Translights behind the scenes

To follow on from my ”What on Earth are Translights” post, I thought I would take you behind the scenes to see what goes into making, using and processing a shoot with a Translight background.

I am going to use the street racer image as an example for this as it contains all the steps that I would normally follow.

Step 1 – Choose your background

The first step is to decide on a background image and whether you are going to shoot it yourself or use a stock image. In both cases you will need to have a pretty high resolution image but you will more than likely only need to print the section of it that will be behind the model unless you are using ambient Translighting which is a whole other blog  post.

In this case I chose to shoot my own image and I shot it in sections using a panoramic head and stitched the individual images using PTGUI so that I could increase the resolution of the final image. These are the individual images  and in this case please ignore the difference in exposure as they are part of an HDR set.

The stitched result looks like this.

Next I needed to turn this into a night scene so after quite a lot of Photoshop work, I had my final background image.

 The section of this image that would be behind the model was printed in two sections, each 90cm wide by 3m high,  on an HP Designjet Z3200 using HP Vivid Colour backlit media. The sections were then joined together and you can often get away with quite a rough join as the model more often than not covers most of the join.

The background lighting is then adjusted to give the desired exposure and then the model is placed in the scene and the lighting that will be used for her is adjusted accordingly.

Finally the image is taken into Photoshop and merged with original background image which restores the background to its full width. Ideally the background should be printed and shot in its entirety but that costs a lot of money and its easy enough to merge the images in Photoshop.

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