Lau­ren — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

I spent Fri­day at Dave Cross Work­shops for a hands-​on ver­sion of Scott Kelby’s Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It (here­after known as LSR) work­shop. Rather than demon­strat­ing his tech­niques to a con­fer­ence hall filled with nearly a thou­sand peo­ple, this was a work­shop for less than 16 peo­ple. We had three mod­els (two female, one male) and went through five light­ing sce­nar­ios, just like the tour. To be hon­est, I wasn’t sure if we would get through all of the sce­nar­ios. At the end of the day, Scott men­tioned that he also wasn’t sure if we’d get through.

For­tu­nately, we had an excel­lent group of peo­ple in the course who kept things mov­ing along and didn’t get bogged down with shoot­ing a hun­dred frames when we only needed one to retouch. In fact, the friend­li­ness of every­one involved is a major rea­son this was a great day for me. Dave, Scott, & Brad kept every­thing run­ning with a friendly tone, all of the atten­dees were friendly — it was just a fun work­shop because of the people.

The Facil­ity

Dave’s stu­dio is really ver­sa­tile. He has pho­tos and a walk-​through video on his web site. We had plenty of room, water & soda in the fridge, Sub­way deliv­ered for lunch and a lit­tle choco­late fix in the after­noon. If you’re in the Tampa area, he also rents the stu­dio out — for much less than I could rent a place in the Orlando area. Makes me a bit jeal­ous, actu­ally. Since I had such a good time at this work­shop, I won’t have any prob­lems going back if he gets another one that catches my eye.

The Work­shop

The day starts with the hand­outs. Dave has brochures and dis­counts from his spon­sors. Scott passed out copies of his recent book — Pro­fes­sional Por­trait Retouch­ing Tech­niques for Pho­tog­ra­phers, as well as the same work­book used on the LSR Tour. The lat­ter comes with a free down­load of OnOne Soft­ware’s Pho­to­Tools 2 and the Good­ies Dig­i­tal Downoads.

At var­i­ous points in the day, Scott touches on his gear choices and why he made those choices. In some cases, I have the same stuff. For exam­ple, he uses Elinchrom BXRi 500 stu­dio strobes and those are the units I have. The rea­son­ing about strobes, flashes, etc is pretty sim­ple. They make a big burst of light. You can spend a lit­tle or a lot, but you get some­thing that makes a big burst of light. So, you’re left with other fac­tors to help you decide which prod­uct will make your burst of light. Those Elinchrom’s include a radio receiver and the trans­mit­ter can move the light­ing power up/​down by incre­ments of a ¹⁄₁₀^th stop. That’s pretty handy when you com­pare it to going to the strobes after a shot to change the power.

More impor­tant than the burst of light is what you put in front of them — the light mod­i­fiers. I have a few of my own mod­i­fiers, but I’ve been hes­i­tant to invest too much in new ones until I knew what I’d do with them. This work­shop answered those ques­tions for me and changed my pri­or­i­ties about which mod­i­fiers to buy next. Since I already have a 39″ Deep Octa soft box, along with a pair of reflec­tors & grids, I ordered a 17″ beauty dish & dif­fuser when I got home.

My rea­son­ing was from see­ing the same model under dif­fer­ent light­ing con­di­tions and the effect it had upon her com­plex­ion. The image I have of Lau­ren above was retouched, but the orig­i­nal image looks very good by itself. As we saw Scott’s pho­tos of her appear on the mon­i­tor, we were all impressed by her clear skin.

The next setup was the com­plete oppo­site — dra­matic light­ing with quick fall-​off. As each of the images from this setup appeared, I saw all these lit­tle bumps and spots appear­ing on her face that every­one in the room would swear just wasn’t there when you looked at her. Although I’ve read dif­fer­ent things about how to com­ple­ment a person’s com­plex­ion with light­ing before, I had never really seen the dif­fer­ences illus­trated so well before. I love my Deep Octa soft box, but that Beauty Dish looks def­i­nitely cut down on the retouch­ing nec­es­sary in the image. I’ll grant you there were other dif­fer­ences in the setup, but I’m sat­is­fied enough to buy the beauty dish.

