Re-creating A Style

REMEMBER my perfume ad post? Well, I revisited the photo and tried out a different technique this time rather than simple photoshop editing. I have been sitting in front of the monitor the past one hour trying to re-create someone else's style. The result wasn't too bad but didn't satisfy my hunger. I would need to sit down with photoshop a bit longer but I thought I'd share the first result with you guys anyway.

It started out like this. I was doing my daily reading on Google and had a look at Jim747's latest post on his blog where he was trying out Dave Hill's photo technique. I got interested, went to Dave hill's site and checked out his gallery. The images looked great.

After going through all the photos one by one, studying the unique shiny looks and his play on shadows, I knew I needed an extremely hi-res photo with good lighting. Jason's photo of my indoor photoshoot came to mind and I thought I'd try to re-create Dave Hill's photo using that favourite photo of mine.

But, by looking at Dave Hill's photos, I knew I needed a background, one taken using a different lens, wide angle preferably. And since this has something to do with my wife and myself, I wanted one of London (since that's where we first met). Search after search after search, nothing satisfied my hunger and I had to settle with one of the Thames and London Eye in the background, taken from my favourite stock photo website, Stock Exchange.

Trying different kinds of filters and blending options and making back up copies after back up copies, layers after layers, photoshop ate my memory due to the multiple hi-res images I was working on. In the end, my computer slowed down and I got a bit annoyed. The result on the other hand wasn't too bad. Voila!

Why am I not that impressed with the result? At the beginning, I knew I was looking for a shiny look so I needed to increase the shiny areas of the original photo before I started. But that posed to be a problem because throughout the process, the contrast increased making it look a bit too bright. So I will re-work on it again once I have the time. For now, click on the image for a better view and let me know what you think.