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

How to Train Your Stitch - Piece Breakdown

A few weeks ago when How to Train Your Dragon 2 came out, I went and saw it opening day. I absolutely LOVED the film. For those who know me, they'll know that Stitch from Lilo and Stitch is one of my favorite animated characters. Well, Chris Sanders, the man behind Stitch, is also one of the men behind the creation of Toothless, another of my favorite characters. Since I'm a big fan of Chris' work, I decided that I wanted to do another mashup piece, this time combining Stitch and Toothless. I started out with several concepts as to what a "Stitchless" might look like.

I wasn't too happy with any of these, so I decided to instead jump right into Photoshop and just begin to sketch. Initially in these concepts I tried to combine aspects of Stitch and Toothless into a new creature. I decided my best approach would be to take Stitch's design and then modify him to look more like Toothless, which resulted in this sketch.

Now that I had a sketch I was happy with, I went back and cleaned up the art.

I was pretty happy with how the lineart turned out so the next step was to add color!

Now that the color was done, the final step was to add a shadow and recreate the How to Train Your Dragon and Stitch Logos

And there we go! The finished piece! I hope you guys enjoyed seeing the process behind this one. I plan on doing more breakdowns like this in the future where I include the original concepts.

As always enjoy!

~Josh