Independent Project
I drew inspiration for my project from Aleksey Dovgulya. Aleksey Dovgulya is portrait, beauty, advertising, commercial, interior, and wedding photographer. He is located in Moscow, Russia and Los Angeles, CA. All his photos pay extra attention to the lighting and clarity. The photos are either perfectly bright throughout the entire photo or uses the lights and shadows to play with the focus and composition of the photo. His models’ skin and the backgrounds in very smoothed. However, for my independent project, I’m drawing inspiration from his “Creative, Fashion, Beauty” tab and focusing on the style where he uses different colored lights reflecting off the models’ skin and in the background. He either uses one or several colors that work together to create a vibe. He utilizes both studio, indoor, and outdoor space.
For my project, I focused more on the colored light aspect of Dovgulya’s work. I ordered a light from Amazon that has a changing color bulb to realistically recreate that technique. I altered the brightness, placement, and pigment of the lamp around my model. I used a plain concrete wall in my basement as the background, giving the photos a little bit of an edgier look.
Before I began my editing technique, I made basic changes to exposure, vibrancy, and lights and darks on Adobe Bridge. For my editing technique, I decided to do a faded cross processed effect in photoshop. First, I added a “curves” layer. On the RGB section, I dragged the bottom part halfway up the first square. For the Red and Green tabs, I created an “S” shape, starting with a concave up to a concave down. For the Blue tab, I created the “S” shape, but starting with concave down. Then I created a “levels” layer. I changed the first box from 0 to 20, then I changed the second box from 1.0 to 1.1 or 1.2 depending on the photo. Then, I created a “Brightness/Contrast” tab. I increased the contrast to about 25. I decided to do this kind of edit because I liked how it took away the perfect digital feeling of the photo and added more of a faded, cool tones effect.
I’m going to pull my photos together by printing them out and making a collage board.
My editing technique: http://www.presetkingdom.com/how-to-create-a-faded-cross-processed-effect-in-photoshop/ discovered from http://www.vandelaydesign.com/photo-editing-tutorials/