Tuesday, 28th June, 2005

Photographic Realism

Bella Jay sent me a couple of copies of Repartee Magazine this morning, because I'd still not seen that issue where I wrote the article. I'm rather chuffed with the outcome — and I must write a few more things for it (like perhaps a "Getting the most out of Flickr as a Trannie" article...)

Couple of things caught my eye though...

1. In the "All about Sparkle" article, I noticed a typo in the sentence "The idea came from a small email to The Angels" — someone forgot to put the words "from Siobhan Curran" in there

2. There was a letter from someone called Nikki wanting to open a debate "on the issues realting to reality and 'art'"...

...allow me

But, before I do that, I just wanted to repost/rehash that Photoshop Tutorial I wrote over a year ago, because while thinking about the issues surrounding my photography, it dawned on me that if I was to cite it as an example, all the images were lost when Erin's hard disk went *phut*.

Photoshop Tutorial #1 (version 2)

photography photoshop tutorial

You may have noticed that there's a particular style to a lot of the photographs that I take of myself. Most of the self-portraits are quite pale, and there's what appears to be something of a glow about them.

OK, let's take an image of me as a starting point — one that's particularly badly exposed...

Pretty bad huh? I am, by no means, a technically accomplished photographer. I don't really have any proper lighting, and I tend to take all my pictures either just in daylight, or with the odd tungsten bulb pointing in random directions.

What I am good at though, is compensating for my lack of traditional photographic expertise using the medium that I'm most comfortable in ... Photoshop.

Right, as a matter of good principle, we should really be working on a duplicate of the image — not only because it's good practice, but also because we're going to need the original later on. ( Image -> Duplicate... )

Next thing to do here, is split the image into its three channels — Red, Green and Blue, using the Channels palette ( Window -> Channels )

This will give us three brand new images, one for each of the channels.

The reason I do this — splitting the channels that is — is because certain features tend to end up on different channels. For example, wearing red lipstick means that my lips are darkest on the Green channel, as are most of the lines and blemishes in my face. The Red channel tends to contain most of the highlights of an image — which is why I'm going to be using it below to add lighting effects. And the Blue channel holds most of the JPEG noise (depending on the camera) because of the way the JPEG compression works.

OK, now the fun begins Take the Green image (in the shots above, it's the middle one), and using the Move tool drag it onto the Blue image. Then, set the Composite Mode of the new layer that's created to "Screen" using the Layer Palette ( Window -> Layers )

Which should (in theory) give us this:

OK, I know I't not much better than what we started with. But bear with me...

Drag the Red image over onto the Blue image, and set the Composite Mode to "Hard Light" and use the ever-so-handy auto-levels ( Image -> Adjustments -> Auto Levels ) to brighten it up a little.

At this point, you're probably thinking "That Siobhan, she's lost the plot completely — that image looks terrible". But this is where we introduce the glow. From the Filters menu, pull up the Gaussian Blur dialogue box ( Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur... ):

Now, the amount of blur depends really on how big the image is. Normally, I'm working with 6-megapixel images (she said, showing off ), so I usually use about a 20-pixel blur. But since this image is smaller, I'm only using a 6-pixel blur.

The result, is this:

OK, whilst still being too dark, you can see how I'm starting to build up layers to create lighting effects — just as if I was waving lights all over the place and slapping Vaseline all over my lens. But, like I said, it's too dark, so I'm going to duplicate the blurred layer, and set this new layer's Composite Mode to Screen

Ready for this?

If you compare that image to the one we started with, IMHO it's a marked improvement. OK, so it's a bit blurry (I'll come back to that in a second), but the tonal quality of the overall image is so much better.

What we need to do now, is increase the definition of the image a bit — and this is where the Green channel really comes into its own.

As I said, earlier — the majority of the facial features end up seperated into the Green channel. And we can use this, and a Soft Light composite mode to really bring depth into the picture.

Dragging the Green channel across, and setting its composite mode to Soft Light then, gives us this:

You could, I suppose, use the Opacity slider in the Layers palette to adjust the intensity of applying that layer to the image, but I'm quite happy with that outcome. It's got a great tonal range — from solid black right through to white — and I've managed to wash out all manner of imperfections in the process, while still keeping it defined (for example, the big red mark on my forehead — a remnant of a particularly satisfy zit-squeezing episode — has completely disappeared )

And if we were going for a black and white image, then I'd stop there. But colour can be more fun can't it?

OK. Now we're happy with what we've got, flatten all the layers ( Layer -> Flatten Image ) and drag the image back onto the original colour picture. See why it was useful to work on a duplicate?

