:: PhotoMatrix ::

While photographing Laila Plamondon at a show recently, I deliberately overexposed a few frames to experiment with cross-processing the images in PS-CS. I wanted to get a «poster» type look for these images. In order to overexpose Laila but not the background - I opened up the aperture and increased the flash power up to overexpose the areas lit by the flash only, also increased shutter speed so that the background and ambient light are underexposed. This is what the unprocessed image looks like, after changing WB to tungsten in ACR but before any processing in PSCS3. Here is what I did to process the images:

• Open the NEF file [Nikon RAW] in PS-CS3's Adobe Camera Raw, change White Balance to Tungsten, adjust contrast/brightness slightly if needed. The 'Recover' slider in ACR can be used to recover some detail in the face - if the face were to be completely «flat» and devoid of any shadow detail then the final processed image would look pretty strange, with no contours or dimension.

• Copy the high-lights [hold Ctrl+Alt+Shift+~] to a new layer.

• Blur the layer a tad and set opacity of the layer to 'Multiply'.

• Then run a custom cross-processing action on this layer only.

• Add a 'Gradient map' layer on top - this is the fun part! You can play around with the many preset gradient map color settings or tweak them. You can check the 'reverse' box for even more options. And, then you can play around with the results by adjusting a specific color/range of colors with a further 'Hue Saturation' or 'Selective Color' adjustment layer. Endless possibilities!

• Finally, sharpen the edges with a High-pass filter layer.

 And here is another cross-processed image from the same session.