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By Root 367 0

a professional office staff of some sort. You immediately go into planning mode, and quickly realize that it ain’t gonna be easy. I mean, from 9:00 to 5:00 they’re all working, right? Who wants to come in to work early for a photo shoot? And I’m sure some have to drop their kids off at school. After work is just as hard. There are soccer practices, dinner plans, and all kinds of other things that a professional office staff would probably be doing on their own time. That’s where compositing can come in really handy. In this chapter, we’ll be using a doctor’s office as an example. Trying to get the doctor and any supporting staff together at the same time isn’t easy. But if you set things up and make it easy for them to stop in when they have 10–15 minutes, you’ll have a lot better chance of making the shoot happen.

The Setup

For this composite, I photographed the doctor and nurses on a white background. They came in at various times, so none of them were actually there in the studio together. With a little planning ahead, though, it was easy to re-create the same exact lighting setup and same settings, so they all looked as if they were photographed together.

STEP ONE:

I set up the studio and used blue painter’s tape (that you can buy in just about any hardware or home do-it-yourself store) to mark the floor where the lights were, as well as where the subject should stand. I also put some tape where I was standing while taking the photo. That way, I knew that the perspective was good and everyone would appear at his or her correct height when I put the composite together.

STEP TWO:

I also made a quick note (on my phone) of the focal length, and the power settings on the lights. Again, just to make sure that the lighting would look exactly the same on each person, regardless of when I photographed them.

STEP THREE:

I shot the subjects in two different ways for this. First, I used two lights: one main light coming from the front left, and one edge light coming from the back right. You can see this setup in the shot here. Then I turned off the edge light, so there was just the one main light coming from the front left.

STEP FOUR:

Here’s the result of one of the photos with both lights on. That edge light gives the appearance that there’s a bright light coming in from one side. It adds a lot of depth, dimension, and background separation to the portrait.

STEP FIVE:

Without the edge light, there’s more shadow on the half of the face that’s positioned away from the front main light. Photographing both ways just gives me more options when compositing. If I place them in a background with a light source on one side, then maybe I’ll use the first photo. If not, maybe I’ll use the other one. Options are great when compositing, especially if they’re easy to do while shooting.

STEP SIX:

Lastly, I shot several poses of each subject. Again, this just gives us some options later. You can see from the Grid view in Lightroom here, that I had them turn to each side, arms folded in some, and facing straight ahead in others.

Prepping the Portraits

Since everything was shot under the same lighting conditions, our main job here is to get a good selection. And since they were all photographed on a bright background (and my original vision for this one was to place them on a bright background), we’ll have a lot of flexibility with our selections. We’ll also mix in a little retouching to help finish things off.

STEP ONE:

Go ahead and open the first photo—we’ll start off with one of the nurses. Press W to get the Quick Selection tool from the Toolbox and then start painting a selection on her. This one is pretty easy to get all of the details. Don’t forget to press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and paint away the background selection between her arms and torso, though (you learned all about selections in Chapter 1).

STEP TWO:

Click on the Refine Edge button up in the Options Bar to open the Refine Edge dialog. Again, this one is really easy, especially since she had her hair pulled back, so there was not