Ghost Pants

I had originally tried to so this Photoshop thingy tonight, but that didn't work out...soooo I decided to do something else. Definitely not anything that required a lot of Ps because I'm pretty fed up with it at the moment.

I eventually decided to do a picture of my pants. Yes, my pants. I knew I didn't want anything inside, so I had to go out outdoors somewhere. So to Peats Hill, of course.

There's a row of bushes that worked perfectly for this. I wanted a natural background, but nothing too cluttered. The bushes were just spaced so that they didn't make a busy background, but they still had the outdoor feel. I set up two strobes to cross light everything, and shot with my 50mm.

The thing I changed from what I usually do was raise my aperture a bit. All the way to f4.5. I set the strobes to 1/64 power, which was not enough I later discovered, but it looked good while I was there. I really should be paying more attention to the histogram to show me the light levels. One day...

Anywho, I took two pictures for this. One for the background and one for the pants. I composited them in Ps with a simple layer mask. A few curves adjustments later just to help with the brightness problem, and I was good.

Over to Lr. I raised the exposure a stop and a half (way too much), and then lowered everything but the blacks. This gave it the midtone exposure it needed without ruining the tonal range it had.

I lowered the vibrance and saturation a ton, and then added blue to the shadow and yellow to the highlights. This gave it a cool looking washed out effect with some complimentary colors.

I didn't run any sharpening or noise reduction.

I think it did turn out pretty well. It's a little off somehow, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Oh well.

See you tomorrow.
*unless I'm in Yellow Stone and not able to access the internets.