Transcript
Greetings good humans and welcome Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we do some activities that are only hobby desk adjacent in my apartment and we find out whether or not we’ve wasted our time trying something new. And we thank our patrons for bearing with us during this niche-specific digression and bout of self daring!
So, for anyone new here, yes, this channel is typically dedicated to tabletop hobby stuff, as the intro implies. But recently I took on a little creative project that is … genre – adjacent let’s say. Meaning it has swords in it, and that’s about it. But I often encourage folks to follow their dreams, and I had to be ballsy and follow my own advice.
Also, when I started this channel, I reserved the right to, once in a while, just delve into something that interests me in the spirit of discovery and avoiding single topic burnout. So the ride sometimes veers off-track. But you know it always circles back eventually. And sometimes off-roading is fun.
So today we’re going to take a look at the results of that photo shoot <snap> and talk about some things related to processing photos, trying to make “art”, I don’t know, we’re just gonna look at and work on some photos.
Now that footage at the opening of the video is from the morning after the shoot. I set up a camera and I recorded my entire five hour session where I initially went through all the pics. Yes, talking to a camera like I was on a live stream. By myself. Yes, sometimes I question my sanity too. I kind of dared myself to do it, cause I was pretty worried I might have genuinely wasted everybody’s time and energy on that project.
But, I’m relieved to say that, at least from my perspective, overall for a first attempt at staged photography, I think we got some cool stuff. Anyone else might disagree, of course, this being an artistic endeavor, all opinions are valid.
Let’s take a look at some of the raw photos and then I’ll show you a couple of the treated ones.
So let’s take a look at the process… Processing? Let’s look at the process of treating an image. Now I’m not gonna bore you with all the time-consuming details, like I said, there are thousands of videos about skin retouching, photoshop effects, stuff like that. But I can show you what I’ve done to a couple of photos by going through the layers I’ve created in building the final look. And you can see just how infinitely subjective this whole process is.
Of serious note is how long it takes me to post process one of these pics. It takes me hours. I’m getting faster with practice, but still, holy cow.
And I’ve been watching a ton of YouTube tutorials and learning way more about Photoshop than I ever thought I would. The interesting and frankly kind of overwhelming thing about this whole post processing activity is similar in some ways to sitting at the hobby desk with a freshly primed miniature. The possibilities are endless. You could literally do a 1000, nay a million different things. To be honest, there’s probably way more things you can do to a photo in Photoshop than things you can do to a miniature, but you get what I’m saying. You’ve got that monochromatic mini in hand and think, all right, what color do I start with, and you look over at your paints and you’ve got 100 different choices staring back at you. Right?
So I used the star rating system in Lightroom Classic to organize the photos, doing multiple passes and whittling down my selections to what I’ve categorized as the 4-star images, which is the collection of images I’ve determined are cool enough to work on. Now, out of my original 623 files I’ve slapped 70 with 4 stars and I still constantly go back and forth on some. Once I start working on a photo, it goes into the five star folder, so I can keep track of what I’ve worked on and what I haven’t.
All right, here’s one of the few medium shots I did, cause mostly I was shooting pretty wide to get full bodies in frame and I just did not have enough time to get closeups on top of everything else.
I always start treating a photo here in Lightroom, I do some basic color correction and some very minor tweaks, and you can see in this photo there’s no smoke in the pipe. But that’s fine, cause hey, we’re gonna use Photoshop to pull the smoke from this previous shot and it’ll be perfect.
After those basic tweaks in Lightroom I send the image to Photoshop and that’s where I do most of the work. Here you can see I added the smoke from that other shot straight away and merged the layers. I should have probably kept it separate, but, well, you know, we’re living and learning.
So the first thing I do is the blemish removal pass. All this stuff has one rule – subtlety is king. Like you could remove every freckle on a person but that isn’t what we want. The blemish pass and the next step are by far the two most time-consuming and tedious steps in the whole process.
After the blemish removal comes the standard frequency separation thing and this where we smooth out the colors of the skin underneath the actual skin texture – again, thousands of video tutorials on that whole process out there on YouTube.
Then I do some dodging and burning – which just means brightening or darkening – to further even out the skin – again, a very standard procedure – and I can also add any shadows and highlights I feel like putting in there. Like I touched up some of the highlights and shadows on the hat to even out some of the ripples in the texture. Again, pretty subtle stuff.
