Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

Introduction – Dragan Effect

In determining the final look and feel of a photographic image it is important to consider all aspects of creating an image and how this can be followed through each technical stage. Although this technique is considered highly contemporary it takes from key individuals within the historical practice of photography namely, Horst P Horst and George Hurrell.

Horst P Horst: Fur, pearls and diamonds, 1940 George Hurrell

http://www.horstphorst.com/works.php?cat=&display=full&invno=yw083

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_nL7M9iB7yJQ/TGmBssPBe3I/AAAAAAAAAEY/8hE-NNIB8po/s1600/untitled.bmp

The main factors to creating a technique, centre on the following:

Lighting Exposure Digital Processing

This is the lighting diagram for the shot used with the Dragan Effect. It is similar to the lighting technique used by Joel Grimes, modified with the

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

inclusion of Black Boards to prevent light spillage onto the lens, creating lens flare. The Grids provide an added direction element to the lighting, although still retaining the softness of the light. The Beauty Dish adds the fill-in to the shadows and mid tones of the image.

Exposure is quite critical in this situation. The two soft-boxes were set for F11 and the beauty dish set for F5.6. The images were reviewed during the shoot to ensure that the exposure carried detail in the highlights and the shadows. The images were shot in camera RAW format. The Camera used was a Hassleblad HD3-39.

Digital Processing:

This is the Starting Image; slightly zoomed in. As you can see it requires work within the Adobe Camera Raw processor. This step is critical in achieving a whole variety of effects starting with a basic raw image. It is, quite literally, the digital darkroom for creating your final image.

I’ve turned on the Shadow and Highlight clipping indicators on the histogram to determine the effect of increasing exposure. Red indicators loss of detail in the highlights and Blue indicates loss of detail in the darkest areas of the image. We will be returning to the original Raw image to get back this detail, so it seems more drastic than it will actually appear in the final image. Obviously all stages can be slightly modified and tweaked for personal preferences.

The main sliders used are as follows:

Exposure +1.20Fill Light 50Blacks 15Contrast +100

This stage is to boost the contrast quite substantially. The fill light is used to provide more information in the mid tones and add texture, and increasing the

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

blacks keeps a ‘maximum black’ feel to the final image. The resulting RAW conversion can be seen below.

Photoshop

We can now open the conversion into Photoshop. This needs to be in 8bit mode.

The first task within Photoshop is to duplicate the background layer. There are a number of ways of doing this. The shortcut is Command J (Mac), Control J (PC).

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

Adjustment to Shadows/Highlights

To Layer 1 we apply an adjustment through the Image, Adjustments, Shadows/Highlights panel.

Ensure that you have the Show More Options box ticked and adjust:

Shadows 20%Highlights 20%Midtone Contrast 0Color Correction -50 (All of these can be tweaked to suit your image)

This stage is to emphasise the texture within the image.

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

Levels Adjustment Layer

Add a Levels Adjustment Layer, to Layer 1, and bring the sliders in to clip the shadows and highlights.

Black 55Midtone 1.00Highlight 200

This further increases contrast and saturation.

Composite Layer

To make a composite layer, from the THREE layers that we have created hold down Command/Alt/Shift/E (Mac), Control/Alt/Shift/E (PC), and rename the layer dragan 1.

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

Black and White

dragan 1 is going to be a black and white layer. To convert from colour we go to Image, Adjustments, Black & White. The resulting dialog box can be tweaked to alter the look of the black and white image. I made no changes at this stage. The resulting effect can be seen below.

This can now be duplicated (Command J, MAC) or (Control J, PC).

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This duplicate copy needs to be inverted to give a ‘negative version’ of dragan 1. The shortcut for this is Command I (MAC) or (Control I, PC). The next step is to add some Gaussian Blur to the dragan 1 layer copy.

Go to FILTER, BLUR, GAUSSIAN BLUR and input a radius of 10 pixels. The Blending Mode is changed from Normal to Overlay.

This layer can now be labelled dragan 2.

The opacity of dragan 1 can be altered to 50%. (Image 1)

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The opacity of dragan 2 can be altered to 30%. (Image 2)

This brings back colour into the image (dragan 1), whereas dragan 2 acts like a sharpening layer and can be reduced quite drastically.

Image 1 Image 2

Using another Levels Adjustment Layer (Levels 2) and using a black brush we can paint back in some of the detail in the burnt out highlights into the Levels Layer Mask. This is still insufficient, so I’ve gone back to the original RAW Image. I’ve opened up an unaltered Raw copy and dragged the layer into the Dragan Effect layers file (seen here as Layer 2). This is to bring back detail lost.

The opacity has been changed to 60%, (Final adjustment 45%).

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

This is the result. I still wasn’t happy with the image, as it requires a substantial amount of retouching and other final adjustments. I wanted to:

Remove the straight piece of hair from the forehead Tone down the scar on the forehead Brighten the eyes Clean up the hair and white spots created by the processing Desaturate the whole image

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Larrie Paul Tiernan - Photographer

I saved another version of the file and flattened the layers to carry out all of the retouching. After that I selected the whites of the eyes (Polygonal Lasso tool) and created a levels adjustment layer to bring the eyes back to white. I also added a Hue/Saturation Adjusment Layer and took the saturation down to achieve the final look I wanted from the image.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/8244160@N04/5390055559/lightbox/

Further Research

Andrzej Dragan: http://andrzejdragan.com/

Joel Grimes: http://web.me.com/joelgrimes/Joel_Grimes_Photography/Blog/Blog.html

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