I’ve written before about how George DeWolfe’s Fine Print Workshop was an important influence in developing my current high saturation, high contrast style for color photographs. DeWolfe has an interesting view on the value of destructive editing. He has no patience for the dozens of layers that most PhotoShop gurus would have you use for “non-destructive” editing. DeWolfe advises flattening images and painting directly on them, using the history brush in an interesting way.
After hearing VIncent Versace on a number of Podcasts (The DIgital Story, Digital Media) I took a second look at Versace’s “Welcome to Oz”. I had flipped through it months ago, but couldn’t really penetrate its message. But perhaps I had become more receptive, because i went ahead and purchased it finally.
It’s been slow going since Versace uses masking layers for his selective edits. So I’ve worked on using selections and local changes in tone and color.
This image was edited with Capture NX, using the brush selection tool to substantially change the image. It may be a powerful enough set of tools to largely replace Photoshop. It works well enough with Aperture since the saved RAW file, the NEF, contains all of the edits within it. Aperture can’t render the edits, so a TIFF or JPEG needs to be generated to go into Aperture to serve as a representation of the current edit state of the image.
I think that the one aspect of Versace’s ideas that I find most appealing is the idea that at the time of capture one should be previsualizing the final image. As I’ve written here before, there’s always an unanticipated transformation of reality into the captured image. So there’s a second previsualization at the time of evaluation of the image when starting post processing.
In this image, I decided that the two triangle forms should dominate, one light and one dark. with masking I was able apply changes to the forms that achieved something like what I imagined. There were further unexpected transformations along the way, but I had that idea about where I wanted to go.