Nelly Com­pos­ite — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

Nelly was up next for a cou­ple of com­posit­ing shots. The key tips I learned here was what works best for extract­ing your sub­ject to use in a com­pos­ite. Accord­ing to Scott, an 18% grey back­ground makes things eas­ier than using a white, black or even green screen back­ground. That makes life MUCH sim­pler for me. It means I don’t have to worry about extra light­ing to turn white seam­less into pure white, or pre­vent­ing light spill from get­ting on a roll of black seam­less paper, much less buy­ing a green screen back­ground. Put up a roll of white seam­less, move your sub­ject for­ward and let the back­ground go grey. Mind you, it may go a bit too grey, but that was eas­ily solved in Aper­ture before I exported the image to Pho­to­shop. Had to learn that les­son the hard way, though. When I tried work­ing on the image with too dark of a grey back­ground, there were areas in her hair that I just didn’t get quite right.

The other key tip was just how good Pho­to­shop CS5’s Refine Edge fea­ture is for mask­ing. I’ve used OnOne soft­ware’s Mask Pro in the past. My opin­ion is that it’s a pain in the ass if you don’t have a ton of RAM and strong CPU. The alter­na­tive for lack­ing resources is to break up your mask­ing into sec­tions, which pro­longs the time you need to use that tool. CS5 doesn’t have that prob­lem. There were spots I still needed to tweak, but it did an excel­lent job right off the bat.

While we were dis­cussing this sub­ject, Matt Kloskowski stopped by the work­shop to show Scott the first copy of his new book on com­posit­ing. It just arrived and he was kind enough to pass it around the class to take a look at it. I only flipped through the pages for a few moments, but the pho­tos are stun­ning. I believe it comes out August 7^th, so I’m look­ing for­ward to get­ting a copy of it.

Matt Kloskowski — © Copy­right 2011 by William Beem

Speak­ing of Matt, he was our male model. This image is right out of cam­era with­out any Pho­to­shop. There’s a beauty dish above (no dif­fuser) and he’s being lit with grids from either side behind him. A cou­ple of things about the raw images from this shoot struck me.

• Good light­ing really saves you time later in Photoshop
• Mov­ing an inch or three can put your sub­ject out of the range of good lighting.

In this setup, I noticed Scott had to adjust a few times when Matt changed a pose and stepped for­ward or back­ward — the light was no longer falling where it needed to be. I think I should’ve made a cor­rec­tion in this frame to ask him to tilt his head-​up just a bit and get a bit more light in his eyes.

Retouch­ing for a male sub­ject is a bit dif­fer­ent, of course. Scott demon­strated a few dif­fer­ent tech­niques to add a bit of tex­ture and grit to the image, but done selec­tively. For exam­ple, he could put this through Nik’s Tonal Con­trast fil­ter for a gritty look, but then it seems a bit over­done on Matt’s face — actu­ally even chang­ing the color of his face. Mask­ing out Matt’s face left it as shot, but still added some tex­ture to his clothes or wrist-​wraps. Another sug­ges­tion was to apply the fil­ter and then only mask it in selec­tively on one area, such as the wrist straps. I do the same thing with my HDR images — put the effect only where you need it.

Break­ing New Ground

There were two other things that weren’t nec­es­sar­ily part of the les­son plan, but made an impres­sion upon me. The first was using my Wacom Intous 4 tablet. For about two years, I’ve regarded this thing as the worst money I ever spent on pho­tog­ra­phy gear. Yes, I know. Every­one who has one loves it. Can’t say that I’ve ever been one of those peo­ple, but I brought it to see if I could get some new insight on using the thing. I’ll post about it in more detail this week.

The other aspect was teth­er­ing. I’ve never tried it before, so I was inter­ested to see what I learned about it from Scott. When he talked about the ben­e­fits of using teth­er­ing on a shoot, he asked if every­one used Light­room. Every­one did. Every­one except for me. I think he had a moment where he inwardly groaned and saw a Bridge/​Camera RAW user who couldn’t tether. Once I told him I used Aper­ture, he said that’s great — you can tether with that just as well. I prac­ticed with it a bit when I got home and I’ve noticed some dif­fer­ences between Light­room & Aper­ture for teth­er­ing, so I’ll go over those in more detail later this week, too.

Next Stop, Orlando

The LSR tour hits Orlando this Fri­day. As luck would have it, I signed up for that before this work­shop was announced. I’m still going, mostly because I enjoyed the ses­sion and I may yet pick up a few more tips. Also, I like this idea of hav­ing three-​day week­ends. I sim­ply have to debate whether to bring my own lunch or trust the offer­ings of the Orange County Con­ven­tion Center.

One more thing — I sat next to Shawn Heifert who came down from Savan­nah. Very nice guy with tal­ent. Check out his great por­trait images on his web site.

Update:

Dave Cross shot some video of the work­shop, so I thought I’d share it here so you could get an idea of what we did in the class.