Anatomy of a Composite

Today my Uncle came down to visit from Santa Rosa. He had just finished building this guitar for his son, Nolan, a very talented and skilled (15-year-old) guitar player and he wanted me to take some photos of it. I imagine he was thinking of some standard studio shots but I had something different planned.

It was a lazy Sunday for us all as we vegged around the glow of the TV. All my equipment was in the car and I was wrestling with gathering the energy to drag my ass out of the chair and out into the 100° weather in order to set up a makeshift studio in the garage. As I was soaking up the second episode in a row of Law and Order, the shot popped into my head. So I decided to set about making it.

The location is an abandoned barn where I had recently shot Amber. My goal was to make the shot that popped into my head into reality - the guitar suspended in air with a spotlighting effect from above -- but with a little bit of a twist. When I edited this shot of Amber, I put a slight lens blur on the image in post, but I left her sharp. It created what I thought was a nice 3D effect. Problem was that the lens blur had also left her with a halo around her body that I didn't like. I figured I could either clone stamp out the halo or I could have shot the background separately so I could completely control it independent of the foreground. And that's what I did with this shot of the guitar.

The first shot I made was just the overhead light to get the spotlighting I wanted. The light is a White Lightning X3200 strobe on an Avenger mini-boom and C-stand. The light is modified by a 20° grid. Here's the shot:



Next I added a second strobe in order to light the fence and dead tree behind the guitar. The light is a White Lightning X3200 strobe on an Avenger C-stand. The light is modified by a 47" octabox. I knew I wanted soft lighting on the background and I was too lazy to pull out the 60" Photek softlighter so I went with the octa. It would actually work better in this situation because it is easier to aim than the softlighter. Here's the shot:



The next thing I did was shoot the same shot as above but without the guitar. This would allow me to put the shadow I wanted under the guitar in post. Here's the shot:



And finally the ambient shot with no equipment in the frame. I wouldn't be using the whole shot - only enough to fill in where the gear is. Here's the shot:



The first step after pulling the images into Lightroom was to select the candidates for the composite. After that I pulled all the images into Photoshop and aligned them. The layers were stacked as following: ambient on bottom, then everything without the guitar and lastly the shot with the guitar on top. I masked out the equipment stands and battery and then matched the exposure with a couple of curves layers and an exposure layer. The next step was to apply the Ogalthorpe™ secret recipe to enrich the colors and boost up the contrast. The end result was a nice useable background with no equipment in the scene.

The next step was pull in the guitar and mask out everything but the guitar. I used the pen tool to outline the neck and body and a brush on the headstock. One I had that I again applied the Ogalthorpe™ secret recipe to enrich the colors and boost up the contrast and sharpen the detail work around the sound hole.

Now I had two completely independent layers- foreground and background - to work with. Basically from there it was some fine tuning of the tonality of each of the layers so they worked together the way I wanted them to. Next I applied a lens blur to the background and fiddled with the opacity until it all meshed the way I wanted. And Voila - that's it - the anatomy of a composite.