But it would also be easy (actually, easier) to mess up these shots. My mom (shown with Branson in the next picture) asked me what it is that makes my pictures look good. There are 4 basics — including the easiest “trick” of them all — that anyone can do to make their images look great:

1. Have a great subject that tells an emotional story. Clearly this is the key to any great photo … if you can tell a story and if you can interact emotionally with the viewer, then you’ve done your job as a photographer. Have a great subject, know the story you’re telling, and make sure you capture it.

2. Be able to identify the great shots. I take a lot of shots. On Mother’s Day I was hardly took any pictures … for me. That means I only took about 100 shots throughout the day — of which I liked perhaps 4. This is THE BIGGEST SECRET TRICK of all good photographers: Eliminate 98% or more of your shots, and only show the very, very best. With this trick, pretty much anyone’s work can look good. Of course, this requires that you can IDENTIFY the great shots, that you’ve got the technical aspects handled, and that you captured a good subject … but this is the easiest way to improve your photography: Only show your very best images.

3. Find great light. Always, always be looking for great light. Where is it coming from? What is its quality? Is it hard light or soft light, one source or multiples, dramatic or bland? I actually bought my loft based upon the quality of the light here: huge windows with the sun coming in just right means it’s easy to shoot here. But no matter where I am, if I see soft, natural, beautiful light then I can’t but help think about pictures. My “trigger finger” actually gets itchy … it’s funny. Know what good light looks like, and start recognizing and mentally cataloging those places where you can find or make it.

4. Know your tools! As in any art, you cannot seamlessly create what you want unless you have a mastery of the tools. Start with the basics: read your camera’s manual and buy Photoshop’s “Classroom in a Book”. Practice and drill both. Know your tools first, this is the foundation for being able to accomplish any of these points.

In the photos here, the reason the pictures look technically okay is (a) I used a good lens for portraits (50mm) with a low aperture setting to create a shallow depth-of-field. If you don’t know what this means, then you don’t know your equipment… and therefore you’re not going to get the shots you want, and (b) I used Photoshop to its full capabilities to create the beautiful black & white tones.

There’s always more, of course, but if you capture an emotional subject technically well and in great light, and only show the best images from your shoot … then you’re 95% of the way to an amazing photograph.

I turned around for another 25 or 30 second exposure for this dramatic street-corner view of the Santiago Street Lofts.

I think this is the better shot of the two, clearly.

I was trying to see what could be doing using Photoshop’s HDR (high dynamic range) module … you take a photo at 3 different exposures (okay, too dark, and too light) and you’re then supposed to be able to use Photoshop to recombine those images and pull out the best details of each into a new and spectacular image. Unfortunately, it didn’t work well at all with what I was trying to do. I’ll have to try HDR again some other time … since it’s all the rage right now. (It’s actually overly trendy and overly done, but I’ve seen some amazing black & white photos where all the additional detail gives the feeling of an old-school silver print … and that’s what I’d like to create.)

Photoshop Disasters

I just watched the movie again the other night, and I noticed that there is no one, single “300 effect” used throughout. There are many, many different effects. Some scenes are dark and heavy, but with illustrated highlights (like when everything is black, but you can see the bad guys white eyeball highlight) … and other scenes are gloriously gold and bright and beautiful (but still with extra dark shadows) … and other scenes are different in various ways.

We had huge debates online, some people saying my image wasn’t even close, and me thinking that there’s wasn’t even close. But in watching the movie, I noted that we were BOTH right … just looking at different scenes of the movie. So I think the trick in getting copying the effect is to make sure WHICH effect you are trying to get close to.

However, the main effect that everyone asks about is not the coloration, but “The Crush.” And I’ve found another possible route to getting that effect. Now, I only spent about 20 minutes on it, so it’s by no means great … but maybe it will give you an idea of how to get the dark darks, and the semi-illustrated look.

There was an image that I saw referenced on a thread, and someone said that it was done with excess sharpening in Photoshop. Here’s an image that is Copyright Max V for reference:

Clearly Max does more than just sharpen his image (and starts with a great image in the first place), and it sounded crazy that you could create this effect with Photoshop, but I tried it and it DOES seem to be a component of how the image was created. So here’s a quick, not-very-well-done image that I tested it on:

—Original Image—

Here’s the original image, converted to black & white. Make sure you use a good BW filter or some other good BW conversion method, of course. (That could be the topic for a whole set of articles.)

Step 1: Make a copy of that background layer. Apply a HUGE sharpening filter on it … in this case it was “Unsharp Mask , 171%, Radius of 45 pixels, 0 threshold”. Here’s what you should get:

Then … take the Sharpened Layer and turn it to Multiply (layer mode). In this case, I also put it back to 70% to dull the effect somewhat:

Finally, I took the original color image, threw it on top, and put the layer mode to Color … so just the color comes back in on top of the “crushed” black & white colors:

As you can see, this isn’t perfect … but I only spent about 15 minutes on the Photoshop part (and 30 minutes writing it up). I think with a little playing around it could be cool, and the effect could be tweaked to have more “crush” effect. If nothing else, it’s a quickie approximation or an idea to start you on the path towards a better solution to solving the great “300 Crush-Effect mystery”

Here’s what I would do quickly to finalize it:

- clip her from her background (terrible job below … for example only)

- add a background (this one sampled in part from a clip from the movie)

- add noise to her to match the background

- add an adjustment layer to get her color more accurate to background

And of course, a very important element … start with an image that has side or dramatic lighting (this one) and a dramatic image (not this one), and match the direction of the lighting of your subject to the background.

