Welcome to my new tutorial! Many of you asked me, how to get from a picture like that to a picture like that.
And so I wanted to tell you today how to create some good photos of your costume, using a few simple steps in Photoshop and Lightroom.
At first: I'm not a pro. However I have a DSLR.
And a photo slave. And Photoshop and Lightroom!
A few words about our camera equipment: We use a Canon EOS 600D with a standard lens of 18-135mm (zoom) as well as our great cosplay lens. This sweet piece here.
It has an aperture of 1.8f, 50mm and is available for a few bucks on Amazon. And with this stuff we get such great pictures as this one.
And now I'll show you the reason why you need a DSLR.
The reason why you should use a DSLR is because it is able to create RAW files. In contrary to JPGs, RAW files are image files which save a ton of additional image information.
This information allows you to do all sort of things with your images.
For example can change the exposure, increase and decrease the contrast, and do the same with the saturation.
As you can see, you can do much more with these photos and this gives you the opportunity to let your image really shine.
Here you see the images of my Protoss Wizard photoshoot. In fact I just grabbed four friends, we made some photos and the result was I now have over 1000 image files.
Friends are mostyl not professionals. This means friends will need some more tries than professional photographers.
And so it's not really bad if you get a lot of photos, since the chance that there are some good photos is much higher. In addition it's much more fun with friends.
Here you see the RAW file of one of my favourite photos. What I do at first is playing with the image temperature.
The Protoss Wizard has many blue elements and I want to underline that with a cooler temperature.
Then I also change the exposure a bit, make the photo a bit more interesting by increasing the contrast and just check if the overall look feels good.
I'm also a HUGE fan of vignetting. Basically vignetting improves everything! It's this dark edge which you may know from old photos.
Many of you will argue about that, but for me every picture must have it! And... in my opinion it makes just everything much better!
As you can see, the blue lights look a bit off. In fact the program breaks the colors of blue LED lights. This needs to be corrected afterwards.
So I adjust the colors a bit. Decrease the value of blue a bit. Inscrease it somewhere else again. And... the photo is almost done.
When I'm done with the rough adjustment in Lightroom, I edit the final image in Photoshop.
For that I jump from Lightroom to Photoshop and... safe it at first as a TIFF file.
Then I do the final adjustments. I edit the brightness and constrast a bit more.
Make everything a bit brighter, everything a bit stronger and... start with editing my face. So... some stamps here...
As you can see I only set some lighlights, I corrected the skin in my face a bit, got rid of tear sacs.
And at the end I adjust the brightness and contrast one last time. Everything a bit higher, everything a bit stronger... and the photo is ready!
So you see it's really not that hard to get some good photos.
Basically you just need some friends, a more or less good DSLR, Lightroom and/or Photoshop and some patience and time to work with these programs.
Well... I hope I was able to show you something interesting, you liked my video and and learned something. See you next time!
