Tag Archives: photoshop

06/12/14

Making of "Ephemeral dreams"

To create this work, I mixed a 3D rendered labyrinth with some photos. The final photo is composed by these three kinds of images, created in this order:

Hands: I used a Canon 17-40L lens at 17mm, f/20 to get a lot of dof and flash on the right with a small softbox.

hands_setuphands

 Sand falling:

I needed to get some photos of sand falling and merge them together to create the parts where the labyrinth was melting. My photoshop skills are very limited so I had to get a good perspective and shoot at 17mm too in order to facilitate the edition. I did some tries using a shutter speed of 1/30, also f/20 and natural light to get a kind of “silk effect”, but when I joined the captures with the 3D labyrinth, the result looked like plastic. I repeated the sand captures using flash to get the opposite appearance (freeze the motion), and I stuck with that setup for the rest of the photos I needed (just 3 or 4).

sand_setup

sand

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Labyrinth: Modeled with 3D Max 2014 with iray. First I created in Photoshop a 2D image in black and white with the labyrinth I wanted, until I got this:

plantilla_laberint2

I added some layers and used the gradient tool to darken the corners so that the labyrinth appeared that was melting when applying later the “displace” modifier in 3D Max (depending on the shade of gray, the height of each wall will differ).

Then in 3D Max, applying the modifier “displace” I used the displace map created to get the 3D appearance. With the modifiers melt, noise, wave and bend I added some imperfections, and also edited the mesh of the labyrinth to melt much drastically the middle part and the sides. Result:

laberint_high_low_mid_fused

Each part was processed with Lightroom to add some dramatism by using clarity and blacks, and changing the temperature of the captures, and also desaturating to have a similar appearance in all of them and facilitate the Photoshop part.

Final photo:

07/19/11

RAW Quality Infrared Photography

One of the typical issues I had when doing infrared photography is that when shooting in RAW format, when we import a photo in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, everything turns reddish again, as if we hadn’t used a proper white balance.

That happens because at least both Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom aren’t capable of using temperatures lower to 2000º K, and when we import a RAW file that had a lower temperature than that (which is usual in infrared photography lol), Photoshop sets the temperature to 2000º K because it can’t go lower.

We need a quite lower temperature so even if we swap red and blue channels to get the proper colors, the result will be still much worse than what we could have obtained when processing with the correct temperature.

(See image 1 for bad temperature example)

The solution? Use another software, at least to import the RAW file.

When I saw this problem I tried other applications and I personally like Oloneo PhotoEngine (www.oloneo.com), which is more a HDR Software than a RAW processing tool, but works great to solve the problem with infrared photography (They offer a 30-day trial).

In Oloneo, we just need to import the RAW file and adjust whatever we want, EXCEPT temperature.

As soon as we touch the temperature slider, Oloneo will try to change the temperature to the original and in this case the result will be horrible again, because Oloneo’s lowest temperature is 2500º K, still not enough! Then, do not touch the slider and change whatever you want (I find very useful the detail strength slider, it really enhances a lot of details).

Once done, we export as TIF format.

(See image 2 for good temperature example, exported with Oloneo, imported in Photoshop and then swapping red and blue channels)

 

Now we can import the TIF file in Photoshop or wherever we want without temperature problems and with RAW image quality!

 

Here’s a different perspective of the same place, using some split toning done with Lightroom:

Natural leading