#Why you should photoshop your cosplay pictures (Part 1)
–**WJS Cosplay Photography Blog**–
Cosplay: Anarchy Cosplay, Photo: WJS Cosplay
“Photoshop” has a negative connotation among the mainstream audience and while I’m open to the idea of people not liking any post-processing manipulation, I would like for folks to know a little more behind it before they come to the conclusion that it shouldn’t be done.
*mid-write edit* So I thought I could address the controversy that arises when a person’s body is manipulated in post-production as an aside, but I realized I really needed an entire entry for that. And that really isn’t what this post is about. Body manipulation is an important topic that deserves it’s own post. This post is about showing how I edit photos and more importantly, why.
Cosplays: Anarchy Cosplay, Photo: WJS Cosplay
When I first started photography, like everyone else I had the notion that a photo captures a truth. Not some esoteric truth, I mean a truth as in physics forces it to capture a truth. Once I actually learned the mechanics behind photography, I realized that that couldn’t possibly be true and that for a lack of a better description, photography is just like drawing but really really fast and way easier (easier to produce an ‘accurate’ image, not easier as in the art as a whole).
A lot of people believe film captured things more honestly than digital. I dropped that notion when I learned about the chemistry behind how film works. The idea that film ever captured a truth can be dis-proven by just pointing out the fact that Fuji sells Fuji Provia (mid contrast, slight saturation, medium sharpness), 400H (low contrast, low saturation, pastel-tinged soft edges), Velvia (high contrast, hyper saturation [more than most digital cameras can do]), and countless other films. Film literally **can’t **capture what the human eye sees and so they ran with it and marketed different formulas for wedding shooters, landscape shooters, etc. Digital can’t capture an accurate image for similar reasons.
The point? The point is that once I understood that cameras not just don’t, but **can’t **capture the truth, I had less qualms with “photoshopping.” Then, once I learned lighting and photographic techniques, I had almost no qualms about photoshopping because of the magic you can already do on set. Take this photo of Niicakes:
That’s a gif animating through all five of the Canon 6D’s profile settings: Standard, Portrait, Landscape, Neutral, Faithful. It’s been a joke among Canon shooters that Neutral and Faithful were named that because they clearly aren’t, and the “Standard” profile that everyone leaves their camera on is the second most “punched up” setting after Landscape. The implications is this: the photos coming off the camera are already processed and none of them represent reality. It also has implications for the “NoFilter” hashtag.
That’s the .RAW image of Storm and Sam, straight off my Panasonic LX100 with no setting changes. I shot the two with the sun behind them because I wanted the soft quality of shade lighting. If I had assistants and a budget, I would’ve lit up their front with some strobes. I had neither. And so during .RAW conversion I bumped up the exposure to something more natural feeling and added a hint of contrast and saturation:
The result could’ve been done in camera, live. If it had been, would it have been any less “honest?”
Now, if I had the budget of a Hollywood film production, I would remove that lamp post, shoot my scene, and put it back. I don’t have that, so I rely on photoshop.
Cloning (what I just did to the lamp post) and warping (when you stretch/shrink people’s bodies) are the two biggest things the mainstream thinks of when they hear photoshop. In this case I doubt anyone is offended because it isn’t the person’s body being manipulated.
Harkening back to the lack of strobes issue, I wanted to brighten their skin, knowing that the human eye tends to fly towards the brightest part of an image and in this case, I wanted the audience’s attention on their pretty faces and awesome costumes.
The equivalent of this in real life is simply shining light on them. And once you realize that it’s light bouncing off the body and not the body actually changing, you might realize it’s not much different than walking under an archway and ‘turning dark’ under the shadow.
Now, I had my camera set to the lowest contrast. Why? Because of something the camera can’t do: see as well as we can. When I shot this, the image on my LCD screen was lower contrast than what I saw in real life. I did this because the camera cannot capture as much ‘dynamic range’ as the human eye + brain can. In this case, I believe our brains can handle 3-4 times what my Panasonic LX100 can. 3-4 times. And so I set the contrast low, knowing that in post I would increase it to something more natural-looking and still protect my extreme high tones and low tones. So I bumped up the contrast:
I also added a custom-drawn vignette because I didn’t like that edges of the frame were pure white, which compete for attention from the subjects. Some might say that’s manipulating an image in a way that wouldn’t ever happen in real life. That’s true. But in real life the edges of the frame would never be pure white, either. Because brain power.
After I added contrast, I felt like the costumes were now too dark compared to the bodies that were brightened up earlier. So I just extended that layer to the dresses:
Now here’s something the brain is amazing at that you never noticed: it color balances. What this means is that it actually corrects color for you. Complicated story simplified, in the shade, the blue spectrum dominates. During sunset, the orange-red spectrum dominates (hence those sunset colors). You can actually force this out by staring out the window in the late afternoon for a minute straight and then turning your eyes to a white wall indoors. If you pay close attention, you’ll notice everything is blue for a few seconds. The camera? It doesn’t color compensate nearly as well. Especially my camera which tends to naturally shoot heavily blue/green, even after I’ve nudged the settings.
And so in photoshop I pushed it back to red-yellow, because those were the colors I saw when I shot this at sunset. And then I pushed it even further, to even more red-yellow, because that’s how it felt to me when I shot this.
And so that’s what photoshop means 95% of the time. It’s correcting what the camera couldn’t do. Obviously you can go way further with it, at which point you’re focusing on “creating an image” (see my banner image) and not “recording a moment”. Which is fine, with caveats. For me, a camera is primarily an artistic tool and only secondarily a record keeping tool. I am a creative photographer, not a coverage photographer, which is its own skillset. And as such I rely on post-processing as another technique to create an image with the primary emphasis being how it feels.
I would go further but this is the second time I wrote this article because my browser crashed and it’s past mid-night and I’m very tired. I’ll have to make this another two-parter. In the mean time, let’s all enjoy Sam and Storm’s amazing rendition of Cardcaptor Sakura:
So I hope that helped explain just what “photoshopping” really means to me, why I don’t shy away from it, and why I think most people should edit their cosplay photos. Next up I’ll go deeper into the “creative” photoshop mindset, which is I’m sure what a lot of people find distinctive about my cosplay portfolio (ie the ones with the energy blasts and lightning bolts).
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