Microsleep #8 - The Recipe

In this subscriber only Micro-sleep episode I talk through the recipe for my 'classic DB photo look'. You can see examples of the look at.... zzzz

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Good evening, and welcome to Sleepy Time Mumbles. A podcast you can miss. I'm Dan Bain, and every episode I improvise a low stakes podcast for you to fall asleep to. This is a subscriber only micro sleep episode. And it is the eighth one of these I have recorded. You can listen to the other ones, but not at the same time as this one. Unless you have two devices. But not now. They can wait for now. Put down your phone, turn off your screens, close your eyes. Now it's time to be mumbled to sleep. Micro sleep number eight, the recipe. I have a certain type of photograph that I take semi-regularly in a specific style. This is the recipe for how I do that. First of all, let me describe the style. And in it the subject is front-on to the camera, Albert Dura, obviously, self-portrait, 16, whatever, Northern Renaissance, etc. And the subject has kind of a what I would describe as a warm soft glow to them, usually on a dark textured background, and usually holding some piece of medieval iconography, an ostrich egg, an urn, a bell on a chain, a book, etc. Scales. Sometimes they wear a veil, a ruff, carry a sword. That's sort of that's sort of the aesthetic as to what they are carrying, but what I am talking about is the recipe. We shoot with a fifty millimeter lens and a forty five degree up and down studio light on a beauty dish with a honeycomb and also uh a diffuser. Then uh I'll usually put a reflector in. No, it's not at forty-five, it's front on. Front on uh to create a clamshell with the beauty dish and the reflector, and so we're getting a clean front light from above, and we're also getting a kicker from the reflector to uh fill in any shadows, kind of even things out. The beauty dish uh gives you really smooth, uh soft, very soft, very diffused light. And we're aiming to get as much on the subject as possible and very little spill onto the background. Sometimes I will add a side color light, but in retrospect it's easier to do this in post. I get 90% of the look in camera, uh but then I will do ten percent or so in post. Here is the recipe. Uh, first of all, a healing brush pass, um just taking out any blemishes, stray hair, whatever. Then sometimes I will do a frequency separation skin soften, even if it's just very quick, it does help with that sort of glow uh look that I'm after, then uh dodge and burn. So I'll do a curves burn layer and I'll just draw in shadows and then I'll do another curves layer to dodge and draw in highlights, and that's just to increase uh a little bit of the dimensionality. Um I'm really looking for kind of specular highlights to kind of bring those up, which gives a kind of a I'm looking for a glossy feel to but not to make it seem airbrushed, but rather to seem otherworldly. I'll do some work on the eyes, or usually heighten catch lights, and also add a reflection from the catch lights into the iris. Um just with an overlay layer, something like that. Um we're getting pretty close, there's not too much left to do unless I want to add a color tone, which sometimes uh so I'll either sometimes do like a blue side light or a red up light, depending on the tone that I'm trying to work with the piece, uh, but I'll just do this rather than I'll leave the versatility open by not doing that with a practical light. I'll just paint it on uh in post again as a overlay or a soft light layer. Tends to do uh a good job. Um and then lastly that's that's pretty much everything. Then I will do a reflections layer, so I'll do a stamp visible layer of the whole image, and then I'll change the blend mode to uh colour add, which kind of burns out all the colours, uh, and then I'll mask that layer 100% with a black mask, and then I'll just just reveal it on points of metallics, uh kind of the corners of them or some such to get like a gleam, real gleam from the metal. Uh then uh again stamp visible layer, convert to smart object, camera camera raw filters, and then lastly I'll do a I just uh apply a color lookup. Uh I've got a pack of presets that are called rich and moody, uh, which tend to uh push things kind of into the kind of a browns uh spectrum, uh soften blacks but maintain highlights. Uh put that on probably at about eighty percent opacity, um, and sometimes I'll take it out of the highlights as well if it's if I'm losing dimension. And that is the recipe.