bleedingpatriot
Active member
It seems that a lot of people are intereseted in Andrzej Dragan's work and have tried to reverse engineer the technique. From what I have gathered from this forum (special thanks to Kent Christiansen's summary page) is that nobody has been able to figure out what the "light retouch" technique is. I think I may have it figured out. If you are new to this you should check out Kent's excellent site at http://porg.4t.com/kcdragan.html for all of the background.
So here is the before:
and after:
This is what I did...
1. First throw a mild s curve on with curves to boost the contrast a little this makes it easier to see the shadows.
2. Create a curves adjustment layer. Reduce the highlight end to 25-35% and add another control point to make the plot a curve instead of a straight line. Your image should be quite dark now.
3. Choose the brush tool and use a gentle, feathered brush. I had the hardness set to around 15% and the opacity set to about 25%. Switch your active color to black and paint over the curves adjustment layer. This lets some of the original image (or light) back in. Initially, I used a brush about the width of the guy's head and did a lot of brushing to bring his head back to normal and to bring the shirt up a little bit. This left the background dark.
4. Choose white as your active color. Here is where it gets good. I like to call this technique "painting with shadows". You will need to have some patience for this to look good. Use your brush to paint white over the curves adjustment layer bringing shadow back in. Enhance all of the shadows in the image making them just dark enough that you can still see a bit of detail in them.
5. Make a duplicate of the background image and place it on top of the layers pile. Convert this layer to a high contrast black and white image. A technique which emphasizes the imperfections works best.
6. Run a high pass filter on this layer. Experiment with the radius until the filter looks like an embossed version of the guy's head, almost 3d. Then run USM on this layer a few times to really bring out the contrast. Between each iteration I did an Edit > fade USM and set blend mode to darken. When you are satisfied set the blend mode of this layer to soft light.
7. Next I created a Hue/Sat adjustment layer. Adjust the Hue to get a slightly sickly tone and adjust the Saturation down some to taste. I used +8 Hue and -11 Sat for mine.
8. After that I created a new curves adjustment layer and put in a fairly steep s curve to boost the contrast even more.
9. Next I created a new pixel bearing layer and set the mode to overlay. I chose a nice shade of cyan and painted over the eyes to enhance them.
10. Then I created another pixel bearing layer and set the mode to overlay. I picked a color that would give the image an antique look. I chose a shade of brown. Use the paint bucket to fill in the layer. Adjust the opacity to suit. I used 35%.
11. Lastly I created a levels adjustment layer and used it to boost the highlights to give it that "glow".
Here is what my layers pallete looked like when I was done:
And that is about it. If you participated in the discussion about this a long time ago then the image I used will look familiar. My result may differ from Andrzej's in some small way but I think the technique is sound. I don't have a studio to that I can use to prove it but I figure that by sharing we'll find out. Every artist will come up with something a little different.
My observation (and that of others) is that this technique takes a lot of artistic intuition and patience. Every image with be a little different, making it almost impossible to boil down to an action. After understanding the basic techniques and I simply worked until it looked right.
I owe a lot of credit to the folks at this forum and around the web for sharing the techniques I used for this. I really learned a lot about blending modes, filter techniques, and color theory by researching this. Special thanks to John Waller's work which originally got me interested in this (one thing leads to another...). Also, check out this tutorial from Adobe for more info on "painting with light/shadows", http://www.ecs.fau.edu/Training/downloads/tips_tricks.pdf
Lastly, if this is old news and I somehow missed it all then forgive me for making you suffer through such a long post.
--
'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' -Thomas Jefferson
http://bleedingpatriot.blogspot.com
So here is the before:
and after:
This is what I did...
1. First throw a mild s curve on with curves to boost the contrast a little this makes it easier to see the shadows.
2. Create a curves adjustment layer. Reduce the highlight end to 25-35% and add another control point to make the plot a curve instead of a straight line. Your image should be quite dark now.
3. Choose the brush tool and use a gentle, feathered brush. I had the hardness set to around 15% and the opacity set to about 25%. Switch your active color to black and paint over the curves adjustment layer. This lets some of the original image (or light) back in. Initially, I used a brush about the width of the guy's head and did a lot of brushing to bring his head back to normal and to bring the shirt up a little bit. This left the background dark.
4. Choose white as your active color. Here is where it gets good. I like to call this technique "painting with shadows". You will need to have some patience for this to look good. Use your brush to paint white over the curves adjustment layer bringing shadow back in. Enhance all of the shadows in the image making them just dark enough that you can still see a bit of detail in them.
5. Make a duplicate of the background image and place it on top of the layers pile. Convert this layer to a high contrast black and white image. A technique which emphasizes the imperfections works best.
6. Run a high pass filter on this layer. Experiment with the radius until the filter looks like an embossed version of the guy's head, almost 3d. Then run USM on this layer a few times to really bring out the contrast. Between each iteration I did an Edit > fade USM and set blend mode to darken. When you are satisfied set the blend mode of this layer to soft light.
7. Next I created a Hue/Sat adjustment layer. Adjust the Hue to get a slightly sickly tone and adjust the Saturation down some to taste. I used +8 Hue and -11 Sat for mine.
8. After that I created a new curves adjustment layer and put in a fairly steep s curve to boost the contrast even more.
9. Next I created a new pixel bearing layer and set the mode to overlay. I chose a nice shade of cyan and painted over the eyes to enhance them.
10. Then I created another pixel bearing layer and set the mode to overlay. I picked a color that would give the image an antique look. I chose a shade of brown. Use the paint bucket to fill in the layer. Adjust the opacity to suit. I used 35%.
11. Lastly I created a levels adjustment layer and used it to boost the highlights to give it that "glow".
Here is what my layers pallete looked like when I was done:
And that is about it. If you participated in the discussion about this a long time ago then the image I used will look familiar. My result may differ from Andrzej's in some small way but I think the technique is sound. I don't have a studio to that I can use to prove it but I figure that by sharing we'll find out. Every artist will come up with something a little different.
My observation (and that of others) is that this technique takes a lot of artistic intuition and patience. Every image with be a little different, making it almost impossible to boil down to an action. After understanding the basic techniques and I simply worked until it looked right.
I owe a lot of credit to the folks at this forum and around the web for sharing the techniques I used for this. I really learned a lot about blending modes, filter techniques, and color theory by researching this. Special thanks to John Waller's work which originally got me interested in this (one thing leads to another...). Also, check out this tutorial from Adobe for more info on "painting with light/shadows", http://www.ecs.fau.edu/Training/downloads/tips_tricks.pdf
Lastly, if this is old news and I somehow missed it all then forgive me for making you suffer through such a long post.
--
'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.' -Thomas Jefferson
http://bleedingpatriot.blogspot.com
