Fun With Judy and Burgess: Dirty Dancing

In addition to Twilight and Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Judy and Burgess wanted to do an homage to Dirty Dancing. The setup: In both photos, the key light is a flash shot through a reflective umbrella at camera right high above the subjects. A second flash at camera left served as fill light, but I'm not sure if it fired in the photo above. It definitely fired in the bottom photo, because we needed a lot of extra light on Burgess's black tank top. Original photos: Shot by Brian: Shot by me: What I did during post-processing: Like before, I first removed the background around Judy and Burgess. Having spent two evenings slowly and painfully (carpal tunnel) removing the background with the eraser, lasso, and magic wand tools, I had enough. I felt that Photoshop must have devised a way to quickly remove all pixels that matched a certain color specified by me. I dug around the internet and found this great article entitled "Keying Out Backgrounds in Photoshop". It's a step-by-step guide on how to use the 'Color Range' tool. This tool is simply amazing. It turned a three hour task into one that took about a minute! In fact, I was able to remove most of the green from the second photo while riding the bumpy train in the morning! Best of all is that with a little care, I was able to preserve most of Judy's hair! Of course I still had to employ the other tools to remove the rug around Judy and Burgess's hands and knees. Next time I'm using a bigger green sheet! What I learned: The 'Color Range' tool is the best thing since sliced bread!