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Photoshop® Workflow: HDR Boxing Gym Portrait Shoot

Here we go. So I'm gonna create a... Smart Object. No, a new Smart Object via copy. So I'm gonna go and put my little cursor over this little, you know, whatever this little block of... It's not really a color, is it? It's gray. I'm gonna right click. New Smart Object via Copy. Now this is important. You're gonna forget this tomorrow. If you don't do this right, the Joel Grimes grungy look will not work. Okay, I've been doing this for a number of years. So now, I have two layers equally duplicated. Except this one's separate. If I hit Command J, it will definitely make a duplicate tied to RAW. But if I change the top layer to black and white, the bottom one goes to black and white. I don't want that. I want to only change to black and white on the top. So now I double click. I'm back into RAW. And I'm going to convert this to black and white. So, your fourth icon over, on the top here says, HSL/Grayscale. You click on that. Say convert to black and white. Now, here's where the magic ha...

ppens. This black and white option gives me a color palette, that I can move and apply to a black and white image. So watch what happens when I move the orange. Nice and grungy kinda. If I go this way, it blows out the skin. So when I do a fashion, beauty fashion shoot, I push my orange to the right. That'll smooth out my model's skin. But if I do an athlete, I'll go to the left. And I kinda grunge him up a little bit here. Yellow doesn't change a whole lot. Blue, let's see what blue does. Not much, little bit on his hand. So, I don't think there's any green. No green. So really, it's my orange. Red, a little bit on the glove over there. So let's pull the red back a little bit. But really, it's the orange slider on his skin. So, looks pretty darn good. I'm gonna hit OK. So now, we're gonna have a black and white on top, a color on the bottom. And this is where the Joel Grimes magic happens. Okay, so let's hit F. That kinda gets me the ability to move this guy around a little bit. We've got a bunch of stuff over here. Let's just kinda get this off here. We don't need this right now. Okay, so let's get him, so he gets a little more on the screen here. I'm gonna push this over a little bit. Maybe make it a little bigger, but not too big. For years I went just with Soft Light. That gives me a pretty grungy look. But my son Aaron came to me once and said, "Dad, if you go to Luminosity, you can apply that black and white filter pack, but still keeping colors." "What? Are you serious?" What a mazy thing. So now I do that. So look what we did. We changed him, made him a little darker. And then, If I go Command J... So that's actually duplicating the layer, so they match each other. And I change that to Soft Light. I'll grunge it even more. I'm going to pull it back a little bit. Let's go about 50 percent. And then, I'm gonna evaluate my image. Now I can't see your monitor there, so I don't know if it looks too light. But if I go and go, you know, I wish I have a little more detail in the shadow in the background. So, I'll double click, and then I go over here. And say, I'll bring my exposure up just a little bit. Maybe pull down the contrast a little bit. Or more contrast. Let's take a look. So, we're gonna change that a little bit. Hit OK. And now, I get to, look at the final result. So let's see what happens. It opened it up a little bit. Now, at this point I might say, I really wanna go ultra-contrasty, which'll probably bring out the sweat a little bit. Gonna go back here. I'm actually gonna pull my contrast to the right. So let's get a little more contrast here. And I'm only working on the black and white layer right now. Say OK. And we're gonna get a little more detail, a little grunge on him. Let's take a look. And lots of times, I'll hit my F key, and I'll bring it to black. Looks pretty darn good. And, if for example, that got a little blown out. Right? Double click. I'm still in RAW, and I'm gonna go take... And we're gonna knock it down just a little bit here. I'm just coming along here, and it goes to the last, whatever you defaulted last. So we're gonna just go, and just kinda, feather that to right there. Say OK, and it's non-destructive. So you can burn this later in Photoshop, but it's destructive. Does it make sense? That's why you work in a Smart Object. Now, I can burn this. We don't have time to do a lot of this. But I can fix some of the stuff in here. We're gonna have to go and move on, so, let's go over here. And now I got my three Smart Objects. That takes a lot of RAM, folks. So you have a couple options here. If you go Shift Option Command E, you will not remember this tomorrow. You've never done this. That gives you a snapshot of everything below. So all of these aren't gonna show up. They're there if you want them. However, that takes a lot of RAM. Now, I can probably go and say, "look, you know what, I'm gonna throw this away." And I really look at this and go, "you know what, I missed something here." His eyes are a little dark. So I'm gonna go here and make a new one. And I'm just gonna pull this up just a little bit. And we're gonna go the other way, to plus. Say OK. So you know what I'm saying? If I forgot something, but at some point, I'm gonna have to put the ring on the finger. I used that term a lot, because I got a good friend, I'm always teasing him. He's been dating the same girl for 15 years, and I say, "just put the ring on the finger." You see how that brought his eyes out a little bit? Again, I can't see your monitor there. But now, Shift Option