Mood Board
Erik Johansson Erik Johansson is a photographer and retoucher from Sweden based in Prague, Czech Republic and Sweden. He is working on both personal and commissioned projects with clients all around the world. Erik doesn't capture moments, he captures ideas. With the help of his camera and Photoshop the goal is to make it look as realistic as possible.
To Erik photography is just a way to collect material to realize the ideas in his mind with a problem solving approach. Although one photo can consist of hundreds of different images he always wants it to look as if it could have been captured. There is no CGI or stock photos in Erik's personal work, just complex combinations of his own photographs. It's a long process and he only creates between 6 and 8 new images a year, excluding commissioned work.
Project #1
The plan for the final image for this project was a composite of about 5 different images to create the illusion of the road being created from a sheet being pulled across a grassland. There were multiple factors that I needed to take account of so that the image would blend correctly and not just look like I placed a cluster of images on top of each other. The very first challenge was being able to photograph all of my photos in the same lighting so that all of the shadows would blend and it would not look like there were multiple sources of lighting in different locations. As all of the images were located outside this meant I had to take all of them at the same time of day so that the sun remained in the same position giving the same light effects. One other problem I had initially was that the white sheet that the model would drag was much too short for covering the entire road and so I had to take multiple images of the sheet across the road and blend them into what looked like a single, larger sheet that covered the whole road.
During the retouch of this image I had three main images to blend: The plain sheet on the road, the dragging of the sheet, and the grass underneath the feet of the model. This proved somewhat difficult when it came to the grass underneath the sheet and model because the grass near the original image of the road was much differently textured to the location where the model was shot standing on grass. This was fixed by changing the majority of all the grass to that of one of the images.
To shape the road onto the sheet itself and finally form the ending image I made the decision to use the clone stamp on a low opacity and a moderately low flow, allowing somewhat of a fade between the beginning of the sheet and the road. The final result ended up in a nice fade from the original sheet in hands to a decent blend into the road, keeping a good amount of the creases in the sheet to keep the illusion of it being a sheet. The final touch that was to add the road markings along the sides of the sheet, which I could not clone stamp as they would be in a different curved position, and so I used the puppet warp tool to pull 2 copies of the white lines in the correct direction then lower the opacity and add a gradient near the top to make it fade with the sheet.
I found the final image to be quite well presented with only one noticeable error in the shadowing under the sheet which I forgot to remove in post. There were no visible seams between images and it all looked as if it could’ve been one single photo, which was my aim in the beginning and so, hence I am very happy with the outcome of this project.
Matte Painting
Matte painting is a technique using in compositing scenes for films. A matte painting is often a painted glass pane that is used to show a landscape or large set piece. Matte paintings are either filmed on set, where they are framed to look like a physical set piece, or they are combined with live footage in postproduction.
Project #2
For this image, not only was lighting a challenge, but also both scale, perspective and depth. For the image of the zip I decided on using a pencil case, which was perfect in my opinion as it was very easily mouldable into the shape required. The original photograph of the field in shot had a lot of details that would be skewed or lost to distortion in post so the first thing I did was removed the cricket green, football net and vehicle in the shot. I did not want to remove everything because the image would be very bland otherwise and so I left a large cricket hut on the right side.
I then positioned the zip over the field and using the pen tool to create nice curves around each of the teeth in order to select and isolate it. This gave a nice preview of the final image with the zip already on the field however the two images were very different, with different light sources and different focal points.
The next aim was to bring the land from the field up to match the curvature and height of what the zip would really be and this was the most difficult part of this project as I was going to use the warp tool to create a lift in the image. I did this by duplicating the background layer and cutting it in two to let me form each side individually. Then using the puppet warp tool I formed my own anchor points on each image and with the distort setting, to add depth, I moulded the land to the zip seam. This took many attempts as I had to play around with certain anchor points and mesh settings.