Recently I finished a retouching project called the Dark Knight with photographer Brian Bailey and I wanted to share a bit about the making of the series.
The theme for this endeavor was Parkour meets Gotham City. We wanted to showcase the fluid movement of Parkour with a backdrop of gothic cityscapes. Our goal was to transform common Denver landmarks into a dark and sinister world. I loved the idea of taking Denver and turning it into a dark cinematic backdrop for the renegade sport of Parkour so this was an exciting project.
One of the many questions I get in my Photoshop classes is how to do selective black and white photos where the subject is in color but the background is desaturated and turned to black and white. One of my Photoshop students, Jo Brady, happened on this fox in her yard one morning and caught it in this great picture. She wanted to turn the background black and white while leaving the fox in color to enhance its presence. So I thought I would share a step-by-step process on how to do this in Photoshop CS6. You can also do this in older versions of Photoshop including Elements.
As photographers were always trying to create unique looking images and a great way to add some flavor to your photo is with color. You can enhance the mood of a photo by warming or cooling it and the color is what gives a retro looking photo its nostalgic feel. An easy way to add flavor to your photos in Lightroom is by adding color with the Split Toning panel in the Develop module. You can use this heavily adding lots of color or just a hint to nudge the feeling a bit. This can also be done in Adobe Camera Raw with the Split Toning tab.
Using the Split Toning panel when developing your photographs will allow you to add your own unique look by adding color to the highlights or shadows or both. Below is a photo with no color added and the Saturation sliders are set at 0.
One of the cool features in Lightroom is the ability to create Collections of your photographs. Lightroom Collections are a way to group photos for easy viewing in one place. They can span multiple folders and different shoots so long as they are all in the same Catalog. They can also be used to display in a slide show, contact sheet or web gallery.
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