Matters of Gravity!

Gravity failure! Happens from time to time in my line of work. Here is how to do it:

I started by setting up my camera on a tripod in my living room. For this kind of shot, you need a camera with a manual exposure mode. You also need to set camera white balance manually. If you do not, you may get problems matching colors in different parts of your composition later.

I took seven shots that I intended to use. Here is the final composition again, and the seven shots:

As you can see, ice cream boxes and a doorstop were essential in creating the picture. I enjoy going MacGyver when doing shots like this. I used adhesive to prevent items from slipping.

The key to creating an effect like this is building the picture layer by layer in a graphics editor. Photoshop is the most well known, but there are many others, like The Gimp, and Pixelmator. I am using Pixelmator.

As you can see in the picture to the left, I am using layers and masks for just about everything:

I mask the images with the different objects, then add layers for adjusting brightness and color. The advantage to working this way is that it is non-destructive. I can easily fine tune a change after I have made it.

I can also limit a change to specific objects. For example, I made a separate layer for brightening the raspberries, another for the cake, a third for the tie, and so on.

To brighten objects, I duplicated the layer containing the object and set the blend mode of the duplicate object to Screen. I could then adjust the amount of brightening with the Opacity slider for that layer.

The tie looked a little bit washed out in the original photo, so I added an extra tie layer and set its blend mode to Soft Light. That gave the tie a bit of extra punch.

Here is a small, but important tip:

I like Pixelmator, but it has one serious omission: There is no built-in function for creating shadows. There is, however, a plug-in that does the job very well.

Here is how to install it:

1. Download the file http://belightcommunity.free.fr/download_file.php?uid=49
2. Locate the file BC_Shadow_1.5.qtz in the Download directory.
3. Drag and drop it into /Library/Compositions. (Your Mac will open a dialog prompting you to enter your password to authorize installation.)
4. Restart Pixelmator, if you had it running.

The Shadows filter is now installed under Other in the Effects browser.

You can find the same tip on the Pixelmator support site.

I recently heard someone, who happens to be very, very good at using Photoshop, that in practice, "you never change the names of the layers". As you can see in the picture, I do. I also group layers.

Because I use meaningful layer names, and logical layer groups, I don't get lost when the layers start to build up. This saves me time.

For this picture, I used seventeen layers in six groups. If I had been using default names, I'd still be working on the image instead of writing this blog post.

See you soon.