Some before - afters

As you all probably know, I've been having about a two-three-year-long affair with Photoshop now. I made a couple of before/afters for a forum and thought I'd share them here as well. No portraits in this batch, as I'm not sure if I want to share those, plus the models don't necessarily want their un-retouched faces on here. ;) But we'll see..maybe I'll show you some of those too sometime. Anyways, here you go..

Expecto Patronum

Expecto Patronum

I had a huge urge to shoot something one night (almost midnight) and I decided to go out to this little river nearby. I took my tripod, ND-filter and my very dusty kit-lens and sat myself on a rock in the middle of the stream. The original plan was to use the ND-filter, but it turned out to be dark enough (or too dark) without it so I didn't use it after all. The focusing was a big pain in the ass and I thought to myself that a flashlight would've been nice to have. Even though the Finnish summer nights are't dark at all, it was too dark for the camera, especially with the forest dimming all the sunlight. So, it was pretty much "a shot in the dark" - literally - focusing for this shot.

I used a 30 sec shutter speed and the aperture was about f/5 or something like that. Once I got the camera focused manually on something else than the rock in the foreground, I came up with an idea to capture more of the surroundings using a panorama technique. At home I was really surprised that photoshop was able to do such a great job stitching the random photos together as I didn't have a clue if I'd gotten anything proper while I was in the woods.

While editing the photo I thought it lacked something important and that's how my 'patronus' was born. I chose a wolf because it symbolizes loyalty and family centrism - two things that really hit hard with me.

Sorry for the boring report and for the rare updates here. I haven't had the time to shoot anything proper, but tomorrow I'm going to get a lovely couple in front of my camera, so I'll be posting the results as soon as possible! :) Thanks for sticking around anyways!!

Wildfire

"Burn honey, burn, let the fire eat away / I never liked the look of this town / Burn it down now"

Sonata Arctica - Wildfire

Meltdown

30 Seconds To Mars - Hurricane

Meltdown

The concept for this photo came to my mind when I first heard the song above, and I got the final vision on a sleepless night as I was rolling around in my bed. Heidi's friend, Johanna, was an awesome model and perfect for this image, so hats off to her and a huge thank you! And again, Heidi helped out and taught me about the lighting.

Let me know what you think! ^^ I'm pretty psyched.

Fallen Angel

"Fallen Angel" 
© Milla Kouhia & Heidi Järvi

Ladies and gentlemen, here it is! As I previously promised, my dear friend Heidi and I really did manage to pull this image off. It's a remake of Luis Royo's painting, Fallen Angel (or at least we assume that is its title). I started making the background about two weeks ago, and tonight we stripped Heidi and created the main-star for the image. As I'm a complete noob in the studio environment, Heidi was in charge of the lighting and I did what I was told to do. 

This was definitely the biggest photography project I have ever been a part of, and I am so damn proud of the outcome. I can't even tell you... 

I hope you guys enjoy this, and please do tell me what you think!

You've gotten into my bloodstream

Stateless - Bloodstream

The Making Of

Here's a little making-of animation to this lazy Sunday evening.

Music: Bill Whelan - Reel Around The Sun (Riverdance)

Be-Bop-A-Lula Vol. 2

Be-Bop-A-Lula!

I had an awesome photoshoot with Sina and her dog, Nasu, today! It was freezing cold, but Sina was a great sport and took it like a lady. ;)
Here's the first batch of the series. Pretty good for a first time model and for my second proper shoot with another person, if I may say so myself. 

Make-up with Photoshop

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my thought process of tonight:

Hmm...I feel like taking a self-portrait... 
I could test out what kind of a lighting I can get with my two lamps... 
I really wouldn't want to put on any make-up, although I look like sh*t... 
No worries, I'll add some in Photoshop!



Music: Petteri Sariola - Prime

My imagination stopped working as soon as I'd set the lamps to their places. The final photos look as if they were taken at school, but it was good practice. And it was fun to play with PS after a little break.

Silence

Apologies for the silence in this blog. My camera hasn't moved much from its spot on this table, and I'm having a little quiet time in my photography at the moment. I'm sure I'll pick it up again soon, but for now I hope you'll be patient. :)

Here are two photos of Heidi that I posted on Facebook a while ago.

See you again soon!

P.S. 70 readers!! Wohoo! :)) Thank you all. I promise to post something new again soon!

The Photography Weekend - Fairytales

Jann Arden - I Would Die For You

(Photoshop by Heidi)

The Photography Weekend - Grand Finale

Before I went to Vaasa, I found some of my old drawings. I started wondering if they could be made into photographs, and it turned out they could. Heidi was a perfect model for these and she was a great help in bringing my visions to life. 

