Day 58

58/365, originally uploaded by Aaron LaRue.

Day 58 is my roommate JT. 

I didn't plan on having him for today. In all honesty, I have a pretty cool portrait planned for him that is set for the near future. But Jordan moved in today, and we had some friends staying over, so we set up the hookah. I needed a picture for today, and I had a another selfie planned if nothing came up, but this picture of JT was just too good to pass up. I'm a sucker for the smoke. I admit it. My name is Aaron, and I have a problem.

To light this, I bounced a flash into the ceiling. One light, pointed straight up. This gave the smoke a nice underlight, and it gave JT a nice soft bounce from above. The real beauty came in photoshop for this one, though.

The original looked like this:




The first step I always go to is "Auto Tone". Sometimes, it's my last step too. Other times, I have to do it by hand because it doesn't look right. But it's always worth a shot. In this particular instance, it looked amazing. It looked like this:




I like this a lot, but I wanted to give it more of an HDR look. So I duplicated the layer, and I applied a high pass filter. Normally when I do this, I cruise around 70-80 for my level, but for this one, 90 seemed perfect. After the high pass, it looks like this:




This looks sweet, but not on it's own. I set the blending mode to "mulitply", and when I dropped the opacity to about 60%, it looked perfect with the layer that is underneath it. I bumped the saturation up on the bottom layer, because the high pass filter tends to make things kind of washed out. Then it was a tad warm, so I went to image>photo filter and I added a cooling filter. I like to add filters in post to get the photo just how I like it, especially since I can control how much the filter effects it. For this one, about 20% was just right. 


That's how I got to my final image. There are probably a ton of ways to do this, and a lot of them are probably more efficient than my method (I'm still a total n00b with photoshop), but this is how I do it, and I'm stoked with how this one turned out. Until next time...