Sorry for the looong post! I know I said I was going to work on warrenshea.com but instead, I spent tonight learning about photo manipulation. To be honest, I thought my Adobe Photoshop skillz were good. Not great, but pretty good. But no, there’s so much to learn and do with this program, it’s pretty ridiculous. Anyways, I spent some time Googling photo manipulation.
“How to get the background white”
“How to remove darkened corners”
“How to sharpen an image”
They all led me to some Photoshop skills. You can see the difference in each shot as the quality of the photo is increased. The order of changes for WHY I did them:
1. Adjusting the tone/color. I find that sometimes the tone can be off….doing either of these will make it a nicer one. A blue instead of a yellow, stuff like that.
2. Adjusting the levels to increase the lightness around a figure.
3. Lens Correction to increase the lightness around the corners of the shot.
4. Vibrance to increase some color contrast
5. High Pass filter, to increase sharpness. I LOVE this step, it looks fantastic after.
Anyways, I learned that the 8 hours of photography last weekend were wasted. The lightsources I chose to lighten some things caused a dark shadow behind my figure. No amount of Lens Correction can fix it….sigh. The shots I took when I first got my light box are better to manipulate. Really though, I need more light for one. And two, a better camera. Doubt I’ll be able to get the latter any time soon. Maybe I can do something about the former…need to hit up a Henry’s.
Nice man! That’s an awesome photo! I agree that lighting needs some work, but I can see you’re working on that. :) I’m so interested to see your collections as they’re photographed. I could never bring myself to collect figures even though they’re so cool!