Photoshop – Cullen Style

Don’t forget to enter my contest to win a copy of Scott Kelby’s Lightroom book, here.

Hello lwm3b readers! First off I want to thank Darcy for the chance to share a bit of my image making process and love for photography in general. Oh, and of course many thanks for bringing her mad design skills to my blog. The woman’s got style. Alright, enough with the praise, let’s get to it.

Photoshop. Is it expensive? Yes. (Although there is an educational discount. Hint, hint) Is the learning curve kinda steep? It can be. Is there a better program when it comes to the “heavy lifting” of image work? In my opinion, no. I know when I’m using Photoshop that I’m only scratching the surface of it’s potential, but I continue to learn and find it invaluable for a lot of my image making.

I’ll be using an image that I put together recently for my wife’s blog. She came to me with a picture that some of you might be familiar with.

She said she wanted to create an image that looked like that but using her hands holding a box of Twilight band-aids. They make Twilight band-aids? Ok, no problem. Looking at the original image I could see there were several key things I needed to focus on. First, the color of the arms really set the mood for the image. Second, I needed to take the original photo in a way that would make it easy to black out the background. And third, I would need to blur the hands and arms to make the band-aid box pop.

Ok, let’s start with the original photo, straight out of the camera.

The main things I was concerned about here were getting good, even light and filling in as much of the background with black as I could. I used a very sophisticated method of laying a black shirt down on the coffee table and smoothing it out, kinda. Fortunately I happened to be wearing a black shirt so I ripped it off and dazzled my wife. Uh, I mean I took it off and quickly put on a different shirt so I wouldn’t scare the children. Hopefully that’s not too risque for anyone. Right, moving on. After bringing the photo into my capture program (Apple’s Aperture) I gave it a quick once over and thought it only needed a little bump in saturation before I shot it over to Photoshop. Hold on to your snow shoes, this is where it gets good!

I wanted to address the mood of the image first by getting the color of the hands and arms to match the inspiration image as closely as possible. My secret weapons in most of my image processing are a suite of plug-ins from a company called Nik Software. They are a bit expensive, but MAN do they rock! I can say that they’ve really helped me to create a look for my images that I would’ve struggled to find without them. Having said that, I know not everyone (ok most people) will have access to these plug-ins so I will show ways that you can achieve the same look with filters and adjustments that come standard in Photoshop. To my eye the inspiration image had a slightly tweaked black and white vibe going on. I used a Nik plug-in called Silver Efex Pro to dial in the color but you could achieve the same result by duplicating the background layer (duplicate by dragging it onto the button circled below) and then adding an appropriately colored photo filter.

You can quickly get to the photo filters by clicking on the half-darkened circle on the bottom bar and choosing Photo Filters.

Now that I’ve done that, the whole image has this black & white look. If you look at the inspiration image, you can see that the apple is still bright red while the rest of the image has most of the color removed. No big though, since one of Photoshops greatest tools is layers. The reason I duplicated the background layer in the previous step instead of applying the Photo Filter to the original is because I needed to keep the original color of the band-aid box intact. To bring that back now I need to use a layer mask. To add a layer mask you just click on the button that looks like a circle inside a box.

This adds a new box next to the little thumbnail of your image. To reveal the band-aid box I just chose a black brush and painted over the box to reveal the color underneath.

Time to get my blur on. I started by copying the layer I just made. (Drag it to the layer button) You got layers, use ‘em! Then I went to the Filter->Blur->Gaussian Blur. I chose a setting of about 5. You can play with this and see the effect in real time. Of course this blurs the whole layer so now my box is blurry too. Not to worry though ’cause we got the layer mask mojo flowin’. Even better, we already made a mask for the box in the previous step so let’s use that. Option (Alt) click on the layer mask you already made and drag it up to the new layer. Ninja move! Instant, perfect mask for the box.

Still with me? Sweet. Ok, I’m starting to get things where I want them. Next step is to black out the background. Putting the black shirt down when I took the photo really helped me here. The first thing I did was adjust the contrast to make the shirt go totally black. This also had the effect of deepening the shadows in the hands, much like the inspiration image.

The next step was prompted by my wife coming over and saying “the color on the arms doesn’t really look right”. I whipped out the Hue/Saturation adjustment and tweaked the color a bit until I got the thumbs up. I can’t really complain because my wife sees colors better than I do, and she’s the client here. Client’s always right! Alright, shirt’s blacked out, color’s right, time to fill in the areas that weren’t covered by the shirt originally. The easiest way to do that is to create a new layer (click this button)

and fill it with black. Edit menu -> Fill, choose black. Having done that you can Option (or Alt) click on our handy dandy Layer Mask button to create a black mask. Button combo! Now to make the black layer show through where you need it, just choose a white brush and paint it in. And with that the image is done!

Thanks for sticking with me through that. There is so much more you can do with Photoshop, but I hope that I’ve shown you some of the potential. Truly, if you can picture it in your mind, you can make it happen with this program. I find myself learning something new each time I use it.

And thanks again to Darcy for this chance to share a bit of Photoshop fun and inspiration behind this image. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Marshall is a sound mixer for feature films, who lives in Southern California with his wife and three kids. And five cats. And three bunnies. And a fish named Captain Jack.

Don’t miss a post! Subscribe to lwm3b. In a reader? Come visit me; it’s prettier here.