PSDFan Extra

Members Area Tutorial: Recreate a High-End Photo Shoot On a Limited Budget

In today’s tutorial you’re going to learn something a little different.

We’re going to cover some incredibly practical, basic tips that you can apply in order to create your own cost-effective photo manipulations from scratch. Not everyone has access to professional photography studios, and today you’ll learn how you can product high-end looking results on a very limited budget.

This includes everything from correctly setting up a photo shoot, to moving into Photoshop and covering post-production essentials. You’ll work with lighting, detail removal, color correction and photo manipulation.

Final Image

As always, this is the final image that we’ll be creating:

Step 1: Organizing Your Photo Shoot

First of all we are going to need 2 light sources (when I say light source I mean anything that you can afford, from a single 150 watt halogen lamp to professional studio equipment). For this project I used:

- 2 x 150 watt halogen lamps
- A black canvas
- An mp3 player
- A headshet
- Cables

The next thing that you want to do is set up the scenery. The image below will help you understand what I mean.

As you can see we placed the “Light source 1” to the side of the model and the 2nd “light source” as a backlight. Now, if you have a decent DSL camera I suggest that you turn it to auto and take the shot. If you are a more advanced photographer you can switch to manual and use the parameters I used to take the photo.

F/5 , ISO 250, 1/50 s , Focal Length 18mm

And this is the result:

You can notice the yellow tones on the skin. That was caused due to the halogen lamps. On the next step we will fix the colors and add elements in order to achieve a more professional result.

Step 2: Fixing the background

In this step all we need to do is just paint the background with black color. Choose a nice soft black brush and start painting these areas

After you’re done use softly paint all the sides of the photo to create a vignette effect. Like this:

That’s the end of the preview!

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• Existing members can login here to access this tutorial.

About the Author:

Cosmas Hiolos is a self-taught freelance graphics designer from Greece. His skills are focused mostly in photo manipulation and photo editing while his area of expertise is designing concept artworks for artists and music bands. Visit his online portfolio through the website Krieg Design

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