Photoart by Zes - Lesson 1 - Photo Manipulation - Body Glamour Photography

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Photo Manipulation

This is the first in a series of lessons designed to show you some ways we turn pictures into "photoart." It is not meant to turn you from a picture-taker to a photographer, but it will help you create more alluring photos.

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Lesson 1 - Photo Manipulation

How many times have you taken a shot, and after looking at it, thought, "if only there was more light..." or "if only that <fill in the blank> wasn't in the picture."

Well, let's show you what can be done with the right kind of photo manipulation software.

First of all, you don't need the most expensive software to make the changes I'm going to show you. For my work, I generally use Adobe® Photoshop®, but I also use Microsoft PhotoDraw (no longer sold) and MGI PhotoSuite. I think PhotoDraw has better "charcoal" capabilities, and PhotoSuite offers better oil paint capabilities than Photoshop. Heck, I'll use whatever it takes to find the right enhancement. You can too - but you have to be patient, and experiment. A lot.

When I create my photoart, I usually use more than one of the software packages listed above, for a single piece of art. Also, I use layers like crazy, among many other options offered through Photoshop. More on layers and these options in later lessons. For now, well show you a very basic manipulation of a pic.

I took this pic of my favorite model outside at night. She was sitting against the outside of our weekend retreat at Live Oak Resort. To me, it looks like a pic that I'd see on many online couples websites. Nothing special with respect to the quality of the pic, except perhaps to the model and photographer (let me rephrase - she's ALWAYS special to me, just that the quality of the photo isn't compelling).

Let's see how we can make this a little more compelling for other viewers.

Before I started changing this pic, I thought high-level, what I'd like to see. I felt that it would be a bit more compelling if there was greater contrast between the subject and everything else in the pic. Also, I felt the background lessened the value of the overall image.

So first, I figured that if I darkened the image, some of the background would be less pronounced. (I could have blurred the background instead of darkening it - but we'll cover blurring in another lesson.)

Here's the pic after the first step - darkening the background. It doesn't do the trick completely for me, so I continued to modify the image.

The next step was for me to add contrast. This will boost the lighter areas, and actually darken the darker areas. I didn't go to extremes when I added the contrast - just enough to make the subject "pop" out a bit more.

You can see that the background is getting darker - and the colors of my subject are becoming more pronounced. If I added even more contrast, there would actually be fewer and fewer colors as the contrast was boosted. I didn't want to do that - just enough contrast to pop the image out.

Sure enough, the background was disappearing, but it was still taking away from the overall quality.

I decided to "paint" the background away. So very carefully, with the paintbrush option in Photoshop, I selected the color of the paint to be equal to the area around my model's hair. The brush size was just large enough to make painting easy, but no so large that I'd accidentally paint something I wanted to preserve.

In this image, you can see how I have begun painting on the left side of the image. When I got close to her body, I reduced the size of the paintbrush, again so I wouldn't paint over something I wanted to preserve in the final image.

After I completed painting the background, I figured it would also be good to crop the image just a bit. My camera's default photo size is 8x12, and since I'm usually framing shots in 8x10 mode, I knew that some of the top and bottom of the pic would need to disappear. Once I cropped it, I boosted the contrast just a tad more to make the image even more striking. Here's what it looks like with the background painted and cropped to 8x10.

This image is "good to go." But then I though about making it more "artsy" and square, instead of rectangular to fit into a special frame of mine.

Depending on the photo, I crop from the top, bottom, or both to get to the size I'd like to use. Sometimes, I add to it (say to make it a 10x10 from an 8x10).

I can't do this on every shot, but with a flat background, it's pretty easy - just know that you must be very patient, as you're blending the added area into your original photo. If I wanted to add more of a side to this image, here's how the "process" would look.

In this image, I've extended the sides 1" - but they're white, and don't match the rest of the photo.

Let me know your thoughts.