I also used some dodging to make her eye pop and then to make it pop even more, I went in with some layers to brighten and add saturation to the iris, again, trying not to go overboard but it’s all subjective choices right? And that’s large part of the time that goes into one of these edits – for me anyway – because I can sit here and look at different color treatments over and over and tweak it this way and that way and which is better and I don’t know and … well, it can just get overwhelming.
So then I masked just the hat so I could darken it a bit. I don’t know why, it just felt like making it darker would add more richness maybe? I don’t know.
And then I learned about contouring, which is something anyone who puts on makeup already knows all about! And there’s a ton of tutorials on that, but essentially it’s just a map of where to enhance highlights and deepen shadows on a human face. This is something I thought, wow, okay, I’ll be using this when painting miniature faces from now on. Actually, I can use all of this stuff when painting miniatures, because in the end, we’re ultimately just playing with contrast and color, and whether that’s in a photograph or on a miniature or in a painting, it’s all the same concept.
So you can see what the contouring layers do to Laura’s skin here. Since I learned about this technique, I’ve started to use it in all kinds of places, not just the skin tones. You’ll see that in a second.
So that takes care of Laura, but now we gotta do the background. So I masked Laura and then started playing with the background to just find something that looked cool, felt cohesive and maybe make the whole thing more dramatic.
I tweaked the overall color of the background with this color balance layer and then darkened it with a curves layer. And then I just wasn’t digging the plain backdrop I had on set, but I can’t get myself to entirely replace a background, I’m just not good enough with photoshop yet to take something like that on and not make it look stupid. So I brought in a graphic with flowers I bought on etsy, which looks crazy of course, until you change that blend mode. I used the Multiply mode and that makes it settle nicely into the existing backdrop. In my opinion.
Then I added a radial gradient in black and white and set it to the soft light blend mode to kind of both separate Laura from the background and kind of replicate the actual flash hitting the backdrop.
Then I applied a gradient map layer to color shift the background – and I literally just learned about this technique too a few weeks ago – and then I applied that same gradient map over the whole image but lowered to like a 70 percent opacity.
Now I could go on and on and on messing with colors and contrast and shadows and highlights and backgrounds, I could literally mess with this photo for a year if I wanted to. This is what I mean about having too much possibility, it’s just nuts. But, at some point, we gotta move on!
So here’s the before and the after. My one artistic goal at the beginning of this whole project was I wanted to try to achieve this “painterly portrait” look that’s all the rage. I think that look just sorta jives with the costume aspect and so that’s been like my guiding keyword during this post processing phase. Whether I’ve been successful or not is really not up to to me to decide lol.
All right, let’s look at another one, which just might be one of the best images I’ve ever been lucky enough to have a hand in creating, with a lotta help.
So this is Lily and she just squatted down in that awesome dress Debradawn gave her and everything literally just worked here. (lightroom footage) Her look and the tipped over cup she did on her own and the smoke element, all captured in camera in one shot, just super cool. In my opinion of course. (possibly cut to the reaction footage)
So I did the first round of tweaking in Lightroom, which got it to this point and then I sent it over to Photoshop.
The first thing I did in Photoshop was – well, I did it at some point in the middle of the process but it’s just easier to show you at the beginning here. I widened the image a bit and used the AI generative fill to stretch the background and it recreated the smoke at the edge pretty nicely.
There’s the original so you can see how much I extended it. Just makes it a better composition to my eye.
Here’s the healing slash blemish removal layer, I did that process and cleaned up the backdrop a little bit, cause my backdrop on set was full of creases from shipping.
Then I did the frequency separation and color smoothing, followed by some very tiny dodging and burning on the skin. I was working on such tiny areas you can’t even see the difference unless I zoom way in.
Then the contouring, which makes quite a difference. You can see I added some highlights to her hair and just sorta made her pop overall.
Then some contouring on the wardrobe, again just to add some contrast and almost a glow to the highlights. But again, trying to remember subtle is the keyword, right?
This color match layer is just a layer where I used the Color blending mode to paint over some subtle color differences in different areas to make any color differences less noticeable, again, virtually impossible to see but here you can see the results pretty clearly with the purple shadow on the scarf.
And then a final pop on her eyes with a curves adjustment layer and then she gets masked and we go to work on the background, just like in the last image.
