Twilight Christmas: How we did it
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008
So, apparently copying a Joey Lawrence photo really well gets you a lot of attention these days. Good to know. (note to self: must do this sort of thing more often, raise google rating and all) Thanks to the middle-aged messiah of cheap lighting, David Hobby (Mr. Strobist himself) I’m getting all kinds of comments and e-mails about how this was done. Since pretty much EVERYTHING I know and love about lighting comes from the strobist website (I can still remember finding it two years ago and going out and buying my first light stand and umbrella…) I thought I’d do my best to explain.
SO, I naively started by putting up a black background, my favorite sheets for our bed, by hanging it from a painting over the couch. I say naively not because I hung it on a painting or left it draped over the couch, but because in hindsight, the black was a bad idea.
Why? Because each person had to be cut out very meticulously, a process which nearly drove me to give up on this photo. See, the transition from the dark edges of the person to the black background was often either missing or REALLY hard to pick out. I used Photoshop’s Color Range Selection tool to get me as close as I could and then spent hours fixing everything up.
If I could do it over, I’d put up a colored background (green?) and use OnOne software’s totally amazing Mask Pro software to cut every one out perfectly and quickly.
By the way, everything was shot with a Canon 5D and an 85 1.8 lens at about f/8 and 1/160 (my max sync speed with lite link remotes) I think. I’m not a Canon crusader but it’s worked well for me so far. (But dang does that D700 tempt) For all you 85 1.8 vs. 85 1.2 people, get over it. I’ve had both, they’re both great. Whatever.
Next I setup my homemade beauty dish on a Canon 580EX (the old kind). The beauty dish is the Home Depot special that David Tejada showed how to make in his tutorial back in April. Since then there’s a much better version created by Tom Seibert that I definitely want to try and make.
Why the beauty dish? Well, it’s very controlled light, yet still flattering. It really pulls out shape and form since it’s moderately hard light, but it’s not as extreme as just a bare flash. An umbrella would have soaked the whole subject and the room for that matter with light, causing all kinds of fill and bounce issues. Getting the dish in close not only created a nice light on the face, but also helped keep the background dark. (read up on the distance portion of lighting 102).
Next I had to get the rim lights going, which was handled by my 580EXII and 430EX. Now these proved to be insanely hard to nail. The back/shoulder light was easy enough, but it was those teensy tiny little rim lights on the jaws that were so hard. I experimented with all kinds of things, my models got very sore legs standing there (thanks again guys). I tried a snoot, a grid, a grid into a silver reflector, and anything else I could think of. I didn’t really get it figured out until 3 people in, and it turned out to be very simple: A tight grid, angled up, mostly missing the subject but just barely touching that jaw on it’s way by. I did a little dance when I finally figured that out.
This was the last photo taken, and you can see the gridded flash doing the jaw rim light. A flag was added to control flare. In this one, a third flash came from the back right to accent the right edge of everything.
Here’s the other originals, in backwards order.
This one was hard because I was the subject. My wife Katelyn took the actual shot once I got the lighting right, which took forever!
This is when I was bouncing off a reflector. I took two shots, one with the jaw light and one without, then I painted in the right accent in photoshop. Cheesy.
Next I converted all the RAW photos to 16 bit TIFFS in Capture One 4 and edited them separately in Photoshop. Besides cutting them out from the background, here’s what I did:
First I cleaned up the skin with a healing brush. (She wouldn’t appreciate it if I showed you the before on that one)
I then ran the Pro Retouch action from the folks at Totally Rad Actions, which is basically a bunch of different layers of varying blur that you can mask in. I brushed a lot of the fine detail out in flat areas and emphasized the large detail while smoothing the skin.
The smoothing totally made the face look flat and soft in a lame way though, so I added 4 different layers of varying hi-pass filters set to overlay mode and brushed them in as needed to get the punchier look I needed. The radius varied from about 12-50.
I know Joey Lawrence has a DVD that talks about his post processing. I’ve never seen it (can’t afford it) and I have no idea if this is what he did on his photo (probably not). But if you can afford it, I’m told it’s a great watch.
Once the photos were edited, I put them all together and did some final curves and color adjustments to get their skin all the right colors and make the vampire’s eyes all brown.
Lastly, it conveniently worked out that I had just shot a bunch of black and white landscapes (seen in an earlier post) so I just used the sky from one of those. I had to mask a lot out and fudge my bad cut outs with some darkening on the background, but thankfully a it only needed to be a subtle gray, so it worked.
