Compositing an image is hard work

Over the past few weeks I have spent my evenings watching one of the Brooke Shaden courses I purchased from Creative Live – originally filmed over three days, there is a LOT of material resulting in pages and pages of notes.

Its taken a while to digest all that information but this past weekend was a good opportunity to get my camera out and put it into practice.  This scene had to be shot twice, as my first go was out of focus.

This image took me 5 hours to put together, 3 just on compositing all the elements together and laying the basis for the colour work.  There are so many things wrong with it but I won’t list them, instead here is a list of the successes and learnings:

1.   Check your camera is properly in focus!
2.   Planning, planning, planning – its all about the planning
3.   Be prepared to change and adapt your concept when the situation demands it
4.   My first go at changing the colour of the dress and the hair
5.   If you are changing the colour, remember if you have more than one layer involved..
6.   Perspective is a bitch
7.   Using colour to shape mood is actually really difficult
8.   Installing the navigator in your PS tool bar is SO helpful, so much easier to zoom in and out of an image with the slider

Just to give you some perspective, here is the base image I started from

Quite a lot of difference!

BTW click on the first image to embiggen it 🙂

This image to me represents those annoying doubts and voices in your head, niggling at you, stealing your self confidence.

What does it say to you?

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