I consider myself to be a Picture Maker not a Picture Taker.
So while shooting on the streets of New York City may provide much opportunity for fabulous picture taking, it may also provide for equal challenges in picture making. There is almost always so much going on that backgrounds can be very busy. Sometimes an image can look ruined because one’s subject is at battle with what gives the city her life. This is where Photoshop and the wonderful Plug In NIK Color Effects become as important as ones’ camera.

On a recent outing that was inspired by Digital Photo Academy and a mission to shoot cupcakes for the Bakery called Baked by Melissa we were met with a challenge. Shoot cupcakes creatively Al Fresco. We came up with an eclectic biker/artist named Lee and spontaneously decided to put the cupcake on his helmet.  The picture was taken, but now the picture needed to be made...

First, the background was just too busy, so in Photoshop the Quick Selection tool was used to outline Lee’s Silhouette from the inside of his figure.

After refining the edge in RefineEdge, a copy was made of the highlighted area and placed on another Fill Layer of white.

Even though we were well on our way the image seemed to lack something in color so using NIK Silver Efex Pro it was converted to B&W. Silver Efex Pro is so much better than merely converting an image to grey scale.

Just as one can add color filters on the camera to manipulate contrast and tone in shooting a B&W image, the colors in a color digital image can be combined with color filters in Silver Efex Pro to achieve better results. There is so much control over all aspects of brightness, tone, contrast, grain and structure. Silver Efex Pro can even mimic 18 different pre set brand name brand film types from ISO 32 to ISO 3200 and everything in between. If you want your image to look like it was shot on Tri-X, you can. If you want Ilford Delta 3200 Pro, it has that!

And since the image stays as an RGB file, various color filters may be added like sepia or coffee or selenium or more if desired. What’s more, there are also at least 25 pre set styles the good people at NIK have for you to pick from so that you can make use of all the hard work they have already done to achieve the look of everything from Pull Process -1 to Plus Process + 3 to Pinhole to Holga to Antique Plate.

Our image looked great in B&W but playing around with the presets we came up with Antique Plate I as looking the best.

Now while Antique Plate did a great job and almost completed our image just with this one preset we decided to allow NIK to help us out a little more with the Color Efex Pro 3 tool, Pro Contrast.

Pro Contrast is a great tool because it automatically analyzes an image and determines a correct contrast that will make your Histogram very happy.

 
And there you have it. Our Picture is Made!