Lately I’ve been wanting to try new things with my retouching and editing. Our style is usually on the safe side focusing on simplicity and cleanliness. With the recent rebranding of our website into the more grungy and dark feel I felt that my approach towards my editing should evolve as well. Not to say that I’ve abandoned the clean editing that I’ve been doing; I feel that I should showcase the other extreme of my editing as well.
I started off with a photo that Mark took of James using his wide angle Canon 10-22mm lens. After some quick RAW to JPEG conversion in Adobe Lightroom I brought the photo into Adobe Photoshop.
Take a look at my layer toolbar and you’ll see some of the many layers I’ve used to put everything together. Most of the layers are just copies of his photo which I like to keep just in case I want to go back to something. It’s always great to have a backup.. nothing’s worse than not having a backup to go back to and having to start over again.
I did a bit of masking, dodging, and burning to have him match the grungy backdrop as best as possible. I also added some soft light to his eyes to give it an extra POP. After some curve adjustments for contrast and I ended up with what you see in the final photo.
It’s amazing to watch photos transform from an ordinary picture into something completely different. Hopefully you enjoy the photo manipulation I did. Let me know what you think!
Mark Gamboa - Lead Photographer of Gamboa Photos 
Crystal Mathias - Second Photographer & Editor of Gamboa Photos 
