BTS: The Black Beauty Retouch

So since i've gotten pretty good feedback in regards to my retouch of Douglas Sonders photo of the Black Beauty, I decided to make a gif of my process of the entire retouch.  Since there wasn't an art director or general client giving me directions on what to do, this retouch was more of an exploration.  I made some mistakes and lots of changes, and while the gif ​doesn't show all my layers, it does give you a general idea of how the image was built.

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The Black Beauty

One of my favorite shows as a kid growing up was The Green Hornet.  ​Whenever the re-runs were on i'd jump on and watch.  I'm a huge Bruce Lee fan and love cars, so naturally the Black Beauty was something I wet my pants over a lot.  Recently I met Douglas Sonders, and east coast based photographer who had just shot the Black Beauty itself and was nice enough to let me mess around with one of his images.  A few hours later and this is the product of a bit of photoshop work.  I wanted to give it a modern movie poster type feel and I have to admit that i'm in love with the final product.

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​Photo courtesy of Douglas Sonders.

Words of Wisdom from Patrick Demarchelier

"You don't succeed overnight, it's a long thing.  You're a young photographer, you work with more clients, there's more jobs.  And you work, and you don't know where you're going year by year.  It's many years before you have success.  Success in photography is what you do everyday. Every day is a new day, so you have to work every day.  So you don't really succeed, you have to do it again every day."

-Patrick Demarchelier

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