As always, let me know what you think, and what your ideas are on this topic … thanks!

UPDATE: Max V. says “A friendly hint: play with selective color, increasing blacks (on black), and also try to ‘match color’ to the sample photo from 300 for the final result ”

Here’s the photoshop tutorial on how to take any new photo and make it “any old photo.” Actually … it’s a fairly simple process (if you know your photoshop basics) to place anything onto a textured background. It’s probably not earth shattering, but I haven’t come across it in my 18 years of image editing, so maybe it can be helpful for you as well.

(My photoshop lessons aren’t written for beginners — althought one could figure it out — so I’ll go at a pretty rapid pace on the assumption that you know the basics pretty well.)

I assume you have a starting image that you’d like to put onto a photoshop background. Here’s mine, in all it’s raw, overexposed glory. I call it “Amanda on Razors” because, well, it is:

Then, go find a good background to put it on. Ideally you want something with good contrast, that will provide a good bacgkround. This one — from www.istockphoto.com — was perfect. (But please don’t use this low-res version … go buy your own copy.):

(1) Now we get to the photoshop part … take your original image (Amanda), paste in the picture image, and resize the picture to the the proper size. Then move it to the back. Your layers palette should look like this, basically:

(2) Do all the things you want to do to the main photo (Amanda). In this case, the only thing I did is convert her to black & white.

(3) Now, here’s the trick. We’re going to create our Alpha Channel. Make a duplicate of the background image channel … and then use levels to make the outside edges 100% white (or 0% black, depending if you’re an optimist or not). Most of the rest of the image should be 100% black, and the cracks and “see through” items should be as close to white as possible. (This should all be pretty easy with levels … a 2 minute or less task.) My alpha-channel-to-be layer looked like this:

(4) Select all and Copy this layer. Then go to your Channels pallette, and paste it into a new Alpha Channel. Here’s what you should see:

(5) Okay! We’re almost done. Load selection … and load your Alpha Channel that you just made. Then, use Layer –> Hide Selection while you have your main (Amanda) image selected. She’ll disappear appropriately:

(6) Now just clean it up! Turn on the background layer to “fill the holes” that are left in the image there (and it will add some texture back in the partially “see through” areas). Find some blood splatters and put them on top on Multiply mode. (By the way, use the same Alpha layer mask over and over again on any add-on layers.) And — in this case — add some toning by putting a Lighten layer on top with some opacity. I also threw away my layer for the Alpha Channel, as it is saved as an Alpha Channel already. Here’s the final look of the layers, and the final image:

So … maybe that was long, too advanced, not advanced enough … you’ll have to let me know what worked (and didn’t) for you. But I know that I would love to see more “how to’s” from my favorite photographers, and not things that are overly simplified. I’ve added a new category, by the way, of Photoshop How To’s … if you’re looking for more, just click on that. (As of this writing there are only two.)

Here’s a little detail, so you can see how cool this comes out in high-res:

I think on my final-final image I added a slight drop shadow to make the picture stand a tiny bit off of the background. Send me links to your pix!

The directors talked about the post-processing of the film as “The Crush,” where they crushed the blacks down to increase contrast, then enhanced the saturation. But it’s clearly more than that … they’ve also color-graded the film, lit it specially, etc. Here’s a good sample:

I was inspired to create something similar. So I played around in photoshop … combined an image I took (Madrid, the girl) with about 4 or 5 other stock elements. I spent a little time balancing the brightness of the images (darken background, lighten model) to come up with my final “base” composite image:

To that I applied the filter by Nik called Monday Morning (Sepia) … this was a big help:

Of course, that’s not the “300 effect” quite yet … so I took the base image, made a copy of the layer and put it right back on top, turned the mode to “multiply” and turned opacity back to 50%. This gets us to that black “crush” mode that the director talked about, and puts some of the color back:

Now it’s relatively close. My lighting wasn’t like theirs, and (since I was pulling an old shot), I didn’t shoot her all oiled up like in the orig. So the last part was to add a lighting effect. This is a lesson for another day, but I basically motion-blurred the background layer like 60 pixels down-right, then threw it back on top in “lighten” mode and made a layer mask to reveal where the light would be. Yes, that sounds like gibberish if you’re not a photoshop person, but it was actually pretty simple. So this is the final image:

It could use some cool movie poster style type, and her body should’ve been lit less evenly, but this was mostly exploratory. So now I have two requests:
1) I would love to hear/see how YOU created the color effects from the movie 300, and
2) I’d like to know if you’re interested in seeing more posts like this one, and if so what experience level you want (easy? advanced?)

[Edit 1: The Monday Morning filter comes from Nik Efex Pro. It seems to do several things, including a "crush-like" color effect, and blurring the background ... but I haven't researched it.]

[Edit 2: This wasn't the best photoshop writeup, and I haven't made time to go and clarify the process ... but I HAVE started to write other photoshop How To's ... and they are now listed under a new category. If you click the category at right, you'll see all the articles (all 2 as of now).]

[Edit 3: See this new post on the same topic: New 300 Effect Post]