash giving that nice reflection on the lipstick now as I said I'm gonna do a little bit more word to brighten up these eyes because as you can see there are some nice catch lights from the softbox that we were using but they are getting a little bit lost because the eyes themselves are a little bit dark so I am going to go in now I'm going to turn on the mask so I can see what I'm painting or just going to change the color of the mask it's a green just to make it that little bit easier to see and it turned down that so we've got a slightly smaller brush I do a size four and we're just gonna paint that in here so everywhere where the green is is where the mask is going to be applied right on the eye itself so using a bright color like green for the mass doesn't make it as very easy to see where that mask is actually going to be applied and we turn the mask off now we can start doing our edits so as before the previous edits were applied which we don't want what I want to do is use exposure to brighten up those eyes and brighten up those shadows because those shadows are affecting the middle of the eye where some of the color is so I'm actually going to boost that as much as I can and I'm gonna keep those highlights down a little bit because I want to bring the exposure at more to try and bring out some of the color in those eyes which as you can see I'm doing that but by bringing down the highlights just balancing the amount of light that's coming up in the whites of the eye stopping those being too overblown and we're going to carry on bringing the exposure up a bit more say there I'm gonna hit booster contrast take down black slightly with the whites I mean it actually that's way too much way too much so we're gonna bring that right back down so I'm quite happy with that actually and then I'm gonna go on new now we're gonna go back in and just do a little bit more on the lips because I really feel that I can make these a bit punchier and I'm gonna reset everything so I'm gonna bring up the exposure the contrast the highlights reduce the shadows and I'm gonna have the clarity again so just going to paint this in she's gonna reduce that exposure again and what I do like to do when I'm doing some editing is just to kind of play with the sliders up and down and still see what look you can achieve if you go too far in any direction then you get sort of disgusting various errors and I don't really want that I mean I am going higher than I normally work but again we're going for quite a specific look here okay so now those have been applied and as you can see we've gone again a very definite look to our image we've gone for these warmer or terminal tones we brought out more detail in the lips but brought out more detail than the eye we've got some color here carrying on taking out any of the blemishes and areas of the makeup and we've just sort of tidied up with the hair a little bit I'm already really happy with how this image looked so there's a few more things that I want to try and before I call it a day so I want to use the gradient tool this is a darken slightly the bottom of the neck where the feathers are and around the shoulders hopefully drawing the eye a bit more to the face but I just want to do that quite subtly so I don't wanted a big gradient just enough that we just did there by dragging up just getting a bit of Darkness there pretend that layer on and off we can see what that's done it's not a huge amount but I think it just makes a lot of difference in bringing the eye more towards the middle of the image okay so if we take a look at the original image that we imported and then we go from there and we go back there is an easy way and take a look at what I've achieved I'm really pleased with how this image is looking it's the colors are less punchy than when we started obviously we don't have that rich vibrant red but I really like the more subtle tones that we have the warmer tones so I'm really pleased with what we've what we've achieved that's pretty much as much as I wanted to do I'm really happy with this there may be a few more tweaks that I'm going to do in in post but it will take a little bit longer but that's just a really good overview of the sort of steps that I would take to get an image to this point and again if you're doing this yourself and you can spend much more time in cleaning up and making sure that everything's in its rightful at vinz right place but the thing that I like most when using Photoshop and and Adobe Lightroom is just playing around particularly if you don't have a very definite idea of what it is you want to achieve then just experimenting with different things you can always go back to a previous version if you want there's no there's no reason to only have one image you can try different styles try different effects and see what you get from this and as long as you're not pushing any particular effect too far then you can get some really interesting looks but for now I think I'm done with this image I'm really pleased and I'm looking forward to seeing what we can get with the rest so considering I was completely out of my comfort zone doing fashion rather than products I am really really pleased with what we've been able to achieve I think I'll make about as emily has done a really tremendous job in helping get the look that I had in mind I really like the soft light I love the tones in the image and I really really love the amount of detail that this thing can capture so hopefully there's been an interesting and helpful insight into some of the work that goes into putting on a fashion shoot just like this there is plenty more coming up in behind the shot so do make sure to LIKE and subscribe and leave any comments that you've got in the box below