Readers of this blog will know that on Monday I organised a Trash the Dress shoot up in Fleetwood.  Although it was very much touch and go on the weather – we went ahead regardless.  And despite having a couple of technical issues (for the first half of the shoot, I discovered I had only been recording JPEGs without the associated RAW files) I am very pleased with the results.

The first of the images from the shoot appeared as my Photo of the Day for Monday – http://www.ians-studio.co.uk/2014/08/potd-mon-25-aug-2014-trash-the-dress/

I have now put a number of other images from the day on my model shoots gallery: http://photos.imb.biz/model/shoot/maude-ttd

I have worked quite extensively with Nik Software’s Colour Efex Pro on a lot of these images.  For example in the image below I have used “Detail Extractor” and a “Graduate Filter” to bring out the detail in the sky.  The Graduate Filter was also used to create a cool blue sky.

To prevent the detail extractor creating havoc with the skin tones it is necessary to add a control point on the subject skin to prevent the filter affecting that part of the image.

Similar techniques have been used in the image below – except this time I have also used Brilliance/Warmth filters and Glamour Glow filter to warm the image up to make it look more like it was shot during “the golden hour”

Saddly, however that error which meant I only had JPG files and not RAW files to work on has meant that some images are not the quality I want.

The above image for example at first glance looks ok but a JPEG image doesn’t have the same information as a RAW file. When I processed the image to bring out the sky detail it led to posterization of the sky.  Look at the sky directly above the model’s head to see what I mean.

This serves both as an example for why it is important to shoot RAW (especially when you know you are going to be editing images) and as a warning to double check one’s camera before starting a shoot!

I am sure if I want to spend time in photoshop, I can probably fix the sky in the above image, but of course it would have been so much simpler had I not made the mistake in the first place.

As mentioned above more images will be added to the gallery for this shoot over the next few days: http://photos.imb.biz/model/shoot/maude-ttd