Assignment 8: Portraiture and Light

Katie Duchscherer

Yay, fun with Photoshop! I had plenty of fun with it earlier in this assignment, but I really went all-out here :) I took a picture of my model standing among the trees around Lag behind Roble. Camera settings were such that I got a good exposure with a wide FOV. I then took a couple other pictures of tree branches in the same area, cut them out of their photos, and blended them in to make them extensions of her arms. I extended her skirt as well and made it look as if she could be mid-stride.

Modern tree-spirit means business :)

The background is obviously heavily edited. I added a gradient layer of blur to reduce the busy-ness with all of the other branches and leaves in the background, as well as darkened the objects in the distance and desaturated everything but my model and her branches. I added more shadows for where the new branches might be casting shade, and some sunbeams to add an ethereal atmosphere as well as to keep interest on the model's side of the picture.

The branches didn't turn out quite like I'd hoped--it was unexpectedly difficult to remove the blue sky from between the leaves and twigs, and getting them to stand out from the background was a challenge. I eventually added a bit of a glow around my model and the branches to aid this, as well as to make her look a bit "magical."

With the desaturation of the background, what was the pavement of Roble's back parking lot has ended up looking more like a body of water. A nice side-effect :)