Brenton Parry

Before and After - Charlie laced...

Added 2025-03-11 08:19:25 +0000 UTC

It's been a while since I've done a before and after post and when I was working on retouching this shoot the other day (with lots more to come) I thought it might be fun to show you what I'm up to.

On the far left we have the "before" shot. This is a completely unadjusted image straight from the camera. There are still some things I want to get dialled in with my new camera so that the exposures are more accurate straight out of the camera. As you can see this was quite dark. The white balance is also off and I'm not sure if I just had it on the wrong setting or what was wrong but almost certainly user error is at play here.

The image in the centre is after playing with the exposure and doing a complete colour grade. The skin tones look much more natural in this shot. I wanted it to have a slightly colourised feel to it and a little bit stylised so the colours aren't purely "corrected".

The image on the right is the part that is taking quite a while. If you look at the first two images you can see I attached metal D-rings to Charlie with bandaids and the third image I've retouched them out using a technique called frequency separation to get a more realistic effect as if the metal goes through his skin. It's a slow process and I'm nearly a third of the way through the images. It's a cool effect but I think if I attempt something like this again I might try my hand at prosthetics and makeup so it doesn't rely on so much retouching.