Before and After - Windswept
Added 2020-09-17 22:56:31 +0000 UTCYou can drastically alter the mood of a photo with a bit of colour tweaking and this shoot with Sam was a great example of that. OK so it's more than just a tweak of the colour. We shot this at the very tail end of Autumn on a cold, windy morning. We had discussed the shoot looking really bleak and menacing. The clouds and the choppy water played along but the early morning light was actually beautifully golden which didn't go with our plans for a gloomy shoot.
So in photoshop I essentially took out any trace of warmth and created an almost monochromatic blue/grey image.As you can see the skies and the water didn't really change at all but Sam's skin tone has almost gone to Vampire-white and the warm colours in the rocks suddenly look like they feel as cold as they genuinely did on the morning. Colour correction is a very powerful and emotional treatment for an image and it can be polarising. It can also go horribly wrong and it's easy to ruin an image by going too far.
I also did a quick touch up on the scrape on Sam's forearm. My philosophy on retouching is not the "Hollywood" approach. Generally if there is a blemish or a mark that will go away, like this scrape on Sam's arm, it gets retouched out. If it's a mole or a scar or something that is part of them, it stays. There are exceptions to both. One model I photographed has psoriasis on his lower back and he said it was part of him so even though it comes and goes, it stayed in the photographs. A recent model has some acne scarring that he feels self conscious about so even though it's a permanent thing, it got retouched.
