In this video, I have a bruising battle by pitching a makeup artist against Photoshop.
AdoramaTV presents 'Take and Make Great Photography' with Gavin Hoey.
Hello, I'm Gavin Hoey and you're watching AdoramaTV brought to you by Adorama, the camera store that has
everything for us photographers. Now I've done years of portrait photography and one
thing that I've discovered is almost always true
is make up. The better the makeup on your model, the better the pictures look, the
less time retouching in Photoshop you tend to spend. Thing is I rather like
Photoshop so when it comes to extreme makeup, which is better? A makeup artist
or Photoshop? Well, that's the challenge I'm going to resolve today by doing the
same shoot twice. Once with makeup and once without.
I'm joined in the studio today by Roger who's going to be my model. Now you can do
amazing things with both makeup and Photoshop but because this is a battle
that would have a real fight so Roger while he's about to be beaten up by a makeup artist.
Sorry about that but before we get to that I'm going to take some shots without any
makeup so I can photoshop them, and then repeat the whole process with the makeup on.
Okay let's get the light setup
as it isn't so much a video about lighting I'm going to keep it really simple
I've got one Speedlite here this is the Streetlight 360, and it's in a small softbox.
Now I'm going to try to do exactly the same lighting for both setups so keeping it
simple with one light should help. Ok, let's take a couple of shots.
Ok, Roger - look straight at the camera, perfect.. ok.
Now if you just look towards the edge of the softball here, that's great.
Ok, then let's look down towards the floor.
And bring your eyes back to me on 3, ready 1, 2, 3.
Ok, then we are just going to try with the gloves, so that's it, put the gloves up.
For the makeup side of things today I've been joined by Anna, who is a makeup artist
extraordinaire. And she's going to add some serious bruising to Roger's face. Now make up
takes time and Photoshop takes time as well and that's going to be an
interesting comparison. So Anna.. away you go.
To be honest, I'm fairly sure that Anna is going to do a better job with the makeup
than I'm going to do here in Photoshop. However, I do have a little trick up my sleeve.
You see with Photoshop, I can add swelling to the face really easily
and unless your makeup artist also does prosthetics that is something that's
much harder to do in the real world so let's see how good a swell up Roger's face.
So this is the picture, it was a raw file and I've done some basic processing and tidying
up and to create the swelling I need a new layer, so let's go to layer, duplicate layer.
I like to get an exact copy. Then for the swelling affect it's filter and Liquify.
Now Liquify is a brilliant filter, as the name suggests it literally turns the
image to liquid and you can use various tools to manipulate it. Now I'm
going to use either the Forward Warp Tool and probably more likely the bloat tool.
The bloat tool, as the name suggests allows me just to bloat everything up here, and
with little cliques I can just add some swelling like that and I just swell
underneath the eyelids and make them all puff up a little bit just like he'd been
in a boxing match. Obviously the more time I spend here the more swelling I
would get out of this shot. And there we go that looks pretty good. I'm happy with that. Now my other
tool is going to be the Forward Warp Tool and for this I can use it just
close the eyelid down slightly, same thing applies, little clicks, little
nudges, small pushes, just to try and maintain the shape a little bit, pulling
everything down, there we go, so that's all swollen up, all closing down the eye.
Ok, just like that,
gently does it, small clicks, ok and of course I could do the other side as well I'm
really gonna do one eye, because time is going to beat me otherwise, I suspect.
I reckon he could have a bruise on his forehead as well, that would look quite good. Let's get the Bloat tool.
And we'll use the fact it's nice and shiny just there, just to swell everything up, because that'll
help with it the natural lighting. We'll go for a big circle as well as a small one. And that should really help,
to raise that bruise up, so yeah, now he looks like he's got a real shinner
and a real bruise on the forehead. I'll click ok. So that has given us some lovely
swelling on the face, but if I go in close it's also distorted the eye. So to fix
that I'm just going to add a layer mask in there. I'm just going to get paint brush, make sure my brush
capacity is nice and high, and I'm using a normal round shaped paintbrush and I
just sort of paint on the eye just as neat as I can to bring that area back through and bring the
original eye back in.
So it looks like it's swollen up but he's still looking at me. That's the basic swelling
what about the bruising? Well the bruising is simply a matter of painting color.
Now the colors are important, so bruizes are purple, red and yellow so those are the
colors I'm going to paint on. Time spent doing this will always yield
better results. But let me give you a quick overview, so of course I'm going do
this on it's own layer, that's always a good way to go. I'm going to start with a
nice sort of purpley tone. So I'll choose a paintbrush that's sort of a bruisy purple, a nice
dark purple or something like that.
Now the shape of my brush isn't going to be the standard round. I'm actually going
to make my own custom brush by clicking on the brush panel and choosing one of these
standard brushes. I'm going to go for one of these spotty one's. This one right here
with size 43 written next to it. I'll just push up the spacing slightly and I'll come to
the shape dynamics and just put everything anywhere it says Jitter, I'm going to increase
it just to randomized it. Same with the scattering as well, we'll scatter and move that around
a little bit, there we go, something like that. I'll even come down and add in a dual
brush affect, I quite like this grassy one, cause it adds some nice edges to everything,
and it makes it much more organic rather than a digital edged brush. That's fine
I'm happy with that, let's go back to the layers and I'll change the layer blending
mode to Overlay.
Now either Overlay or Multiply are the blending modes I'm going to use, but I'm always
going to take the opacity for my paintbrush. That's the paintbrush not the layer
down to 25% and then paint gradually, and the reason I'm doing that
is the more I paint the darker it becomes so I build the effect up
rather than having to do it just in one go
lots of small brushes are the way to go and build the color up in lots and lots
of effectively layers. Now, of course this is the bit that really takes the time. Same with the
make up it's going to take time to layer this up and make it all look convincing.
So thanks to the magic of video I'm going to speed along.
And I think that's probably about right.
So that's taken me about 20 minutes to so
lets go see how Anna is doing.
Well there we are, about 25 minutes and Anna has transformed Roger completely.
He looks like he's had a really rough time of it and it is completely different to my photoshop stuff as well.
And that's fantastic. Of course, we've got to see how the make up works under lighting.
So, let's set the same shots up again and repeat the shoot.
So, lets start you off by looking straight at me.
Perfect, ok, there looking up towards the light.
And looking down to the floor. And bringing your eyes back to me.
Fantastic, chin up slightly... brilliant.
Now give it a pose, that's good. A bit of aggression... yeah..
One last one, real anger, that's it, yes perfect.
With both sets of pictures now completed, I think I can say with some confidence
that there is not really a winner here.
Yes, in photoshop I could do things myself and
even things that makeup artists would find tricky.
But with makeup once it's done once it's done for the entire
photo session and that is a massive time saver. Not only that if you look close
the makeup really holds
detail and sometimes Photoshop isn't quite that good so for me it boils down
to this if you've got one or two pictures to do and Photoshop is your tool of
choice, it can really work well but if you have access to a really good makeup
artist, they can come up with ideas you hadn't even thought of elevate your
photography to a whole new level and frankly a makeup artist is really hard to beat.
Now if you want to see more videos from myself and the other amazing presenters here in
Adorama TV, you know what you've got to do, you got to be clicking on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.
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