Some More Self Portrait Jazz and Cleaning Backgrounds

Alright, I got a little bored again and since I've been playing guitar again lately I wanted to do a self portrait involving that. Great, I've got plenty of props! So with the D200 still off at the doctor, I'm using basically the same setup from my last post (D60, SB-20, paper softbox, Phoshot wireless flash triggers) with the one addition being a SB-600. So here's the setup after moving lights around and playing with output settings! (by the way, all the pics are clickable to bigger sizes)

• Nikon D60 with 18-55mm @f/9 on tripod about 14" off the ground

• SB-20 on mini tripod with my expensive paper softbox complete with duct tape 1/16th power

From Steven Lee Photography

From Steven Lee Photography

• SB-600hanging from the ceiling bare at 1/8 power

Simple and straightforward it would seem. Except for having to set the timer and get to where I thought I should be positioned. That proved to be pretty hazardous in my cluttered bedroom, but after tripping and falling in the floor enough times I was able to get a couple of decent frames.

As you can see, my room is a bit of a mess and with the space and equipment I was working with, I couldn't black out the background. It ended up looking something like this.

So I decided to go about editing in two ways. With one image I took it into Photoshop CS4 and hacked it to bits as follows.

• Duplicated background layer (usually always my first step in PS)
• Made some minor tweaks to the background copy with levels, curves, colors
• Created a new blank layer
• With the paint brush, I painted black everything I wanted to fade into the background
• Created a new blank layer
• Cleared up skin with cloning and healing
  
• Reduced fill of the skin clearing layer to 60% to look more realistic
• Saved as PSD and went back to Lightroom
• Added a preset with vignette and tweaked colors to my liking
• DONE!! (took longer than I'd like to admit)

Next up I decided to see if I could get the same effect using only Lightroom. All I did was use a brush in the develop panel. Make sure you are using the in depth brush menu by toggling the small boxes in the upper right side of the brush box.

• I lowered the exposure and brightness till I had a black brush and painted out everything I didn't want.
• Applied a preset and tweaked colors
• Done (much quicker than CS4)

The result is not much different except for the skin touch ups that I did in CS4. I decided to keep my guitar case and a little bit of the wood in the background for this one. Here is the before and after.

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