Catchlight Studios Photography

Trash the Dress

We had a fun workshop on Saturday evening at Ponce Inlet Island, just south of Daytona Beach. The theme was "Trash the Dress" and to help us with that, we had four lovely models, Ashley, Kelsey, Lindsey and Rebecca. The workshop was led by local photographer Maurice Rodriguez,

We had 15 participants and four instructors, and everyone had a great time shooting the models on sand, rocks and in the ocean. Here are a few images from the shoot - all were captured on a Nikon D3s with either a 24-70 or 70-200 mm lens. Lighting was via a Quantum T5D-r flash triggered with PocketWizard Plus II transceivers.

Getting perfect color with the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport

Getting accurate AND consistent color can be difficult in digital photography. Every camera records color a little differently, monitors display colors differently and printers reproduce color in various ways depending on the papers and inks in use.

A great first step to digital color management is to capture color accurately in the first place. This became very easy with the advent of X-Rite's Color Checker Passport. The product comes with three color enhancement targets:

The Creative Enhancement Target contains color patches to enhance portrait and landscape images, and to evaluate shadow details or highlight clipping.

The White Balance Target allows the user to create a custom in-camera white balance eliminating the need to correct each image later.

The Classic Target is a mini-version of the industry standard color reference target for creating DNG profiles and for evaluating specific colors.

We use ours primarily to create a custom calibration profile for use in Adobe Lightroom. The supplied software makes this extremely simple to do. First, you take a photograph with the Classic Target in the frame (it does not have to fill the frame).

Then, in Lightroom (or Camera Raw) you Export that image to the X-Rite software. The program creates a Camera Calibration (DNG) profile that is specific to the camera and the lighting conditions employed. The system is smart in that you will not be able to select a profile generated for a different camera. The process takes only a minute or so.

After restarting Lightroom, your new DNG profile will be in the drop-down menu in Lightroom's Camera Calibration panel.

When doing corporate headshot work, we like to create a custom White Balance AND a custom Camera Calibration before we shoot the first client. Then, by shooting tethered to a laptop computer running Lightroom, every image is color corrected automatically. The result is perfectly accurate and consistent color for the entire shoot - with almost no post-processing required!

 

 

Enhancing Location Portraiture with Topaz Adjust

For those that have not seen or tried the Topaz suite of plugins for Photoshop, do yourself a favor and head over to their web site and download a few free trials. My personal favorite is Topaz Adjust - and I use it a lot! For under $50, I think this is the best value plugin out there.

Like most of the Topaz suite, the plugin loads with a series of presets which are a great starting point for your image. You can click on any one and the preview window will update with the changes applied. From there, you can fine-tune with the slider controls to your heart's content.

In this image of Trent, I chose one of my favorites, the Vibrance preset. This gives a great color pop and adds a good dose of mid-tone contrast without going too "over the top" (easy to do by the way).

Given that one of the principal applications of Topaz Adjust is to add mid-tone contrast and give things a 'gritty' look, you might think that portraits would not be a good application for it. For senior portraits though, a gritty or grungy look is definitely popular and easy to achieve in Topaz. Nevertheless, you need to be careful - especially with female portraits - because the effect can look very unattractive on skin.

Using Photoshop's Layers and Masks, however, it is easy to keep the skin intact and leave the Topaz effect just on the background and optionally, the subject's clothes. To do this, first duplicate the layer in Photoshop. Then, run the Topaz effect that you want on the top layer. Add a Mask (white by default) and using the Brush tool, paint with black where you want to remove the effect (the skin). The screenshot below was taken just after the effect was painted out. Quick and easy!

This is a great technique to make backgrounds (especially urban or mechanical) really 'pop'. Here are a few before and after images. As you can see in the first image pair, the technique works really well for photographs that will be subsequently converted to monochrome. In this example, I used Nik Silver Efex Pro which added still more contrast to the image.

If you already have Nik's Color Efex Pro plugin you can achieve much the same thing using their Tonal Contrast filter.