Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises.
-Pedro Calderon de la Barca
A couple of years ago I purchased an olive green backdrop. I really liked how it photographed but didn’t use it often because it is small measuring about 4′ x 6′. It’s fine for photographing one person, but even then, most of the time I had to expand the backdrop when retouching the image in Photoshop.
The less time I need to spend in Photoshop the better. People seem to think there is a magic wand in Photoshop (which ironically there is a tool in Photoshop called magic wand but it’s powers are limited to making selections and masking… in other words, not a Harry Potter-style magic wand). All that sitting during retouching is slowly killing me – not joking – so the more I can get the image right in camera, the better.
This is a long way of communicating to you that the goal was to create a larger olive green backdrop that replicated the color of the small backdrop so I could photograph more than one person against it. As I described in the Old Masters Brown blog post, I brought the olive backdrop outside along with paint samples from Home Depot to assist with selecting the closest colors for the new backdrop.
The end result, interestingly enough, produced a more vibrant green than I anticipated. The smaller olive green backdrop is subdued and delivers almost an Old Masters oil painting tone for a background. The olive backdrop that I painted delivers a bigger punch of color that I did not expect, but quite like. It’s not what I was aiming for, but I’m happy nonetheless. Because this:
Interested in learning more about what the studio has to offer? Click on the following links to jump to the studio’s portfolio of images, and download a digital copy of the studio’s Magazine and Style Guide to learn how to prepare for your photoshoot: