The Lady and the Tramp was a really fun project to do. I can’t claim credit for the idea though, that must go to the lovely Leanna, the model in this image. The brief was to shoot two images, one with her dressed as a Lady and the other with her as a Tramp, then merge the two together in PhotoShop.
With a little thought, preparation and patience it’s actually very easy to achieve although we weren’t without our difficulties on the day. Most of them environmental funnily enough.
We chose Camden Lock as the location for this shot mainly because I’d worked there before and it offered a number of different location possibilities, plenty of places for Leanna to get changed and made up and shelter too in case we had bad weather. The down side with this area of course being the numbers of people present. In fact, you can see the market in the background of the final image and it’s absolutely packed.
So, how was it done?
This is actually very simple so no prizes for guessing that it was one of those rare occasions where I actually used a tripod. The sequence of events went something like this..
- Scout the location
- Set up the camera on the tripod and compose the frame for the final image with the model in both positions
- Take the first shot (or as I did, a series of images with several poses whilst trying to ensure that all the people in the immediate background had moved)
- Model changes to second look
- Take the second shot, once again making sure you have enough frames.
- Edit the images in PhotoShop to produce the final composite.
At all times it is important to ensure you don’t change the camera’s position, focal length if using a zoom lens, aperture or focus. You must ensure near perfect registration between frames in order to prevent spending longer than necessary in PhotoShop at the compositing stage.
I’ve outlined the steps I took to produce the final image below. This is by no means the only way of doing this but it worked for me. If anyone has any constructive comments on where improvements could be made, please let me know.
Step 1 – Base Image
I could have started with either the Lady or the Tramp as the base image butas we actually had a heavy rain shower between the two looks I opted in favour of the Tramp as my starting place. I liked the wet pavement and there were considerably fewer people on the bridge so would be easier to clean up.
Step 2 – Cleaned up background
The first task was to clean up the background image sufficiently for it to be used in the final composite. I didn’t want any tourists on the bridge in the background and during the shoot it was very evident that it was aways going to have someone on it.
The solution was to take lots of frames and then use the empty bits of each frame to produce an empty bridge. This is very easy to do in PhotoShop through the use of layers and layer masks. Simply stack several images onto different layers, add a layer mask to all but the bottom-most layer to hide their contents. By painting on the layer masks the empty parts of the bridge can be revealed, thereby removing the unwanted people.
Step 3 – Removing the fence
With the people gone, the next problem is the fence. In the final image lady is meant to be walking past the tramp begging in the street. With the fence just behind the tramp, it is obvious that there isn’t a path for the lady to walk along. To improve the realism of the final image, the fence needs to go.
Ordinarily I wouldn’t do this amount of work in PhotoShop but would rather fix it at the location instead. The general rule of thum is a few seconds or minutes in the shoot can save 10’s minutes or even hours in post processing time. On this occasion there were so many people around that the location we ended up with we needed to make a compromise and this was the quietest place we found on the day.
The fence wasn’t really dificult to remove, just time consuming. I used a combination of the clonse stamp tool and the healing brush for most of the work. It was also a great opportunity to try out the new Content Aware Fill tools in CS5. They didn’t always get it right but that was probably down to me being overzealous and trying to do too much in one go. Little and often definitely works best here.
Step 4 – Background Contrast
After all that work on the background I felt it looked too flat and needed a little kick. A slight tweak to the contrast was all that was required.
[Note: In hindsight this might be better being performed after the lady was added and I might rework the image to try this out. As far as I can I make all my edits non-destructive and with the use of layers, it’s relatively straightforward to make this type of change by re-ordering the layer stack.]
Step 5 – Cue the Lady…
From this image you can clearly see the problem we had with people and onlookers on the day. If you look to the right of the frame you can even see the feet of several people having fish and chips for their lunch. The issue with the fence I mentioned earlier is also more aparent here, i.e. how could she be waling past if there is a fence across the path???
You might also notice that the path is dry too. I did toy with the idea of bringing in the good weather from this shot, namely the blue sky and dry scene and blending it with the wet weather of the base image: Lady, good life, good weather; Tramp, miserable life, miserable weather. I may well work on this in the future.
To use the Lady in the base image, the lady needs to be cut out…
Step 6 – The Lady behind the Mask
As the background is aligned between the image of the last and the image of the tramp, it wasn’t necessary to be super accurate when removing her.
There are many ways of doing this in PhotoShop but in this instance I elected to remove her using a layer mask to mask off the parts of her image that I wasn’t interested in. As you can see from the image above, I had the luxury of being very sloppy with the mask because of the registration between this and the base image.
Step 7 – We’re floating in the air
With the lady’s background masked off it’s time to add her to the base image. The next step is to embed her within the image.
Step 8 – Shadow play
To embed her in the image I simply added a shadow behind her and a reflection beneath her. I also added a global contrast adjustment as she was flat comared to the base image.
Not perfect and could be improved. Suggestions?
Step 9 – A little dodge and burn
Very light and mainly to just darken down the corners.
Step 10 – Thats a HOT dress…
For me, the dress seemed way too hot and super saturated. For this image I desaturated it slightly prior to adding the final cntrast adjustment for the final image below.
Final Image…
And lastly…
Special thanks must to to the crative team for this project, without whom it would not have been produced.
Leanna, the model who came up with the original concept and did an excellent job playing the parts of both the lady and the tramp.
Shade, the make-up artist for the shoot who created two amazing and very different looks on the day.