The first sketch is a part of a fantasy story I started planning when I was a teenager. I never finished it, but sometimes I return to read the drafts, and they include drawings of the characters, such as this vampire. We edited the final image together. Heidi came up with an idea to use the moon and the smoke and I loved it.

Lady Moon

The other one doesn't have a particular story behind it, just something I drew once. 

Ever after never came

All in all I had an awesome and productive weekend. Heidi and I knew each other from the internet, and it was great to meet her in real life. She's an amazing model and extremely talented photographer and photoshopper, and she taught me a lot of useful things during my stay. And I fell in love with her furry children, Sira, Saaga & Killi. :)

More Heidi at:

Her blog 

Her photo gallery

Fly, fly away

With this bridle I cannot fly...

...but when the bridle is off...

...peculiar things can happen.

Wings copied from this image

The Fairy Godmother

I had an inspiration-flood last night and this is just one of the results. More coming soon. ;)

A photograph reveals what she turned around for.

View larger

Before & After

Vintage Effect Tutorial

So, I asked and one of you answered. Here's a tutorial on how I do the vintage effect on my photos.

I posted this once already, but I had saved the video in a bad way so the quality was sh*t. So here's a better one. I recommend you watch it in HD (click the Vimeo-link) and in full screen. :)

I have all this wrapped around in a neat little action in Photoshop, so if you want to use this more than once and don't feel like doing it all manually, I suggest you make an action of your own. When everything is on their own adjustment layers they are really easy to modify to suit different photos.

If you find this interesting and test it on your photos, feel free to post a link to them in the comment section below. I'd love to see what you come up with! :)

Photoshop tutorial requests!

I made a little tutorial (the same as in my previous post, only for GIMP and in Finnish) today using a screen recording software, and I was thinking I could make more. It was quite simple, quick to do and fun. 

So I would like to know if any of you, my dear readers and visitors, have a Photoshop (or GIMP) technique, effect or whatever that you would like me to do a video tutorial on! 

It can be a photo edit of mine that you like and would like to know how I did it, or it can be a photo or a banner/header perhaps on the internet that you saw and wondered how they did what they did, or anything. I absolutely  do not know everything about Photoshop, there is still loads (an understatement) to learn, but I can try. And if I get multiple suggestions (I really hope I do!), I'll choose some that I will do and leave those I know nothing about alone. 

So go ahead and hit me with a comment! :) 

Kind of a selective coloring with Photoshop

I thought I'd write a little insight to my post-processing work behind my latest horse fair photos. Really simple playing with the masks and it's kind of a selective coloring without turning the background totally black and white. 

All the pictures can be viewed larger. Here we go!

The original photo

I started off by reducing noise (Filter > Noise > Reduce noise > 10/0/100/0) in the background. I used a layer mask so that I could only have the reduction in the background area. The filter reduced too much of the details of the horse and I didn't want that.

After that I used a premade color toning action to make the image a little more interesting (at least in my opinion). But as you can see, the action leaves the area around the horse's eye a little too dark so...

I combined the visible layers into one (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E) and added an ordinary empty layer on top of that. Then I used a white brush and painted over the dark area (on the empty layer) and changed the layer mode into Overlay. So it made the area around the eye a little lighter without looking unnatural.

Then I added some vibrance to the photo with a Vibrance adjustment layer keeping my eye on the horse and the rider only because...

...then I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer and desaturated the photo keeping my eye on the background. Then I used the layer mask to paint the vibrant tones of the horse and the rider visible again.

So basically that is it. Another way to extract the object from the background a little more. I'm sure that I'm not the first one to figure this out, and that there are many different ways to do the same, but this is mine. Then I just did final little tweaks to the photo.

At the end I sharpened the photo a little using a high pass filter (Filter > Other > High Pass) on a copy of the combined layer. Then I changed the high pass layer mode into Soft light. This adds a little more definition to the photo.

And the blurry green branches were distracting so I cloned them out.

And that's it! I think it's pretty neat little technique and I wanted to share it with you guys. I hope you enjoyed the tutorial, let me know :)

Sweet dreams in black and white

Sonata Arctica - In Black And White (Live)

I've had a whole new inspiration in my Photoshop work after the product photography course I attended a week ago. My use of layer masks has become so much more efficient. I first worked on this in color, but then realized that it actually looked better in b&w. Even though my damaged hair is more obvious....I wasn't made to be a hair model (or any kind of a model for that matter).

Btw, this is my first proper SP with my new camera. It's still quite difficult to get my eyes in focus if I want to 'free' my bangs, but in close-ups like this one it's easy to repeat until you get the results you wanted.