And, sha bam, there you have it.
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In talking to an old photog friend a few weeks ago he said “I figured this sh1t out back when there were no blogs”…then I read Chris Buck mention the same thing on APE.
SO in saying that, I am glad you blogged haha
Cool fun project, thanks for sharing.
Happy Holidays.
Stikman
Great job done with low cost. I too try to strive those kind of results on a cheap budget! Thx for sharing.
You should buy one of those lastolite collapsible backdrop, I know they helped me a lot.
Great work – this really kicks it.
I second what Kristof said about the Lastolite collapsible black velvet background… it was made for this sort of work.
Very good job. FYI: Mask Pro is very good and I’ve used it for years but it’s not the be all and end all. Sometimes for hard edge stuff it’s just as fast and more accurate to just use the good old pen tool and make a path and then a vector mask. Also, although your use of black caused you more work, had you used say green or blue for a background you might have had some spill over color onto your subjects face or clothes which may have taken just as much time to get rid of. Thanks for sharing! I wondered how that punchier look was done…
Thanks for posting, that was a great read!
(Jumped from Strobist)
Hey, just found your blog via strobist. Love the Twilight tribute, very well executed!
I’m definitely subscribing to your blog, you have some great work! I’m also enjoying the Solid Rock Christmas album you posted a while back. I love the rendition of “O Holy Night”.
Zach,
Great work friend and well explained. May I added my recommendation of the collapsable velvet background, I found one of ebay for £25 (about $40) and I carry it everywhere.
Regards
Jase
Nice work! Thanks for the write up too. Very informative!
Wow. Terrific job. Thanks for step-by-step. Happy holidays.
[...] great pieces of fan art–one a holiday themed recreation of the Twilight cover, the other an amazing family Christmas card done in the Twilight movie poster style. Have a wonderful Holiday, [...]
Excellent job. Thank you for sharing your techniques.
Thank’s for the rim lighting position trick. This is a cool technique I may have to try!
Thanks for the how-to share
(from Strobist)
Debbi
Yey! the set up! I’m always amazed to see how non-dramatic the set ups are compared to the final image. As I said before, great work.
I actually tried my hand at this today, spoofing one of the other posters just as a fun lighting exercise. (posted at the blog http://nathanael.squarespace.com/blog/) Thanks for inspiring the fun! I’ll keep my eye on your blog for more coolness. ; )
Merry Christmas!
_Nathanael
Your results from this tight shoot are all the more spectacular when the budget is taken into account. All round stunning results.
I gave it try the night I saw your Twilight image on Strobist.com, and I was pretty chuffed with my results, so thanks for the inspiration.
All the best for the future.
Pete
very informative. thanks for sharing! got here via strobist.
happy holidays!
Looks great man!!
Excellent! Thanks for sharing this! Rockin card!
[...] cards I have ever seen. The family is apparently full of Twilight fans so the photographer Zach Hodges took individual pics in his make-shift studio and them spliced them together with software. The [...]
Brilliant photo and post! I really enjoyed reading this and seeing how much details you’ve thought about to get this just right. The jaw light certainly adds just the right sparkle to the photo.
Well done!
Blaise from France
Would you mind if I featured this blog story on the Twilight Lexicon? I totally understand if you were to prefer not to have that kind of exposure, but someone pointed out this entry to me and i think a lot of Twilight fans would think it’s really cool.
@laura ya of course!
Great work!! Do you think you could please talk a little more about the post-processing? I’m curious about how you got that gritty desaturated look.
Fantastic work man! Keep the DIY spirit alive.
Dave, find a great post on the “Dave Hill” look here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/strobist/discuss/72157594577686705/
Nice work Zach, low budget with awesome results, I’ll look forward to more of your stuff.
Saw the shot on Strobist and clicked to have a look in more detail.
Fantastic shot, great photog skills matched with some nice post processing.
Cheers,
Richard B.
Thanks alot zach. i just fount your site and this was the first post i read . you explained it verey well and answered a lot of my questions ….so Thank you again
Absolutely stunning work, Zach. Given the range of cheesy snow scene cards people send and Christmas, this is just the sort of thing to buck the trend. Genius.
Alice and Jasper are just so cute. I wish we’d see more off screen pics and coverage of them