I didn’t like these wisps of smoke up above her head, I thought they were distracting in the final image, so I tried to remove them. I had to add some brightening to get this big crease out and then some darkening (aka dodging and burning, right?) and then I wanted to pop the smoke a little bit, so that’s done with a curves adjustment layer, again, just more “dodging”.
And then I color shifted the whole background into the bluer side with a selective color layer – again, this is something you can just infinitely tweak.
I wanted to add some dramatic lighting and kill as much of that crappy background as I could, so a vertical gradient in overlay blend mode worked for that. I realize this probably sounds like a lot technical jargon but I think visually seeing what’s happening just kind of shows you that I’m basically just working on this thing like’s a painting – or a coloring book.
The last thing I had to correct was this little patch of smoke bursting around her arm which just had a weird color cast to it, so I had to paint over it with some blue in the color blend mode to get it to match a little better.
And now the most fun part, which is the global effects, stuff that’s gonna affect the entire image as a whole because we have a fairly coherent image to work with after all that previous stuff.
I started with a gradient map, you can see how it shifts the colors, basically it applies the colors in the gradient to the shadows and the highlights of the image and I think it looks pretty great, and basically everything is frosting at this point.
Now a very subtle shift in the whites, which are essentially just the highlights on her skin, I just made them a little more cream colored and a little less blue, again, super subtle. I mean based on YouTube compression you may not see any change at all.
Some curves adjustments darken the overall image and then this Lookup Table from inside Photoshop, some kind of fuji film emulator, I don’t know, there’s bunch and I just kinda slide through them until I find one I like. I don’t always use these but this time, this one worked pretty well. And this layer is only set to 25% opacity.
And then one final layer, another look up table set to teal and orange, again something I just stumbled on and thought, wow, that is cool for how crazy the color is. And that’s the cherry on top. I really like how this one came out, I think it’s pretty rad!
And now something I do with pretty much every photograph is I wanna check it out in black and white. And you might think this is just a simple turn off the color sorta thing but there’s as much variation in black and white as you have in color, it’s crazy.
For example, just the black and white filter in the standard photoshop adjustment layer has these presets that all look pretty different.
I’ve found that I typically like this weird formula that I’ll tweak on a per image basis. I use a combination of the infrared preset and the Green preset, two different layers masked to see the effects of one here and the other there.
But I think this image works super well in black and white too! I love it! And I don’t think I can pick a favorite between the color version and the black and white, I like both quite a bit!
Okay, how about we just take a quick look at one more that I think works far better in black and white than it does in color.
This one, once I dropped it into black and white, I was like whoa, this is badass in black and white! I mixed a couple of the black and white presets again, using the infrared layer for her dress and then masking it back out to the brighter green preset layer to make all those folds in the dress pop.
All right, just like at the end of a mini painting video, here’s some of the images I’ve completed. Some of these have color and black and white variants and while I think all of these are looking pretty cool at the moment, I’ve noticed that every time I look at quote finished unquote photo a day or two later, I see something I want to change.
So overall I’m chalking this whole project up in the Win column. There’s quite a few images I’m pretty proud of. And it took a bunch of other talented artists to help me get there, so I just keep hoping they’re all gonna dig the results as much as I do. And you’re seeing all kinds of different color treatments here and some backgrounds have images or textures added, and all I can say is I’m just having fun experimenting. I have no idea what I’m doing, other than just letting myself eat all the crayons in the box!
I actually really like quite a few of the images from this shoot in black and white and, well, if you follow me on instagram, you’ll be able to see ’em as I release ’em. Which reminds me, I’ve been wrestling with this quandary of where to share the results of this project. Like, every marketer in the world would tell me to absolutely not clutter my miniature painting Tabletop Alchemy instagram with portrait photos. And they’d be right from a certain perspective. But dammit, I’m interested in too many things and I wanna do them all and I don’t wanna like have to run separate social media accounts for every little thing, which would be dumb anyway because I just don’t do like one thing all the time.
Like, my brand, if I have such a thing, is probably at its core all about not having a brand – or singular niche anyway. It’s about engaging in all kinds of creative stuff. As long as there are swords involved, that’s a common thread, right? So at least I roll with a common theme. Sometimes.
Anyway, let me know what you think of these pics or anything else! And, uh, go do something off-brand, cause what the hell, you gonna miss out on doing something you wanna do just cause other folks – or algorithms – think you should stay in a box? You decide.
See ya!