Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer

Above is the image Ogura-san and I ended up submitting for the hair style photo competition I originally discussed here. What do you think? He wanted to make it a little bit different from a typical color photo of a model so we played with a lot of different ideas. Simply making Alina black-and-white ended up being the most visually appealing.

That’s not to say there wasn’t extensive cleanup on the hair, face, and other areas of the image. Separating the girl from the background was time consuming, including making the holes in the hair on the top of her head still show the background through them. Some parts of the image weren’t in the photo and were made from parts and Photoshop tools. I’m still no photo editing expert but I think it turned out OK. Wish us luck!

My friend Ogura-san is a stylist. He recently decided to participate in a photo competition and asked me if I would help him out with the photo touch-ups. It sounded like fun so I agreed. Of course I’ve never done photo touch-ups before at this level but I didn’t let that stop me. Especially since step one in the process was getting to go to a photo shoot with a real model. Woo!

So I went to the photoshoot about two weeks ago. The model was Romanian, her name was Alina, and yes she was attractive. Ogura-san was there making sure the hair was right and directing the styling. There was also a photographer, a make-up artist, and a professional lighting rig. It was really cool to get to see this kind of setup.

I just recently had the photos delivered and have spent some time editing some of my favorites. Ogura-san and I are still hammering out what the final image will be, and the below two photos I edited are not going to be used, but I thought they ended up looking pretty nice and I wanted to share them. Which do you like? Blue or red?

99% of the credit goes for these images goes to the team who originally created and captured them. My edits primarily involved removing a lot of stray hairs covering Alina’s face, removing minor skin blemishes (if you can even call them that on this girl, her skin was basically perfect), and adjusting the levels and color tone of the images. I also did some shadow tweaking and a minor bit of reshaping.

It was fun spending a bit of time learning about the process. As with all skills, it takes a lot to become an expert and I am far from that. It is scary how much can be edited even at a beginner level. I’m sure everyone knows this already but you definitely can’t trust any image you see in a magazine.

Photo editing skills will definitely come in handy in the future. If for nothing else but to humiliate coworkers by putting their head on this guy (NOT SAFE FOR WORK, unless you are a former coworker of mine then you’ve probably seen this image before).