Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Lighting with Photoshop












When I accidentally stumbled on warehouse full of guys carving wooden carousel animals (see May 18 post),
I felt completely naked with only an 80-200 lens on my Nikon D3. Here I was in the middle of a fantastic situation with only a single big non-image-stabilized lens, no strobe, no tripod. What to do?

Shoot, you dummy. Make your body a tripod and light it with Photoshop later.












I wanted atmosphere around the carver.
So in Photoshop CS3, I first dinked around with Filter>Render>Lighting Effects. But that wasn't enough.
Then with the pen tool, I made a selection to darken everything except the shaft of light.
Which do you like better?

2 comments:

JC's Coolio Photos said...

Janis,

Thanks for the PhotoShop mini tutorial. My comment would be to widen the shaft slightly.

Have you heard of Topaz. It is a image altering software. I have used it on some of my photos. Very cool.

Jeff Cameron

Janis said...

Jeff,
Never tried Topaz. Will check it out. Thank you.
janis