Command E. Gives me a snapshot. I'm gonna say, you know what, I am done, I'm gonna flatten all this because I'm moving on. Flatten, here we go. I'm gonna flatten it all. Save my RAM for some other, you know, things I'm gonna do. All right, so, I'm not done yet. On my screen, because we've... Because we've changed the resolution, I cannot get to my palette below. Let's see what happens if I do this. I cannot get to my layers. I would say that doing Photoshop in front of a group of people, there's gonna be something... Oh, there it is. Sorry, that was kinda my fault. Here we go. We're gonna go to Hue/Saturation. I just needed to move this. It was too low. And also, by the way, if you wanna do your view... no sorry, workspace. It defaulted here to Essential. I should be on Photography, but I'm not gonna change it right now. We're gonna keep moving. So you can change that around. OK, so, Hue/Saturation. I've got way too much warmth in him. And part of it is because of the way I'm treating the image. So, I do on every image. I go minus somewhere around 15 to 20 on the overall master. Red, I'll go by minus 10-ish, 12-ish, somewhere around there. Yellow, same thing. That takes out that reddish cast. And I'm color blind, so let's go back to black here. But I do know that I've got a problem there with my color balance. So I desaturated it. Does that make sense? And then, I'm gonna add, usually, I add a vignette. So let's go, a vignette... I guess that's what you call it. Levels. We're gonna go to, over here is the gradient, and we go to circular. And we're gonna pull from center out like this. And there's my mask with the circular gradient. And I just pull my... Levels down a little bit here. So that's gonna, let's make it smaller, so you can see it. We'll turn it off. That's gonna bring him in a little tighter. So your eyes go to him. You don't have to do that. I'm just saying that's something I would do. And then, I've got lots of glares in here. This would be a little hard for me to work every day under these conditions. It's so bright. My screen's a little bit, shiny, picking up windows and stuff. But the next thing I gotta do, is I've gotta fix some areas back here. And also, I might... I might take a Levels here. I should have done this, maybe. I might just fine-tune my contrast. Maybe come to that point. Maybe bring just a little more detail, because I made a vignette. That looks pretty good on my screen. Again, I don't know about the monitors here in the studio. So, let's go from there. I'm gonna take, a black brush. And I'm gonna go, and I'm gonna take, and Option/Alt right here, go click. Pick up that value back there. Let's go a hundred percent. Come on. And we're gonna go like this. This is the fastest way I can do this right now. And then I'm gonna hold down the Shift key. I'm gonna go across here, and bam. See how that just cleans that up there? I'm gonna fix that. I'm gonna fix this. Just blow it up a little bit. So I'm doing a really fast retouch here. And then, let's get rid of Properties here. I'm looking at anything that's bugging me. And let's take my spot healing brush. We're gonna fix that little spot right there, that bugs me. And that bugs me, that bugs me. That bugs me. You see what I'm doing? Anything that takes my eyes away from the overall. Let me move this around here, because I got a lot of junk on my screen. Here's a little spot. Let's see, here's a little spot. Maybe I'll clean it up a little bit in there. So I'm making sure my eyes are not distracted by something. Okay, so now we're not done, I'm gonna (mumbles) black and white. So if I want to go to black and white, there's two options I can do. Which Hue/Saturation wouldn't have changed anything at the time. One is, I create another adjustment layer. So go down here, adjustment layer, black and white. And now I have all these little sliders. And I can still fine-tune his skin the way I wanted here. That's one option. Let's get rid of that. The other is, I can actually go back to RAW. So let's go to Filter, Camera Raw. And in terms of quality, there's probably no difference, because you're not really going back to the original RAW. You're just going to the RAW filter. And I'm gonna go over here, and I can go and convert to black and white, and do the same thing. So it's really up to you. I typically just do an adjustment layer. And so there's my... Pretty darn close to a retouched image. I will also sometimes add a photo filter. Go to sepia, and give just a little bit of warmth. That's gotta be above, sorry. It's gotta be above here. Because you don't want your Hue/Saturation knocking out the warmth. So that gives just a little bit of warmth. I don't know if you can see that on your screen. That's just kinda... Yeah, that gives a little bit of warmth on the overall look. So, there's Rod, HDR, sitting on a bench. All right, do you guys have any... That's kind of, that's that. Let's take a look at it under... As well as I can see. I don't really have gray here. Let's see if I can change this to, light gray. I like to look at it. Small, big. And kinda get a sense of, what's bugging me, if anything. In the one that I did, in the hotel the other night, I actually extended that little line across there, so that I can see the bench across the top. And I'll probably do that, fix a few things. Like I said. Go to sleep on it. You'll wake up the next morning. And you'll go, "what was I thinking?" Right? So, let's just say, that's a good one. So let's go to another one here. So, let's do Ryan, then we can always come back and do another, the other one of Rod here too, okay? So, let's go back to, let's go to Ryan.