Rendition of Love

As I’ve finally got my much sort after bath tub I couldn’t resist trying to recreate the now iconic Mert and Marcus LOVE cover with Kate Moss and Cara Delevinge and who better to model for me than Allana Ellis. You’ll probably remember Allana from my previous review of the Fuji X E1 though this time I shot with my Canon 5D Mark ii as I wanted to use the Ray-Flash Ring Flash adaptor to give a simular lighting effect, as I can’t quiet afford The Briese Focus Reflector which I asume Mert and Marcus used on their shoot:)

…after precariously hanging over the bath tub and with the help of Jessica Leahy our fabulous stylist and bubble maker I managed to get this shot by underexposed by 2 stops and using the ring flash as a fill.

As you can see with Allana fair skin tone and the white tub reflecting the light, the whole thing is looking somewhat washed out and not as cover worthy as I hoped. But then come along Photoshop to save the day. Here are the steps I took to recreate the cover:

Firstly, even though we had added blue food dye to the water this did show up as much as I hoped so my first task was to enhance the colour of the water. I did this with a colour balance adjustment layer, then using the inverse mask to specifically apply it to the water by painting it in. Here are the readings I used:

I did exactly the same thing with skin though added more yellow red and magenta to give her skin more warmth. I also used a curve layer to darken the skin ton slightly. See readings below:

So this is what my image is looking like now:

The colours and tones look fine, but there is something lacking in the water…So I decided to use the clone stamp to create more bubbles and finally I painted as a mask the Plastic wrap filter as an overlay to give it a bit more punch (Please note to use the plastic Wrap filter you will need to be working in a 8 bit channel, so save this for last)