Happy Halloween! (and the Hatter MAGGI update)

Hello my Sweethearts!

Spooky Halloween! Even so it’s almost in the mid-week I hope you'll manage to have fun and enjoy your time. Just remember not to party too hard, because it might become a problem in the morning. )
Also, if you’re participating in trick-or-treat let’s make children’s day a bit brighter and give them good sweets. From my point of view this holiday should be felt as bonus Christmas. )

Today I’m here not only to greet you with Halloween, but to share another update on MAGGI The Hatter. This time more open and provoking. )

This project is tough. Really is.
Last project that was hard to work on was “The Goddes Incarnation” photoshoot. Since we used relatively flat soft light on the model, it was hard to work on forms and shapes of the model. Almost no highlights. One small mistake and everything is ruined.
There’s one russian joke suitable for such situations: “One mistake and you’ve mistaken”.
Love this joke. )

The Hatter project on the contrary stands on the opposite side. The light is more hard. Also we used different color backlight in order to bring different feel in each shot. The temperature of the colors plays a big part in image perception.
But different colors also come with complications. For example they can mix badly with each other on the model’s skin. Every model has her own unique skin tone, so the color changes every time. Especially in the places where the model might have “complications”. So you should mix the problem with the body part, and proceed to fix the mixed light.  
There’s also one fun inconvenience that happens when you have two colored lights on model's body. It’s all due to how our eyes perceive the light and colors.
In case of this photoshoot and this image in particular, before the color grade, our eyes might see green-ish or yeallow-ish tint on the parts where the base white light (temp is around 5500-6500 K, which is basically daylight) reflects off of the body. Even if the color of the skin is correct, you’ll see it differently.
I’ll try to explain like it would explain the person who doesn’t know physics at all, like myself and Tao. So please, be understandable. )
Blue color mixed with yellow gives variations of green. Pink color mixed with yellow gives variations of orange. Skin color usually consists of magenta and yellow colors.
As you know, all visible information is technically a reflected light that was caught with our eye cells or camera matrix. So when the light bounces off the body you have several sources of light information. And let’s not forget about the surface where light bounced back.
Closer to blue, you’ll see green skin. Closer to magenta you’ll see orange/yellow skin. So the amount of each color depends on the camera angle and light source positioning.

In some cases, when both blue and magenta light sources are positioned right in front of each other, a mix of the colors creates a brown color. It happens because blue and pink create purple. Purple mixed with orange/yellow gives types of brown. On the photo it looks like you have no color in shadows, and dirty brown colored skin.

So you need to fix all this. Interesting looking photos come with a big price and hard work later on post-production. That’s why not many photographers use mixed light. It’s hard to work with it on every step. And a lot of money to pay your retouchers, if you don’t do your own retouching. It’s just basically not worth all the headache.

Since we are knuckleheads, who love to experiment and don’t live life, we love to try and work with different light schemes. And it always fires us back with huge burnouts. But it’s interesting. )
It’s also funny, when you as the retoucher curse yourself as the photographer for what was done on set. And curse back at yourself when you spend too much time on one photo. It almost feels like “Controllable personality disorder”, haha. )  

The project is still in progress. We’ll do our best to finish it as soon as possible. Few images are left that we wanted to work on this month. Other half of the photoshoot will appear somewhere in the future months.
We already working on preparations for November projects and soon I will make the voting post. Hope you’ll have the time to make your choice. )

Have a great day, Hope it won’t be a tough read. Also, hope you’ll give us that needed extra time. It really is tough project and both of us really sorry for slow work time. But none of us want to give you the project created without any sincerity and attention.

See you soon! And Happy Halloween once again!