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Photo Touch-Up |
This article is the follow up on my previous article on Model Photography where taking photos of model is just half the work done. Owing to my personal affordability limit in buying expensive photography equipment, it is clear that I could not produce a consistent result with the quality at magazine level. Please note that all photos taken on this site is taken under serious budgetary constraint. This means that photo taking is just half the work done. The taken photos could only be published after some serious filtering and touch-up.
I do believe I achieve something here and I will like to share the procedure that I had tried from many trial and errors. The following are the steps I have taken in taking the photos for Saint Cloth Myth Leo Aioria.
We know that in order to take good photographs we need some serious lighting. The best lighting will be direct sunlight, follow by the expensive studio lights. However, I am only armed with 3 desk light bought from IKEA and an outdated 2.0 mega pixel Digital Camera. For a good result on indoor photo taking, I learned that I could not go any lesser than 3 light sources.
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| 3 desk lights setup for photo taking |
Each position, angle and range reflect a different amount lights to the camera. This means that there is not definite formula to get the right amount of lights without a light measurement device. The cheap way here is to use a digital camera and snap the same photo at different exposure level. This is also known as bracketing. In this case, I started from exposure level at +1.0 to +2.0. These figures is again a guideline and vary on every situations. Some cases I took at -0.5 and increment by 0.5 to +1.5.
In this case, a total of 90 images are taken. I have to filter out badly taken photos such as those that are underexpose, overexpose and out focus. At the end of this process I have 23 out of total 90 left standing.
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| STEP 1 - Total 90 photographs taken | STEP 2 - Only 23 are chosen |
The 23 filtered photos are not the end of the story. I had to go thru Photoshop to do perform image adjustment Each images are adjusted on its contrast, level, color balance and shadow-highlight. You will notice that each photo will have difference in color balance. I use the match color function in Photoshop to achieve a color uniformity for each photos. When it is not giving a good result, I use the photo filter function. Again, photos that can poorly be adjusted are taken out again which left 13 out of total 90 images.
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| STEP 3 - The taken photos has difference in level, color and contrast | STEP 4 - After adjusting the color, contrast and level, these photos still shows difference in color balance |
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| STEP 5 - Applied with photo filter [ Cooling Filters (80) ] and done! | STEP 6 - Tada! 13 good photos ready to be publish! |
Document Date: 12.02.2005
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