I am a big proponent of getting the shot right in the camera to avoid having to fix something in Photoshop after the fact. I recently had a really good example of why this is important.
I designed a wedding invitation for a bride recently. Her wedding theme heavily involves peacock feathers. Instead of a flower bouquet, she will have a fan of peacock feathers. On the invitations, she wanted to have peacock feathers. I didn’t have any peacock feathers, so I went to iStockphoto.com and found a whole bunch of peacock feather images to choose from and potentially buy. The bride initially sent me an example of what she wanted that had peacock feathers on a white background. iStock had lots of feathers on white backgrounds to choose from, excellent. I chose one, and made a rough draft design for the bride. She liked it, but really wanted the background to be black with white text instead of a white background with black text. I thought, no problem, it should be easy to replace that white background with black.
Have you looked really closely at a peacock feather before? The little tiny hairs on the barbs of a peacock feather are very intricate. I quickly discovered that changing a white background to black would be a nightmare. There might be some Photoshop guru out there that could do it, but for me it was an impossible task. So on to plan B. I could buy a stock peacock feather image shot on a black background. The problem with that is mixing a photo with a black background and a solid black Photoshop layer poses serious problems come printing time. The two blacks may look the same on your monitor, but when they are printed, they are different shades of black. So, my only option was to make a photo of the peacock feathers myself. Had I done this in the first place, I would have saved myself a lot of time and headache.
I found someone that had connections with a peacock farm and acquired a really nice feather. I just needed to make one picture with the peacock feather in two places in the photo leaving room for the wedding invitation text, all with a black background of course. It took 5 minutes to make the photo. I used the multiple exposure function in my camera to take two shots with the feather in different positions, resulting in one photo all done in camera, no Photoshop. Here is the setup shot (click to view it larger).
The combination of using a 1/25o sec shutter speed and controlling the light with a spot grid resulted in a solid black background in camera.
And here is the final shot right out of the camera. All the empty space was done intentionally so that I could just drop the invitation text onto the photo.
So the morale of the story is that I spent probably a couple of hours attempting to Photoshop a feather from a white background to a black background before I gave up. Getting a feather and doing it all in camera really was the best approach. It literally took about 5 minutes to make the image and I didn’t have to do anything with it in Photoshop.
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