Then, set the composite mode to Luminosity

The Luminosity mode uses the layer to set the lightness of the layer beneath, whilst retaining the colour. So, in effect, what we end up with is like a tinted colour version of our black and white picture:

Bingo Gorgeous. Well, gorgeous except for the fact that I seem to have one of my fake tits showing:

Whoopsie OK, Clone Stamp Tool to the rescue...

So there we go That's how I make my photographs look the way they do. Now, we could argue all day and night as to the ethics of messing around with photographs in Photoshop, and which of the two images is more 'real' — and I will, in a bit.

I just need to have some coffee and perhaps a biscuit first...

Not just the Internet though D (and you're point about offering a fantasy is a very appropriate one), I think this applies to the whole concept of transvestite photography.

The whole debate here, which I'll try to sum up in a minute, I think is misunderstood — it's not about manipulation of photographs, it's about deception

OK, basically, for some reason (and I have some thoughts as to what those might be) some transvestites blatantly cut-and-paste their faces onto the bodies of models.

Now, to some extents, I don't actually have a problem with that. The whole process of dressing up, sticking in falsies, slapping a pile of make-up on your face (something I seem to do a lot more infrequently than some girls — or at least, feel the need to less), to me, is a process to go through to be able to look at myself as if I was a woman.

And Photoshopping your face onto Jordan's body is conceptually identical, IMHO.

I mean, suppose you never got the chance to dress. Suppose you could never find a couple of hours of privacy to do your make-up, but you still wanted to at least visualise what you looked like when dressed.

Seems perfectly plausible to me

The thing is though, when it comes to doing that then sticking your pictures on a web site, I think there's something else going on. And this is where the deception comes in.

Now, a lot of what I do has an element of 'attention-seeking' involved in it, so I can understand this to a point, but let's suppose that our theoretical trannie is looking at certain online forums and websites, sees a bunch of gorgeous trannies, and sees how much attention they get — through comments or whatever — if it were me, I'd want a piece of that.

I'd want to be able to stick pictures of myself on something like http://www.hotornot.com and be flattered into thinking I passed. So I can see why someone would want to create a glamorous picture of themselves.

I think our community (whether consciously or subconsciously), or rather the competitiveness within our community breeds deception.

...

I also think, that insisting that retouched photographs should be indetified as such (which is what the point of the letter that sparked this off was), is a little futile. It's far too simplistic to suggest that running a photograph through image manipulation software automatically designates it as "retouched".

Just scanning an image is a digital manipulation, and the minute you start getting into debates about "where do you draw the line?" you end up tying yourself in knots.

As far as I can see though, even the act of taking a photograph (digital or not) in the first place is an act of manipulation. There is a perception that photography is an accurate record of a moment — but it's not.

For a start, it flattens. It takes a three-dimensional montage and squishes it down to a flat object. And I think you'd be surprised just how often that's missed. A lot of the time, when I'm doing Repro work, I get asked to take someone out of a picture — and the assumption is that if I do that, then the background will show through where they're missing.

But also, any photograph is a stylised version of what was in front of the camera at a particular moment in time. And the result of pressing the shutter is often very different from the self-perception that the model has.

Whenever I take pictures, I'm always dismayed that the results aren't how I perceive myself.

And that, I suppose, is what I try and do when I piss about in Photoshop. I'm trying to reach a point where the image on screen matches the image in my head. I think we spend far too long obsessing about the way that we look (which is a rather typically male thing to do isn't it?), rather than the people that we are.

...

But anyway. Sorry, I had a big long rant worked out in my head about all this — stuff along the lines of "what is a photograph" and perhaps something touching on the subject of Abstract Photography. But halfway through thinking about it, I got a phone call with some rather good news, and I'm afraid that my head is now in "planning a shopping-spree" mode, rather than "I am a serious artist" mode

To me this shows that I am creating a deception from my normal bloke self....and I'm gladly doing it!!

Tina, aye — but what is that deception? I've been reading through some stuff today, and I'm starting to come to the conclusion that transvestism has nothing to do with femininity — it's all about camp

Karol, shitty death honey Seriously Good Fucking Luck babe

Jane, oh, I have a few plans. Whisking Kathie away for a weekend for a start. Then being as nice to the two designers for the fashion show to them as they were to me. Then maybe fixing my car. Then lots of clothes

And maybe something Mac related...

As to what prompted it, well, I can't really explain. It's just that someone decided they'd actually pay me the going rate for something for a change. As opposed to the Siobhan rate that I usually charge.

It's nice to be taken seriously once in a while