So I've had a couple of people ask me how I did the photos for the tssk photo shoot which has led me to this, my first ever tutorial. Don't worry, for those of you who are lazy, you can simply download this action and get right to it. Photoshop is amazing for those of us who lack certain lighting abilities as well as high quality photography equipment, following I will show you how to look like a pro or at least attempt to (basic knowledge of photoshop is assumed). Check out Atiba Jefferson, this is my inspiration.
1) Take a photo, this is probably the most important step, you can only fake so much in photo shop. You need to make sure your subjects work well with the background/location think about colors lights and "image". Arrange your subject(s), these guys didn't just stand where they were on their own. Lastly try different angles expect to get about 5 or 10 good shots out of 100. We can't get into all of the photo composition techniques here, but the above are the basics. I'll be using this photo...
2) After you take a photo, open it in photoshop, then duplicate the original photo layer. Go to image, adjustments, shadows and highlights. Make sure you click show more options, then crank the shadow, highlight, and midtone contrast sliders all the way up click ok. It should now look like this...
3) change the new layer blending to "overlay", soft light works nicely too. Adjust the opacity to your liking, I set it at 40%. You'll notice this brings out a lot of the detail as well as the colors...
4) Create an adjustment layer by clicking on the little halfmoon icon at the bottom of the layers pallet, choose "Hue Saturation", set the saturation to -50, click ok.
5) Create a vignette by creating a new layer and selecting all (cmd/ctrl a), then chose select, modify, feather, I chose 30 for an image this size, click ok. Then select inverse and fill with black.
5) If your happy with that, then your done. To make things a little more dramatic and a bit less noticeable I change the vignette layer blending to overlay and take the opacity down, on this I set it at 60%.
From here you can do any number of things to help bring out the mood of the photo, you can play with the different settings for each of the adjustments as well as add more layers. The last thing I do is once I'm satisfied with the image I flatten it and then run a sharpen filter. This makes it look like I have a much nicer camera than I actually do brings out a little more detail...
The above is the finished product, of course you can take this as far as you like or make it much more subtle. Let me know if you have any questions, and I would love to see what you come up with, thanks for checking it out!
