Here’s a play by play of how I made a Digital Forest. What I don’t know about photography, well, I can at least employ mad skills in Photoshop to make up for it–for now. The goal, of course, is to do everything at the first click of the camera with lighting and scale. But, we’re learning. So, let’s see some of the final images of my cousin’s daughter–then we’ll open the hood so-to-speak.
Here is one of the original shots from my living room using a single soft-box light on the left of the subject.
Time to color correct the saturation of the reds, and begin extracting from the background. (White balance…what’s that?)
Now, over to my favorite in-a-pinch place– istockphoto.com for some vector art and a photo of dirt.
After opening up Adobe Illustrator and deleting the backgrounds from each vector image, I imported the modified .eps files into Photoshop. A few clicks (okay, a lot) to mess with shadows, bevels and my favorite–the Layers >Satin options– and those flat vector shapes start to take on a 3D look. The dirt is cloned multiple times to create the ground. And a trick learned from Burt Monroy at a photoshop conference tells you to look at the details. Notice the vector butterflies are given a shadow that appears on her dress.
Lastly, I use a plug-in from Digital Film Tools that’s certainly worth the $50 (or less with a NAPP discount) if you’re at all into digital manipulation. Flatten the image and save as a new file. Then bring up the effect under the Filters menu.
And there you have it. See the final image gallery here.
