As promised, Rick Shore Composites in progress

Finding 5 minutes to blog today I’m taking advantage and blogging away!  I’m thinking that if I want to keep the blog regular I’m going to have to start pre-writing posts again, or doing posts in the evening.  Super busy time of year, and it’s honestly hard to prioritize the blog.

Last week I did a shoot for Rick Shore (you may or may not recall).  Well, I’m getting into creating cutouts for composites, and as usual I’m getting ahead of myself by trying ideas out.  Today I’m going to share 2 images that are in process, but not finished.

Image number 1 is from Rick’s “Working Barn” and the shot I did of him last week.  So, two copyrights here gang, now downloading.  🙂

While we were doing our shoot in studio I was actually going back to the images Rick wanted to use to check angles and perspective.  I wanted to make sure that I was shooting at angles that would work with his images.  Fortunately we had a stool in studio and I positioned Rick so we could make it look like he was really sitting on the fence.

I’ve decided that I want to keep Rick in color, but still blend well enough with the black & white image.  I duplicated the layer of Rick, converted the new layer to b&w, and then did an overlay.  Desaturated him a little with that move.  The final touch so far is some dodging and burning of Rick.

A final touch?  His guitar is also in the background leaning up against the barn.  I might add his camera to the scene as well, but I’m still pondering how that would look.

Image number 2 is going to need more work.  The hotspot on his hand and the spots on the top of his tripod need to be dropped down a bit.  They make you wonder where the light is coming from and distract from the composite.  So some more work there.

On the positive side for this one Rick’s stance is spot on for the angles in his original image.  Check out his foot.  Just the right positioning for the lay of the land.  I’m going to add some of the red sand up his shoe so it looks like he’s slightly sunk into the red sand, and do the same for the back tripod leg as well.

These types of images are always works in progress for me, and I thought I’d share the 60% done images with you today.  I really do get a kick out of compositing.  The tough part is using someone else’s images that were shot without thinking about blending new elements into them.  You’ve got to position your models based on the original images, so you need to have them on hand when doing your shoot.