Hi everybody, this Craig Tanner for The Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Joan who is an advanced photographer from Virginia; she shot this image for a photo contest with a theme Grand Fairytales. She less knew that historical settlement have James Town. So she said when she saw this theme, she knew she had access to the perfect location for a Cinderella shot and I’ll say that she had the perfect model. This is Joan’s daughter, she used the Nikon D70s, 18-200 zoom, ISO is 1000; had a working Aperture about 7.1 and a Shutter Speed of third of a second. That shutter speed makes me think this was most likely set up on the tripod beautiful model, really beautiful frame and of the setting. I love the balance that’s wrapped around of the front and the back of the room around Cinderella here. I like the space that Joan’s is giving to the top and bottom frame are very balance. I like the place mode of Cinderella; I’m sort of over here on the third thus dynamic. I love the way that the room has become a character in the story because Joan has given it to me just the right amount of space on here. Really beautiful from a color standpoint and you’ve got this historical setting has all this tones, the umlauted colors. But then the white scarf and the white blouse here is really helping to make Cinderella the main subject.
But the main thing to me that’s really pushing this over the top and making it so beautiful is this real classical dramatic lighting. It’s really interesting, we’ve come to call these are quality of light, Rembrandt lighting and Rembrandt was painting at about the same time that Jamestown I was settled so fine congruence. If you think about—when you look at this image, where’s Rembrandt lighting. This is sort of characterized by someone typically—we’re thinking about Portrait light here. We’re thinking about Portrait subject being in a sort of dark poles or shadows with a single key light. That’s pretty high to the side that drives a lot of dimension and form into the portrait, so looks what really interesting here you’re even saying the classic sort of triangle on the shadow side of the face but we associate whether Rembrandt lighting.
A lot of times when we’re talking about looking at Tiger portraits, really beautiful classical quality of light and I think my perfect world improvement for this image. I really just think about accentuating, mainly accentuating the things that already light bringing Cinderella forward a little bit more. Accentuating this dramatic lighting pattern but playing around within the front of the room creating more the lighting effect to create a little bit more dimensional image and start just a one note image with lighting.
I’d like to cut down on a couple of things. I’d like to make it look the light source is more of a near light source so that we don’t have so much light hitting in this corner. This is getting so bright and flattening out just trying to compete with the main subject and I’d also like to cut down on the amount of space back here. Now, on a perfect, perfect world in camera, if I was sort of—or directing the shot and more in camera I’d say, hey let’s look at a variation where we move Cinderella back just a little bit. We actually use this—in the ceiling is a framing device and Cinderella’s head is more in here. There’s more of a dynamic relationship between her and this space shapes and the fireplace and we—by the nature of leaving Cinderella back here cut down a lot of the space back here. The other thing, without much spaces making it sort dominant for me is the elbow. It becomes kind of high contrast and it’s going to dominating,
I’d like to cut down on that, so let’s look at the things that I did here. Knowing that I’m going to make this darker in here, I came in and cleaned up some of these dark areas. What I don’t do in an area that I’m trying to sort of turn of from my photograph standpoint is make darker but it already have some dark values in there and drive those to very-very black. If I make this whole thing down here darker but I still end up with the bunch of local contrast, it’s still going to be visually exciting, so I’m going to use the healing brush to get rid of some of these ideas, qualities of line and dark spots. In the same layer, I’m going to get rid of some of these bright areas that I feel like are just taking away from the main subject, so here’s the Digital Clean-up layer then all with that with the healing brush. I feel it’s working at a 100% maybe I wanted to use clowning a little bit before and after.
Next, what I did was I came in and I’ll just do it again here real quick. I used the Marquee tool to make a selection all the way over about the shoulder right there and I did that on this rescale layer and then I scaled this down and so when I drop that selection and show you what this looks like, that’s the scaling work. And you can see I pushed over a pretty long way to here to cut down on this overall space and watch what it does for the elbow. It just makes that elbow less dominant and there’s more focus now on the face, on the hands and the broom. Now, what we want to do is just crap away all that duplication. So let’s do that. Put Cinderella a little bit more dynamic place in the frame and then this next layer is all about darkening the bottom left hand corner. And one of the real important parts of doing this work here--let’s kind of look at the curve here for a second was not only to make this darker. I’ve picked two points on the curve here to also flatten that area out on the curve so that I don’t add to local contrast. I’m actually getting rid of local contrast as I’m making it darker. And if we go back layers, you can see that I applied this change locally. Here’s what the mask looks like where have painted with white is where I applied it. So I also applied it behind Cinderella to again cut down on all that space back there about making it go darker. And I’ve done this in luminosity blending mode so I won’t have an effect on color just having and effect on value making it more like an arrow light on Cinderella.
I came in, made the light on. Cinderella stays a little bit more dramatic. I thought it was like a little too bright and now you can really see that Rembrandt bright triangle on the shades out of the face and then the last thing I did was I used levels and let’s just look at this. Let’s go to the adjustment panel and you can see I just did a huge hocking adjustment to the levels here to over exaggerate setting a white point. And then I came in and I applied that locally to the mask to create these lighting effects in the front of the shot. Really sort of limit the direction of light and sort of making it seem like--maybe lights coming too in a couple of different places. There’s an opening here in the Cab and maybe a window over here and just getting this more dimension but trying to limit the direction of light that already exist in the shot. And to make it a little bit less of a one-note thing or a light just hitting Cinderella and give a little bit more dimension to other things in there. I did that in normal blending mode and I warmed up those areas in addition to letting the light hit there. Last thing I’ll say here is there are different ways to do lighting effects in Photoshop. I like this way a lot. It lets you have a lot of control and it’s just a levels adjustment. It’s now a lot different things, they’re connected or just something, that happens to the picture and the other thing. I’ll say about lighting effects is that you can learn all kinds of things about how they do these techniques in Photoshop. I’m not trying to be too blunt here but if you don’t actually ever work with lights or really study qualities of lights, they will make it harder to do the work in Photoshop. I’m not trying to be a master of the obvious. I’m really trying to encourage photographer to learn to as much as you can about lighting. If you’re going to try and limit those lighting effects in Photoshop and it doesn’t just have to be doing all lighting with lights, light strobes and hot lights. They could be studying painters, they could be studying cinema and learning different lighting patterns in that way, where we talked about the Rembrandt lighting pattern; just some things to think about in terms of lighting and let’s go back as close as we can in the beginning here.
A Huge thank you to Joan, stunning, stunning environment or portrait of her daughter playing Cinderella, hopes to see you soon, everybody on The Mindful Eye and Daily Critique.
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