Friday, November 8, 2013

Guess Who My Brother-In-Law Is?

Yeah, that's my brother-in-law.  My wife's "little" brother.  We were over and he'd asked me to find something online for him.  I'd found something I thought might fit the bill, so I handed him my iPad.  That's the "main" lighting for today's image.  He was sitting "Archie Bunker like" in his favorite chair.  I knew the light was dim and cranked up the ISO on a Nikon D300 to 3000.  (Far above what "should be" a reasonable sensitivity setting to avoid noise.)  The shutter speed was 1/15 sec, hand held.  It should have been a mess of a shot, but, with a little work, came out okay.  There's a couple other things I should "confess" to.  The background was his dining room, his shirt was blue and he's actually eighteen years old (no, that last piece is not true).  To find out what became of the dining room and the blue shirt, hit the "Read More".




Obviously the background was replaced.  I'd just been out in the neighborhood taking a couple shots of the last of this year's foliage.  I'm pretty sure there were no bluish leaves around.  I purposely defocused the lens while taking the shots because I knew I wanted them for backgrounds.  There's no "Photoshopping" done to the focus.  An Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer  was added and the red leaves switched to a blue green color.  Another Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer was added to switch his shirt from blue to red.  On the leaf Adj. Layer the Master settings were changed.  There was no specific color to be targeted, so there was no reason for targeting. 
The opposite is true for the shirt.  There, there was a specific color (blue) that needed to be changed.  In the Adj Layer there's a dropdown that has Master as it's heading.  Clicking on the dropdown gives a list of colors that can become the target.  It really doesn't matter which color you select.  Next you'd pick the initial selection eye dropper tool.  (The one without a plus or minus sign.)  Use it to click on the color to be targeted.  In this case it's the blue (original color) of his shirt.  PS will automatically switch the color selection to whatever color is closest to the proper color.  From there it's a simple matter of moving the slider left or right until you get near the proper, altered, color.  Adjusting the Saturation and Lightness should bring the color to the shade you'd be looking for.
A couple other small changes were added to complete the transformation.  A soft (Hardness of 0) Brush (B) was used to dab a little red to the cheek, nose and lips.  Each on its own Layer so the size and Opacity could be independently adjusted.  The Opacity of each Layer is under 10%.
There's really not that big of a transformation in the person.  Just his surrounding.

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