A few weeks ago I had the fabulous local singer/songwriter Katherine Terrien come over for an Tuesday Open Studio Night along with my friend Priya Alahan who did hair, makeup, and styling on the shoot. We wanted to create the illusion of a “Good” and “Evil” Katherine holding her guitar. Part of the reason for the Tuesday Open Studio Nights is to play around with concepts and ideas that I’ve not played with before to add to my arsenal. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a rut creatively and this is a chance to push myself. Some of the techniques are just small things that I’m curious to try. Some of them are pretty major ones, but having an evening set aside specifically for the purpose of just trying something new has really helped me develop new tools for shoots. Here I wanted to play around with using light to create patterns. In this shot I wanted to light the background (a simple hanging blind) in such a way that it created an interesting pattern.

I’ll be the first to admit that this shot could have been planned better. There are a number of things I did “wrong” that, if I had planned this shoot in advance I would have done differently. I didn’t use a tripod. I should have used a wider-angle lens then the one had used (I was as far back as the room would allow), and I would have been more careful about marking the spots for the two Katherines to stand. If I had even more planning I could have rigged up a system to hold the guitar in place so that it wouldn’t move and all she’d have to do is put her hand on the hanging guitar. All of these would have made the post-processing on this image MUCH easier. But since this is a “play session” I didn’t really bother too much with getting the technical perfect.

We decided it would be really funny to have the Bad Katherine really struggling to pull the guitar away and have the Good Katherine effortlessly holding it, so this is the image we ended up with.

The Shooting
First I lit my background. I knew I wanted to create a gradient pattern of bars, so I twisted the curtains so they were mostly open and threw a Vivitar 283 with a grid just outside of the frame up high and I took some test-frames too make sure I got that light where I wanted it. These test frames became invaluable in the post-processing phase, but more on that in a moment.

Next we shot the Good Katherine and I set up my key-light for her. An AB800 through a 60″ PLM umbrella with a white diffusion panel on it at about 4 o’clock. I also put up black cloth as a flag so that the light wouldn’t spill onto the background.

Next we shot the “Bad Katherine”. At this point we knew where the guitar was and roughly where the Bad Katherine would stand. Because we didn’t mark all this out ahead of time, however, it wasn’t going to line up perfectly in post, so I’d have to do a lot more photoshop to get it looking right. If you’re going to replicate this technique, proper planning really is key to saving yourself a lot of headaches. However it is what it is, and like I said, the purpose of the exercise for me is the shooting concepts, not the post-processing headaches, but it’s an important lesson to learn. The other key to getting the images to match, which is crucial is the lighting. Don’t touch the lighting!!! If you mess with the lighting between shots and make adjustments your two images will look like they were shot in two different environments and it will destroy the illusion. It’s the biggest dead-giveaway to a composite. To get the Bad Katherine to be able to pull the guitar we had Priya hold the guitar similarly to how the Good Katherine was holding it.

Post Processing
I do very minimal work in Lightroom. I pretty much use Lightroom for global adjustments to an image, and as a catalog, or a “down and dirty” post-processing when I don’t have the time to jump into Photoshop for an image. So here I just added a bit of contrast in the Curves dialog box and got the colors looking the way I wanted them to and then hopped over to Photoshop.

I used the Good Katherine as my base layer and dropped the Bad Katherine on top, dropping the opacity of the layer to 50% to help line up the layers. Now what I’m most concerned with here is lining up the neck of the guitar where the Bad Katherine is holding it with the same position on the guitar that the Good Katherine is holding. In doing so I encountered a problem. Namely because of small differences in the angle of the guitar the strings would not line up perfectly (had I had a suspended guitar that both Katherine’s simply put their hands on this would not be a problem), so I had to do a work-around which I’ll get to in a moment. Next I changed the opacity back to 100% and added a Layer Mask to the Bad Katherine layer and completely removed the entire background and the guitar.

Not to shabby, but still a long way to go. Next I had to add back in the shadow on the neck of the guitar where the Bad Katherine’s hands are. Since the two Katherines are still on separate layers and I used a layer mask to hide the unwanted areas, this is really easy to do. I simply added a new layer between the two layers and changed it’s Blending Mode to Soft Light. Then I simply grabbed the Brush tool with a low opacity and painted the shadow in gradually. To check on the progress I simply Shift-Clicked on the Layer Mask icon which hides the mask, showing what the true shadow looks like. It’s an easy way to flip back and forth.

Lastly came the problem of the background. I simply did not have enough background to span the length of the photo, which meant I had to go in and mask the Good Katherine as well and drop in a whole new background. (See how much of a role good planning plays?)

After dropping in the new background I’m now at Square 1 of my normal post-processing cycle. I like a really contrasty-desaturated look lately, so I’ve been creating a Black & White Adjustment Layer at the top of my stack, and I try to make a good-looking black and white version of the image using that tool.

Then I change the Blending Mode of the Adjustment Layer to Soft Light. This makes it REALLY contrasty, but we’ll fix that in a second. I liked the contrast in the background, but my foreground is way too contrasty. The good thing is that my background is a separate layer! I simply duplicated my fighting Katherines and merged them into a new layer. I always do this step on a separate layer because that way if you decided later it’s too strong you simply drop the opacity and you haven’t fiddled with the original image. (I will be a very happy camper when Adobe figures out how to make a Shadows/Highlights Adjustment Layer!!!) Then I went to Image -> Adjustments -> Shadows/Highlights and fiddled with the settings of both my Shadows and Highlights until I was happy with the look. That got me here.

Now I’m basically done. I run my skin-smoothing action and then did final touch-ups including removing the base of the guitar strings that were just peaking out at the bottom and doing some dodging and burning on the image.