It can be assumed at this point that any image you see in a magazine or commercial has been somehow processed in photoshop. Still, even with its ubiquitous presence, I am sometimes shocked by the possibilities available to a photographer or retoucher on the computer that were never available before. Check it out:
No matter how many times you drop a raspberry into a glass it will never look quite perfect. Here are two shots:
Not bad if I do say so myself, but neither one perfect. The first has very little splash, but a great looking berry. The second has a great splash, but the berry has drifted so close to the side of the glass that it is very distorted and not very legible. To get a great final image, you have to start with quality in the first place… remember, you can’t polish a turd, even with photoshop! This image was shot with only one light, placed above the table angled slightly forward toward the camera. The gradient was created using only the white background where the light falls off as the background sweeps upward. Looking at the finished image I might shift the gradient down in the composition, but hindsight is 20:20. It could be moved in photoshop, but then the entire thing would have to be replaced in photoshop, the way I did it, the bottom was lightened and evened out, but not actually replaced with a fake background. I just think the more real photo we can keep the better the final product.
It may seem backward, but I actually found it much easier to put the splash on the glass with the good berry, as opposed to the good berry in the glass with the good splash. I will try to find time to do a proper tutorial on how I combined the images, but the basic idea is easy. Loosely trace the splash area and paste it on the background. Each time I dropped the raspberry I needed to clean the glass and area, so careful resizing and aligning is needed to get the splash to line up perfectly with the background image. But after that I just used a quick mask to blend in the edges of the copied splash and voila:
Ok, ok… there were a few other steps as well. I used a multiply layer to boost contrast, deepen the color and blacken the top of the gradient. I used a gradient and a clipping path to bring the bottom of the image to 255, 255, 255. I even added a little reflection, but I am not totally convinced that it adds to the image, but I can turn it off if I don’t want it.
Hopefully this has been a slight inspiration to you. I realize that it in no way plumbs the depths of what photoshop can do, but this image would have been much more difficult to create only a few years ago that I could not resist showing it off!
-Chad