RED TREE STUDIO

Welcome to the Sneak peak of the Carnival Girls shoot for The Siamese Twins featuring Patricia Ward...

We are often asked how much Photoshop is used in our shots and the answer is that unless it is something blatantly unnatural like the Siamese Twins shots below, very little. All our shots would be processed to sharpen, crop, colour adjust etc. but unless the shot calls for it we usually don't radically alter the content of the shot. The Carnival Girls set would be the exception to this. All of this series is heavily processed to get the look and feel we are after and extensive changes to the physical content are usually needed as well to give us the unnatural Carnival look we want.

The shots below are very heavily processed and we are not going to go into a tutorial on how the processing was done but we did think it might be interesting to show the RAW shots straight out of the camera and the progression to the end result that you see in the gallery.

	This is the first of three completely unedited shots straight out of the camera. The mannequin was used firstly for perspective to give the model a sense of space within the shot and secondly to create realistic shadows on the background and on the model for her 'twin'.
	This is the second shot completely unedited straight out of the camera and without the mannequin leaving room from her 'twin'.
	This is the third completely unedited shot straight out of the camera showing Trish posing as her 'twin' with a costume change and small changes to her hair, makeup and expression.
	This was the first of three attempts to get the final image. I played it safe with a nice morph of the three shots above and a minimal join of skin on the hip to represent the Siamese Twins aspect of the shot. The general consensus of the circle of critiques I asked said that I had played it 'too safe' and the join was unnatural and understated.
	After a bit of research and looking through images of real conjoined twins I realised that I needed to go much further which left us with the shot to the left. A lot of PhotoShop’ping later left us with the image you see here where the clothes were made to look like they had been made for them and they are very obviously joined.
	There was a feeling that we were close, but the shot was unbalanced. I cloned the arm from 'black top' Trish onto 'orange top' Trish, to balance the shot and that left me with the latest in the Carnival Girls project. If anyone is interested in the specific techniques of the Photoshop used don’t hesitate to contact me.