Once upon a pine

Written by Otilee on April 24, 2010 – 4:45 pm -

X-Press Magazine,Issue 1209 – 22.04.10
‘In the Pines – Once upon a Pine’ COVER

Shot for RTRFM’s In the Pines music festival – Sunday May 2, Somerville Auditorium UWA. Tickets $20 from Mills, 78’s & Planet.

Styling | Emma Bergmeier (costumes – Memory Lane, Mt Lawley).
Band Members | Felicity Groom (Snow White), Andrew Ryan from The Black Black Smoke (Wolf), Matt from the Black Black Smoke (grumpy dwarf), Sean Pollard (Prince Charming), Perrin from Goodnight Tiger (Little Red Riding Hood), Jill from Goodnight Tiger (Happy Dwarf).

PROCESS!

The process for those interested, involved getting separate shots of each person / cluster separately and then compositing them all together. After working out the composition (allowing room visually in the top left corner for the X-press masthead etc) placing each character in the setting – I mounted my camera on a tripod so that the composition would be the same for each of the separate shots I was going to take. With the lighting I used one off camera flash along with a reflector and with the awesome help of my other half Brendan and X-Press fashion editor /stylist Miss Bergmeier – we lit each each character separately moving around ‘the composition’ for each of the separate shots. While the other characters / band members were waiting for their shot they stayed in each of their positions which is why as you will see below they aren’t posing while the others are being shot.

Dwarves

Snow White

Wolf

Red Riding Hood

Prince Charming and Cinderella

So after compositing each of the separate shots together I went on to do around 60 light and colour adjustments masking and painting in all the various areas to begin to ‘blend’ the composited images together and sort out any areas of overlap where the light was dramatically different to the adjacent image layer. Also making various colour adjustments to the wardrobe and re-designing the overall colour pallete of the image to make it look more ‘magical’ to reinforce the fairytale concept driven my Emma’s styling.

Then I finished off with a series of layers where I manually painted in the light source / light through the trees, generally did some more messing around with curves, light, contrast and colours to tie the whole thing together for the final image (below).

Tags: In the pines, Perth, publication, retouching, tutorial, X-Press Magazine
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Retouch process – mini tutorial 1

Written by Otilee on November 28, 2009 – 4:48 pm -

Photographer Leon Dee has very kindly given me permission to post the before / after of the following gorgeous image of his that I’ve done some retouching on. I’ve been getting asked a lot about my retouching so I thought I’d upload this in stages detailing my process with this image.

The order and number of stages/layers varies from image to image however the below is how I approached this one.

RAW SHOT

The first was a duplicate of the background layer using the healing brush to remove the forehead scar and ear piercing followed by a series of around 6 layers of initial colour adjustments including hue/saturation layers, selective colour layers and photo filters.

Initial colour layers altered things such as the hand print colour and the lip stripe to appear as the same hue and a series of skin tone colour alterations.

Next grouped stage was a series of around 5 light adjustment curve layers to lighten up the eyes, give more contrast using the light play on the skin and a slight background lighting adjustment.

I wouldn’t normally flatten the image at this stage but wanted to play around with the composition by seeing how the hair would look if I extended it to the upper left corner like a rad African Queen style beehive do (I liked how this was going so I went with it). To do this I did a series of actions liquifying and clone stamping portions of the hair to achieve the shape / height I was after. As well as some very slight face alterations (opening up the left eye more etc).

At this stage the clone stamping wasn’t completely successful – if you look closely you can see the duplicate strands and a slight green fuzzy at the top were the original hair height was.

Then went on to a few flattened layers of skin retouching using a combination of the healing brush and dodge and burn tools with a really small brush size to effectively resurface areas of the skin without losing the skin texture (soooo important!!)

At this point I thought it would be cool to get a nice colour repetition happening visually with the image – as I’d already altered the lip stripe colour to correspond with the hand print on the cheek I thought a rad gold lipstick to tie in with the necklace beads would provide a nice balance. Changing the lip colour was done across two layers using a combination of photo filter and curves. It was at this point that the white paint mark on the opposite cheek (that worked with the original makeup as it tied in with the white lip colour) looked out of place so I flattened again to do a cheek reconstruction with skin texture from the opposite cheek as well as a general clean up (around the lips etc) using a combination of the clone, healing and dodge and burn tools.

Next came some curves layers to add some light contours to the cheekbones, chin, eyesockets / browridge and nose. Followed by some more hue/saturation and selective colour layers to re-adjust skin tone and background colours as well as some additional flattening and skin retouching layers (sometimes when you mess around with light and colours after an initial retouch other blemishes and imperfections become visible). Followed by finally fixing the hair clone / green glow issue by re-cloning other parts of hair, dodging and burning as well as some curve adjustments to finish it off.