#studio gk

[studio-gk]

Recent retouching work for this gorgeous floral beauty story shot by Benjo Arwas for Thrifty Hunter Magazine.

www.studio-gk.com

[studio-gk]

Studio GK | refining masks

I learned a wonderful trick for refining masks in Photoshop from fellow retoucher Christy Schuler. Joshua Cripps illustrates the basics in this article from Plearn, but here's a quick summary.

I am using this recent composite I created for Kevin Steele to show this technique. In this image, I was asked to add the motorcyclist's hair blowing in the wind from another shot.

Refining hair masks can be especially tricky. I started by adding the desired hair in about the right position to blend onto the model. 

Channel selections can often create a great starting point for your mask, especially in an image like this where we are working with dark hair on a clean white background. Look through each channel and determine which one provides the best separation between the hair and the background and create a mask from that channel's selection. In this case, I used the green channel:

Which gave me this:

Now, it's just a matter of painting with black & white on the mask to clean up any messy areas. But the edges can still be tricky, especially with hair.

However, if you change the blending mode of your brush to Overlay, it will lighten or darken gray pixels without affecting pure white and pure black. It often helps to add contrast to your mask first by using curves:

Finally, after using my brush on Overlay and filling in pure white and black areas to build my mask, I am left with this refined hair mask:

Which ultimately gives a very nice final effect:

Photography: Kevin Steele Retouching: Studio GK

-g

[studio-gk]

july | behind the camera

So far, July has been a whirlwind of portfolio printing, designing business cards, launching new websites and an overall refreshing of my branding identity--and things are finally coming together. Just a couple weeks ago I launched my new sister project for digital retouching: www.studio-gk.com. I'm already working on a number of exciting projects and am stoked to share once the final images are done.

I also redesigned my online and print photography portfolio, made some changes to my website www.grace-kathryn.com and added brand new galleries with fresh work.

Once everything is finalized at the end of the month I'll be announcing a couple giveaways and other goodies for this August... so keep an eye out :)

[studio-gk]

Studio GK | Sister Project Launched

Exciting news! I have just launched my new sister project for photo retouching. Studio GK offers a clean, professional, and elegant aesthetic to the art of high-end digital retouching.

Get regular updates by connecting on Facebook: www.facebook.com/studiogkretouch

And be sure to check out the full portfolio and before/after gallery on the new website: www.studio-gk.com

-G