Cathedral Light Trails

Following on my obsession with light thought I would post another light trail picture.

Took this one a few months back but stumbled across it this evening whilst looking for something else.

Beautiful You

I mentioned in this post a while back that I was doing some photography for some friends that were starting up a website.

Well, Stace & Mags now have the site up and running. Please support them by going to www.beautyu.co.uk and taking a look.

Airbrushing - Because You're Worth It!

I have been doing a few projects recently that have involved some requested photo retouching / airbrushing. I use both Photoshop and Paintshop Pro so experimented with different techniques in each until I came up with something that I was fairly happy with.

This process does differ depending on the photo but I now use a general routine for the smoothing out of skin without making the subject look fake and also trying to keep the important details.

I was looking for a model but as no one was available I had to take a quick snapshot of myself to work on. After a long weekend and lots of late nights, a retouch was just what I needed!!!

Here is the before shot, straight out of the camera.



Here is the same shot again after some retouching.



Click on the images to enlarge as the differences are more noticeable.

================================================

Here are the steps that I look to achieve this.

Opened the original image in Photoshop and removed any blemishes with the spot healing tool

Duplicated the background layer and applied the dust and scratches filter with a radius of about 3 pixels and a threshold of 0

Applied a gaussian blur with a radius of about 1.4 pixels

Applied some texture to the image by using the add noise filter (1%)

Added a layer mask revealing all and filled the mask with black

Set the colour to white and used a paintbrush to brush in the new smooth skin

Lightened up the areas around the eyes and brightened up the eyes themselves

Applied some adjustment layers (curves and colour balance)

This technique does seem to work better on photos of women but then we are used to them having much smoother skin than us guys anyway :)

Lady In Red

......This lady is dead!

Found this dead Coccinellidae (ladybird) at home.



Thought I would capture it on camera as I've done previously with:-

The Fly


and Spiderman Part 3

Graffiti

Came across some old Facebook Graffiti of mine and noticed that you can now embed the replays. Here are few of my Star Wars inspired graffiti pictures...

Vitamin Shot

With the weather getting colder and Swine Flu still hanging around, it might be time for a vitamin shot!

Website Photoshoot

Some friends of mine are starting up a website and asked if I could take a few pictures for the site so I spent an enjoyable evening on Monday taking a variety of shots for them.

As you'll notice from my blog, I don't take a great amount of people shots so it was really good practice for me, especially with a wedding shoot coming up next year. There were a fair few shots that went straight to the recycle bin (the beauty of digital!) but we did end up with some good results and they were both pleased so all is good.

Here is one of the shots taken during the evening. I will post more after their site goes live.