Drawing inspiration from her years as a painter, Gemmy Woud-Binnendijk creates painterly portraits with a camera. Her imaginative concepts, meticulous planning, and attention to every detail result in portraits that belong on museum walls. Gemmy shares her understanding of historical approaches to lighting, wardrobe selection, and character-building before taking you into Photoshop where she gives her portraiture the final polish.
In this tutorial Gemmy reveals her entire creative process and demonstrates the techniques used to create her beautiful painterly images in-studio and in Photoshop.Starting with pre-production, Gemmy walks through how she conceptualizes and finds inspiration for her images. She then works with her trusted stylist and assistant to create a distinct look and style for an image. Once on set, Gemmy sets up and tests studio lighting, meticulously placing and dialing in the desired power and quality of light required for her painterly style. You then see her pose and communicate with her subject, direct her stylist, and work entirely through capturing an image on set. Once an image is captured, Gemmy then demonstrates her unique and thorough Photoshop workflow to see the final image realized. Throughout the tutorial, you’ll go behind the scenes on two complete photo shoots and their respective retouching processes. Finally, Gemmy challenges you with a homework assignment to create an image of your own. RAW files, composite elements, a Photoshop action, and final images are all included with the purchase of this tutorial.
An introduction and overview of the Fine Art Portraiture series with photographer, Gemmy Woud-Binnendijk
Observe the iterative process of creating a solid base image for a composite concept. From gear setup, light and camera settings, focal point, catch light placement, and key/fill light balance.
Work with the final Flamingo concept in Photoshop and prepare the composite base for retouching. Add compositing elements and bring the color and light into balance with Photoshop Helpers.
Observe best practices when masking to make effective masking adjustments for convincing compositing, using native photoshop tools. Use blurring and paint strokes to enhance the compositing.
Identifying flat areas in the base composite and targeting areas to build shadows based upon the production light source. Learn to build dimension with shadow and light. Paint with a variety of shadow techniques, developing a layered approach, creating a soft, natural diffusion.
Review areas to apply the shading technique and consider best practices for creating a realistic composite with dimension and shape. Considerations around a layer based shading approach
Refine the composite to remove halos. Create a simple skin retouch.
Refine layer organization and manually build and apply Frequency Separation to subtly hone the skin tones and support the painterly look.
Add more dimension and depth to the composite by creating more refined shadows and highlights with Dodge and Burn and Channel Masks. Isolate specific areas for subtle additions of contrast in the highlights. Enhance the image with Selective Color
Push the concept to completion, finalizing the painterly look
