Trade Secrets: Fashion

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|| SportsShooter.com: News Item: Posted 2006-01-13

Trade Secrets: Fashion
Kyle Green's fashion photograph is the eleventh in a series of SportsShooter.com features called "Trade Secrets."

By Kyle Green, The Roanoke Times

Photo by Kyle Green / Portland Tribune

TONED IMAGE: Amber's turquoise ballgown has a jewel-encrusted bodice. a lozenge-pink, ultrasuede coat staves off the early spring.

"I have a great idea for the spring fashion shoot". Usually when I hear those words from a writer, I am skeptical, but when Portland Tribune Fashion writer Jill Spitznass told me that Oaks Park Amusement Park in Sellwood, Oregon had agreed to let us shoot on location, I changed my mind. The park wouldn't be open for two more weeks, and we had full access to all areas of the park, plus the Tribune was paying two models to join us for the shoot.

On the day of the shoot, I gathered the writer, models, and my equipment (Canon 1-D, 2 550 EX strobes, Canon ST-E2 Speedlite Transmitter, 16-35mm, 50mm, and 70-200mm, light stands, and umbrella...for the model in the $1500 dress...Portland is notorious for rain in the spring) and headed to the park. I didn't do much advance planning for the shoot, probably because I love the excitement that photojournalism offers you on a daily basis (walk into a place, and within 5 minutes, find a suitable location, set up your lights, and create). I also work best when I light my shots as best I can on location, and then do most of my creating in post production.

The shoot went well...we stayed dry and the models were professional. I posed the models next to a series of empty rides, and in an empty park, the feeling was quite surreal. The day was so gray and bland, with heavy overcast skies, the colors of the dresses really stood out. This idea became the catalyst for the final version of the picture. I decided when I got back to the office, that I would use Photoshop to suck all of the color out of the frame except for what the model was wearing. This technique would allow the viewer to focus on the clothing items in each picture.

The raw file was fine, but fairly boring...nicely exposed but not much punch. First, I did some basic toning to the picture, adjusting the levels, contrast, and adding some saturation, then I set this as my history state in the history pallet. I started by knocking out all of the color in Photoshop with the hue/saturation command. I like to click colorize box, then drag the hue down to the low 30's, leaving the saturation and lightness alone. This gave me a nice sepia/warm brown town.

Then I used the history brush to bring back the color to my toned version, painting over the portions of the picture I wanted to be in color, specifically, the model's dress, skin, and the background cars on the Ferris wheel. This needs to be done carefully, usually with a small brush, and with a few corrections...if I color outside of the lines. The history brush is the most powerful tool in Photoshop. I prefer it on this type of work because 1. I don't like making clipping paths, and 2. I feel is give me more freedom to be artistic with my picture...kind of like dipping a brush in paint, then applying to your canvas.

Photo by Kyle Green / Portland Tribune

RAW IMAGE

When I was done painting back in the color, I liked the image, but felt that it needed to be taken a little further. I wanted to create a dreamlike feeling to the image. I did this by using the elliptical marquee tool to select the middle part of the picture, then selecting the inverse, feathered about 200 pixels, then applied a Gaussian blur to (radius of around 7 pixels). Next I selected the curves pallet and darkened the selection slightly.

The last part was to remove the highlight on her forehead. This was done in Photoshop 6, so I did not have the healing tool to work with. I selected skin tone next to the highlight with the eyedropper tool, and then painted with the brush tool set at 10% lightly over her forehead. This works well, because the highlight is not removed, just lessened enough that it doesn't look as though there is a giant sun reflecting off of her forehead.

I applied this technique to the rest of the photos, about eight in all. It took most of the next several days and about ten hours of post production until I was happy with all of the pictures. I thought that this picture would be the lead photo, but the editors choose another photo because it had space to both drop in headline text on the bottom of the image, and put the masthead over the top part of the image...(oh, the indignities we photographers suffer). This image did run six columns on the inside page, however, so I wasn't too upset. All in all, I was pleased with this image. The raw image would have been fine with a small amount of toning, but with a little creativity and Photoshop, I was able to come away with a final image that was true to my "style".

Kyle Green is a staff photographer for The Roanoke Times.

"Trade Secrets" is a series of educational features where SportsShooter.com members reveal the inside-information about how they were able to create a specific image (or two.) To nominate an image for this feature, please send a message to the SportsShooter.com admin staff here: http://www.sportsshooter.com/contactus.html The SportsShooter.com admin staff reserves the right to accept, or not accept, any nomination.

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