video game and movie
. Although I'm not done editing the images, I've gotten far enough through the process to show something interesting from my workflow.I used two lights for this shot, both above right; one was a head with a 7" reflector
+ grid
that lights the top of the head, and the second was a 2' by 2' Profoto softbox , which lights up the hands and the guns. I used a small fog machine
for the smoke. I deliberately got a low wattage machine so that I could run it from my generator, and so it wouldn't fill my tiny studio with fog in 5 seconds.So here's how the raw image from my Hasselblad (ISO 50, f8.0 @1/350 sec) looks in Lightroom
to start:
Ok, so I'm happy with the pose, but it needs to be way brighter. I jack up the Exposure by about a stop, +50 Fill Light, +100 Clarity, -20 Vibrance. Those moves get me to this:
Now I need more Clarity, but I already maxed out the slider at 100 above. There's a really sneaky way to get around this; hit Command E to edit in Photoshop, do any adjustment, and close the image saving it back into Lightroom. This will effectively zero out all your LR sliders and you can start all over again. Here it is with another 100 clarity added as well as a gradient to knock down the too hot right side:
Now, its starting to look like something, so I take the image back into Photoshop, add the falling magazines (with a 10 pixel motion blur), illustrate some smoke coming from the barrels (tutorial), and back into LR:
The shot is nearly done, but I'm looking for more, so I keep tweaking the color for something grittier, and the gradient I put on earlier is no longer working, so I fade it back. Here's what it looks like so far:
That's all I have so far, but I'm going out today to shoot some alleys to strip into the fog for an extra dimension. I will post that as soon as I have it all together. If you have any questions, feel free to comment, or send me an email.
