Compositing Colors

I figured since I as on the topic of biking from yesterday with my helmet, I might as well shoot my bike. The one I have in Montana right now is my P.1. This isn't a biking blog so I'll spare you the details about it. What I was concerned with is the color scheme of it. It's black and with purple accents.

I wanted to have the lighting reflect the colors of the bike. So there had to be purple. I set up cross lighting for it, one 560 on either end of the bike shooting almost straight across it. This gives very strong texture and contrast. I also had on of the 560 gelled purple so there would be purple highlights on the reflective paint. I shot during the day, so there was natural light coming in through the windows providing the base exposer.

When shooting during the day, you first meter for the natural light, then underexpose that and bring in artificial lights to bring back what you want lit properly. This is somewhat of a quick and dirty way of lighting, but it definitely does the job well most of the time. It's what I used for this shoot. I shot at 1/125, f2, and ISO100. This gave a underexposed naturally lit scene, which I then added the two 560s into at 1/32 and 1/64 power. The purple gel was at 1/64 because I didn't want to overpower other colors too much.

This was the initial result.

 Not very interesting, right? Kind flat and boring really. It's just sort of...a bike. The purple helps, but not enough. So I though maybe a grayscale version would be better?

I converted it to grayscale, added some clarity and brightened the bike (not the background), and put a vignette down.

Much better. With out the distracting colors, the form of the bike is much more apparent. The details in the shadows and highlights just pop, and the textures are supple but apparent. But there's still something missing.

What happens if I add in the color photo on top of this?

This happens. I happen to think it's a very lovely effect. I dropped both version into photoshop, then set the color version to "hue." This dropped the exposure range and tonal changes that layer make to the grayscale version, but left the colors. I dropped the fill down to around 60% just to make the colors more supple and not overdone. To top it off, I added in a lens flare because why not? Sometimes that random, completely unnecessary addition just works. There's no reason for a lens flare, but so what?

And on that bombshell, see you tomorrow.

And no, I haven't been watching unnecessary amounts of Top Gear.