Dramatic lighting retouch

[AdamZx3]

Heres my take for a recent retouch, going for a more dramatic lighting with some desaturation.
Before
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v3...3/DSC_3002.jpg


After
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1037/...86d0311d_o.jpg

Would love to hear some C&C on it

PS any idea on how to embed images, the [img] [/img] doesnt seem to work.

[Swampy]

Adam... I don't know, but I don't see anything very dramatic in your retouch. It's an outdoor shot that the eye expects to see a lot of sunlight causing the worked version to look washed out and bland. You might want to extract the subject and put him against a dark background (typical grafitti on the alley wall look) if you are going for that grunge look.

[Alison]

Hi Adam,

He has a tree sprouting out of his back I think swampy is correct, get another image of a skate park, bike track, band, writing scrawled on wall etc., and take the guy from the image and drop him into the new one. Blur the new image a little etc., to still make the guy the main focus. The park on the left does nothing for what you are trying to convey.

I've attached an image that took about 5 mins cos I'm on my way out of the house. It is meant as a guideline, not as an example to follow - too many mistakes

[AdamZx3]

Thanks guys,

I will admit the background is very bland, just a snapshot I took of myself holding the camera in front of me while I tested my new SB-600...trying out a light crossing technique by balancing the sunlight and flash. I was going for kind of that Dave Hill look.

For the processing I used a BW copy of the blue channel and set it to overlay at 60% or so, and then took a copy of the original and set it above and set the the blend mode to color to take away the washed out look. Added a curves adj. layer tweak and I then used the PWL action to make a color dodge and color burn layers and painted on the highlights and shadows to selectively increase the contrasty look.

Definitely not everyones cup of tea i'm sure, definitely on the "grungy" side

Heres a link to Dave Hills website for anyone not familiar to the processing syle, of course he uses more lights in his setup though, which is the key to getting there. http://www.davehillphoto.com/

Any crits on the processing itself?

[zganie]

Try and look at photographers who do portraits,then you will see dramatic lighting or maybe take a course or get a book on lighting,There is a book called CREATIVE PHOTOSHOP LIGHTING by Barry Huggins maybe check it out


zganie

[Swampy]

Adam, there is a whole discussion thread on David Hill technique(s).

[pellepiano]

I think you would need to boost contrast ( Highpass, USM,PWL, blendmodes ) a lot more, and adding some highlights and maybe add some small noise. Here is a try.

As mentioned there is a whole Dave Hill thread with a lot of tips and different aproaches.