Been meaning to get to this one for a while, just never set aside the time to do it. Finally started this past week with a few days to spare, which was good, because I ended up having to re-record it after finding the screen capture software wasn’t capturing, like, the screen, instead cropping off the sides a little. So let’s take a look at using layer masks, because they’re brilliant, and this is something that you would have a hard time accomplishing in an old style, wet darkroom with an enlarger – definitely one of the benefits of digital.
By the way, not throwing any shade at Adam Zubek-Nizol’s image used therein, because it’s excellent, and I’m in no way implying that it needs improvement. Instead, it was an image showing the traits you might want to reduce for a commissioned portrait – I have a couple of examples of my own, back from the wedding stringer days, but not the subjects’ permission to use them and I respect privacy herein, thus the royalty-free image.
You can also see that the deep black of the shadows from the wrinkles and creases actually rendered the skin tones a little more grey when the Gaussian Blur filter was applied, which should then have been color-corrected or the deep black de-selected before the Blur was applied – again, this was a quick-and-dirty demo, but editing for serious results should take such extra efforts into consideration.
Still fighting the background noise issue, even though the effect is notably trivial – I can hear it, so I want it gone. This comes from Walkabout Studios being too close to the AC units, and the ridiculous heat causing them to kick on even if I try to time recording between such. It’s getting to be an elaborate set of audio edits to try and remove these, and I did them in the wrong order, and wasn’t going to record everything a third time. Had I waited until the minimal cooling that nightfall brings to stretch out the periods between AC cycles, I would instead be dealing with frog noises. Some better windows are on the list of things to tackle for Deep 13 here – not because of recording, but because they really do need to be replaced – and we’ll see how much they may correct the issues.
As I said, play around with the technique, because it’s remarkably useful – I was shown this decades ago and have made good use of it ever since.
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