Behind the Scenes – Grell Juliette

This weekend just passed, I hosted a cosplay/photo shoot gathering as a housewarming party at our new home. We live on a forested block which has a lot of photographic potential, and this is one of the shoots I did that day with my friend, fashion designer Anna Cabral. You can see the album of twenty photos here. I thought it might be interesting to show you the behind the scenes process of one of the photos:

The shoot is of Annie’s favourite character, Grell, from the manga Kuro Shitsuji. Annie told me that one panel, Grell fantasised about becoming Juliette and was depicted from only the shoulders up in the outfit that inspired Annie. With that tiny spark of inspiration, Annie created this entire gorgeous outfit from scratch. The manga is a kind of supernatural gothic horror theme (fans please forgive my gross generalisation!), and we wanted the shoot to reflect this, with a dark, slightly foreboding feel to it. To help us see the look during the shoot, I used tungsten white balance, to pre-visualise a cool blue look.

The ambient light was sufficient for the shoot, but I wanted to add some contrast, and darken the background to give more of a feeling of being at dusk. To do this I used a flash mounted in my Orbis ring flash modifier. The Orbis is primarily a ring flash, and I’d used it as such earlier in the shoot, but it also is an excellent lightweight largish light source for use off camera. I set the flash power at about one and a half stops brighter than the ambient. For this particular photo, I wanted to draw attention to Annie’s face, and let the light trail off towards the ground, so I had our friend Sam hold the light close to Annie. Incidentally Sam is an excellent photographer as well. Check out her work here: http://reclog.wordpress.com/

Because I knew Sam would be in shot, I took another shot from the same position, with the same composition, without Sam in the image. I would then use that to make a composite in Photoshop so that Sam could be removed.

In processing I imported the photos into Lightroom 4.0 and processed the image using basic global adjustments and a couple of local adjustment brushes as follows:

In the Basic panel I primarily dropped the white balance way down into the cool tones, increased the contrast, decreased the vibrance and increased the saturation. This combination gave it a dreamlike dusk feeling. The problem with that is that Annie’s skin tones went very blue, and the gorgeous dress went from red/burgundy to a deep purple/blue. To correct that, I used the adjustment brush.

Here I corrected the white balance to strongly warm up Annie and the dress. I also made the tint more magenta to make the reds pop and correct from the slight green cast that comes from shooting in a forest. I also reduced the clarity a bit more and slightly bumped up the exposure to make Annie look more ethereal. I used the erase brush to fade off the mask towards the bottom to make sure Annie was still anchored in the image, rather than looking like she was added afterwards.

Finally I added a very subtle halo or glow around Annie:

Once all of the processing was done in Lightroom, I synced the image with the one taken without Sam in the frame. The two photos were exported at full size as TIFF images. These were then opened in Photoshop and composited to remove Sam. The result was saved and re-imported into Lightroom to keep it in my workflow. The final exported image looked like this:

I hope you enjoyed the look behind the scenes at the making of this photo! Please have a look at the rest of the shoot here.

If you enjoyed this post-processing walkthrough, you might also like my ebook Photo Nuts and Post.