Leah Johnston Art: Photography and Poetry

When the little things weigh you down.

**Since I had several people asked how I did this photo, I thought I’d post a brief description for anyone who’s interested. This is my email response to someone who wrote me and asked. Hopefully I’ll be offering more thorough tutorials at a later time, but this should be helpful to any intermediate Photoshop user with an understanding of masks**

I took a photo of myself with the hairdryer going. Unfortunately the wind it produced was rather minimal (only enough really to send one strand of hair flying backwards) so I took a ton of shots with both the hairdryer going and with me tossing my hair. Then I picked the photo I liked the best of myself and composited on some of the best pieces of my hair from other shots to make it look like it was really being blown around. The difficult part of this shot was the objects. I do my manipulations in small steps. I brainstorm what I need for the shot and take shots of each individual object, doing my best to match the original lighting. I always shoot in RAW so I have the ability to fix lighting problems afterward in PS. So I basically held each object up in the same lighting environment as the photo and took individual photos. Then I made a selection of each object in PS and dragged them over to the original photo. Making good selections and cut-outs are the most important thing in manipulations. I’ve recently discovered that I could be making better, easier selections using channels so I’m now taking a course on that. But for right now, I generally use the quick selection tool and make a general selection, refine the selection using feathering etc and then drag it over. It’s better to get too much of an object than too little. I perfect the cutouts using masks in photoshop and erasing additional backdrop with the brush tool. The next thing to do is add drop shadows. You can do this by double clicking the object layer and adding drop shadows there. The special trick is to then go to layer-layer style- create layer. This moves the drop shadow to it’s own seperate layer so you have full control over where it falls, how large it is and the opacity. Based on the existing lighting, I try to match up the drop shadows based on how close the objects are to the wall and where the light falls. Adjusting the opacity of the drop shadow layer, and adding a gaussian blur to it are great steps to ensure the drop shadow looks realistic.

Anyways, I’m not sure what your level is in PS and if this makes sense, but if you have a familiarity with layers and masks it should help. If not, I highly suggest reading a book on PS or taking online tutorials such as at lynda.com- you will learn everything you need to know!