A "Fantastic" Selfie! - Piece Breakdown

Happy Halloween everyone! In honor of the holiday spirit, I thought it would be fun to do another Photoshop breakdown of my latest photo, which is also my Halloween costume this year! As you are well aware by now, my favorite Doctor from Doctor Who is the 9th Doctor! I previously made some Psychic Paper so I decided to complete my first ever cosplay! I wanted to take a really cool portrait to feature the costume, and I thought it would be funny if the Doctor was taking a selfie on the TARDIS! Here's how I achieved that photo!

The first step was to take a photo! I set up my green screen behind me to make it easier to remove myself from the background later on! I also used three lights to get myself nicely lit so I would somewhat match the background image I picked. You can actually see my lighting setup here if you're interested!

The next step was to remove the original background and place in my new background image.

This is where I really began to make the photo blend in with the scene. I did some basic color correction, removed the green spill leftover on the jacket, and got rid of the shadow cast on my face by my Sonic Screwdriver.

Now I added some shadows to the side of me and did a final color grade of the image so it match the background.

The final step for this part of the composite, was adding a lens flare to the sonic and a slight vignette.

Now I took another photo of myself taking a selfie. I didn't have any fancy lighting set up for this one, but I did make sure I chose a lens that would leave my background nice and blurry. This was important for later

Next I cut myself out of the original photo and threw in a blurry version of my background from the other photo.

The next step was to piece the background and foreground together and do some color correction to the foreground to match the scene.

Next I added in the composite image from earlier, and recreated the iPhone camera interface. I also added a slight glow coming from the screen.

The final step was to add a flare behind the phone, integrate the screen, do a final color grade, and voilà! It was done!

I hope you guys liked this piece, I'm really really happy with it! Special thanks for my buddy Edward Boswell for giving me some great feedback while I working on the final composition!

Thanks for stopping by, I hope you have a happy Halloween and as always, enjoy!

~Josh 

Toothless - Piece Breakdown

I thought it might be fun to show my process for editing my latest photo. I recently got a new camera, a Sony A77, which is a BEAST of a camera. Something that I've always found fascinating is macro photography of toys and action figures. I love it when the photographer uses them as if they were real life models and tells a story with the piece. As you know I'm a huge fan of How to Train Your Dragon, so I decided to do a macro photo of my Toothless figurine. Here is the original photo straight out of the camera.

It's not too bad of a photo, but I know that I could do so much more with it. Here's what I did:

The first thing I did was recompose the shot to match with the rule of thirds.

Next I did some cleanup to the background, getting rid of some stray pieces of grass.

Since I wanted Toothless to be the focus of the image, I sharpened him up a bit.

This step is probably really subtle, but I added some dust by the light source to add a bit of atmosphere to the piece.

While I had some really nice background defocus going on, I wanted to add a bit of bokeh as well.

Now that I had most of the touchups done, I did some basic color correction to make the greens really pop.

Something I did on this piece, since I was trying to tell a story, was add some widescreen bars to make it feel a bit more cinematic.

I also added a vignette to add to the cinematic feeling a bit. Plus I really like vignettes haha

And here's the final image! I added a lens flare to the image, whichI think really pulled it all together!

Well there ya go! Just a quick little look into how I edited this piece. Hopefully you guys like the finished product as much as I do.

Thanks for stopping by and as always enjoy!

~Josh

Lake Eola Photo Shoot

So two weekends ago  I went with two of my best friends, Dana and Cayla, to do a mini photoshoot by a lake near our school. I've discovered that over the past three years that I have a passion for photography. Dana and Cayla wanted to take some cool photos and I wanted more work for my site, so off shooting we went. Here are just a few of my favorite photos from the shoot.

As always I hope you enjoyed this post! I have some very exciting stuff coming soon!

~Josh