Behind The Scenes of Advertising
Still Life Image with Splashes
From this article you’ll know how to combine different images to create something unique. Moreover lighting setup doesn’t require a lot of equipment and everyone can do that. You’ll learn how to properly light small objects to give them a sense of volume, combine different part of single a image to get realistic result, retouch difficult parts and many more things.
There were involved different techniques to create this image. I faced a lot of difficulties during shooting and post production which I want to share with readers to help you avoid such mistakes.
— Lighting setup. Coffee Beans —
— Postproduction —
First of all, I did focus stacking in Helicon Focus. For each piece of chocolate I took 12 frames. Another cool thing about Helicon Focus is if programm stiеched frames not ideally, you can fix it manually by yourself. It works similar to masks in Photoshop.
Liquify tool to fine tune the shape.
Time to put everything together. I got splashes from Solid Paint Splashes pack. Regardless I couldn’t find needed splashes out of the box, I did few manipulations with the most appropriate ones. By the way you may check my tutorial below. It’s about how to subtle change particular hue.
But in this case I needed to completely change color of a splash. So for the first one I desaturated the whole splash with Hue/Sat adjustment layer and increase brightness with Curves.
To shift color from purple to coffee color I added Hue/Saturation layer with settings you may see above. Just keep in mind that it’s much easier to shift colors with similar brightness. I mean it would be near impossible to convert black into white and vice versa.
I deliberately skip some parts of retouching process otherwise it would be super long read and this article would be not for easy reading. If you have any questions write me a PM on a Facebook or in the comments at the end of this page.
It may look like I perfectly position splashes at the first attempt but it’s not true. I spent probably a half an hour rotating, transforming and warping them. Another issue was a positioning of two chocolate pieces.
I cutted out coffee beans and started to put them into composition.
After I’m done with coffee beans, I started to work with colors. I’ve changed the color of chocolate with Selective Color adjustment layer as I didn’t like original look, it was dull.
At the end I increased contrast of splashes and overall contrast and also added gradient on the background.
Videos below contain few examples of retouching in real time. Please take a note videos don’t contain sound.
In the video above you’ll see how to retouch problematic areas and keep original texture.
Compositing in still life photography is very common thing. Here’s how to replace certain part of an image by another one.
Overall postproduction process for this project wasn’t very complicated. I spent a lot of time trying to figuring out the best position of the chocolate pieces relatively to the splashes. Also retouching of chocolate bars is very time consuming. Now looking back I ask myself is that possible to get this shot done without focus stacking? Probably yes. Is that possible to get that level of details without focus stacking? Absolutely not. In my opinion details which I see at 100% crop are worth all efforts. Especially if you do something for your portfolio it should be all perfect.
I hope this making of was interesting and you learnt something new. If you have some specified questions about lighting, props, postproduction or whatever don’t hesitate to contact with me.
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