Experimental Processing (Going Out on a Limb!)…

I’ve enjoyed the wet plate collodian work of Ian Ruhter here on Tumblr and wondered if it was possible to replicate the process digitally. Well, I’ve been tinkering about with various “recipes” for a little while and this is the closest I’ve managed so far.

Using Silver Efex Pro 2 I converted to monochrome and used the tin type preset as a starting point lowering saturation and increasing contrast in Elements. I copied the resulting image and reprocessed it in SFX2 using a solarisation preset. The second image was used to create a new layer over the original and the opacity reduced to 15%. The levels were then merged.

Next I took a rust texture, converted it to mono and boosted the brightness to maximum before reprocessing in SFX2 using the same solarisation preset as before. The texture image was added as a new layer to the portrait and opacity reduced to about 15-20%.

Finally, I added a portrait finishing technique from Scott Selby’s excellent Elements 8 book.

Comments welcome! And if anyone wants to blag the “recipe” and improve on it I have no objections. If you do, please share your technique! Thanks…

Model photographed at Focus 2013 courtesy of the Olympus guys.