Insomnia (Digital Imaging)
April 14, 2007
For today’s show-and-tell I will demonstrate the amount of digital imaging work that I do to my otherwise straight-looking images.
FInal. And yeah, it’s a Sealy.
Here is another shot of Karen T. (Karent?) that I did last year. I love the moment that we captured, but it never felt quite like a “good enough for the portfolio” image to me — something wasn’t quite right. That is until about 15 minutes ago when two strokes with Photoshop’s Liquify filter put things where they needed to be. (Sometimes you need to look at an image with a cold eye.)
Below is a raw scan of an outake. You can see how far I’ll go to modify people even when they are already in excellent shape, as Karen surely is. Notice how I can clean up the image while building density and managing the highlights. I also control the sharpening and out of focus areas. Once things are the way I want them, I’ll crop and add the faux Ilford HP-5 film frame. (For the past few months I’ve been using the film frame to differentiate between film and digital images.)
Raw Scan
I archive high-resolution, layered “master” versions of my selected images for printing — I usually use a semi-professional Epson 2200 inkjet printer with a Quadtone RIP — but I also need smaller .jpgs for web posting. Rather than simply resizing and saving the images in one step, I usually build up a little added contrast, saturation (for color images), and sharpening because otherwise saving images in the .jpg file format tends to soften and flatten the image.
Of course the nicest thing to do is to start with a lovely model like Karen. But sometimes I have to work with whomever is in front of me. This poor doctor has pretty good self-esteem and a sense of humor, so I’ll use him as an example:
Before
Now this “Before” image above is cleaned up and good to go. It’s accurate. But just for shits and giggles I did this enhanced version…
After
Which is a bit of a sloppy hack job — I don’t remember how many beers we were into it that night — we were just goofing around — but it does kind of show you the range of possibilities.
Back in the day I made a lot of money doing digital imaging before it became commonplace — the old studio on East Avenue had all the toys — Pressview monitors, a couple of loaded Mac workstations, an Iris printer, and a Leaf scanner (1992-1998 or so). And I’ve taught digital imaging workshops and classes for years. But I’m no longer a production artist… I am far too slow. If you want to see some world-class imaging work, check out my old assistant, Stephen Yadzinski, and his outfit called Big Swing in Santa Fe. He works for the big boy ad agencies.
Bottom line? It takes a lot of work to make stuff look real.