Increase lighting drama

[Japaslavian]

Before

After


I haven't done any big Photoshop jobs on anything for a while, so lo' and behold, the first photo I mess with is one of myself...

Anyway, I started off with an awkwardly positioned me, with my 580EXII bouncing off the wall camera-right. I used my 10-22mm, and as you can tell from the original, I didn't have it very straight, and the super wide angle just makes all those things more obvious. So my first task was to straighten out the door frame. This took several sweeps using the Warp function of the Transform tool. I set some horizontal guides and got the frame nice. Unfortunately, this also warped my skinny figure, so I had to duplicate different parts of the layer and do additional warp transforms to to fix everything, ie I would take a marquee of my head, duplicate that, warp it back, and mask it back in. Now normally, I wouldn't keep a shot so lop-sided, but...

After about 30 minutes of transforming, I had lost parts of the image around the edge of the frame, so I cropped a good portion of the image, which I should have done anyway, because I think I shot too wide of a crop anyway.

From there, I wanted to intensify the lighting to give it a little more drama. What I ended up doing was making a curves layer and decreasing the values of everything by about 2 stops, making it look somewhat underexposed except for the major highlights. With this layer I made a vignette using the lasso and making a random circular shape, feathering it by 250 pixels, and adding a mask. Then I continued using the mask and a very small, very soft brush, and at about 50%, decreased every shadow/crease on my clothing, as well as bigger brushing for larger parts, Especially the left side of my pant legs. When I needed to, I brought back in some highlights like the the small jean creases.

Next, on a new layer, I took the dodge tool at 0% hardness and did a similar thing as before on the curves mask, except this time on highlights. I hit my clothing creases, as well as the left side of my face, arms, and forehead.

Finally, I cooled the image off with color balance, and decreased the saturation by about half, then added a contrast layer where I increased the brightness by 10, and the contrast by about 15 if I remember correctly. I was using CS4/did not have legacy checked.

That's the truncated version. I'm sure I missed a few steps but that's the simple gist of it. I like to make my images "professional" looking without looking totally shopped. I think the most major differences came from the things that no one would know about had I not shown the original, ie all the transforming. If I wanted to go back and change anything I might mess with the shadowing on my pant legs, and they don't really seem to be wrapping around light they would naturally, but oh well.
Anyway, I hope you like it. If you have any questions about specific things let me know in this thread or PM me and I'll be happy to answer them for you.

[lej]

Looks really good for me.
Thanks for the info Japaslavian!!