Amami Superman Photography

I had last Wednesday off, but it was cold and windy and I didn't want to go out. It was so cold that it hailed for a few seconds. It usually doesn't get that cold here in Amami. So instead of going out, I sat in my wife's shop and snapped shots of people walking by. The originals weren't that great so I tried to think of something to do to them to make them seem a little more artistic. I cruised around the interwebs looking for ideas and I came across a few photos that isolated the subject by turning all the colors besides the subject to black and white. I thought this would be something cool to try.

After importing my photos to Lightroom 2, I selected the Edit In feature and brought them into Photoshop CS3. I then made a duplicate of the background. I selected the background copy and used the Desaturate feature to make it black and white. Next, I adjusted the Contrast and Brightness to the desired effect I wanted. After that, I made an opacity mask of the background copy and commenced to hide the subject revealing the color image underneath. Once I finished, I saved it and returned to Lightroom 2 to do a few more tweeks upping the blacks and giving them some vignettes. I thought they turned out pretty nice compared to the originals.

I wanted to show the originals also but I didn't want to just stick the originals into the post so I decided to do a little html work and make some mouse-over images. I hope you like them.