Hey Everyone,

I’m really excited today to let you know that my 2nd Kelby Training Class Character Composites is now LIVE!

“Get ready to have a blast learning how to create character-based composite images with photographer and retoucher Glyn Dewis! Starting from scratch, Glyn will teach you every step in his process; from cool ways to use social media for brainstorming and communicating ideas to the importance of building your own stock image library while on location. Glyn demonstrates how he works with non-professional models and shows you how to bring all the elements together in Photoshop. Along the way you’ll learn numerous tips and tricks and leave the class inspired to go out and create your own fantastic composites.”

This class is where I go through everything that’s needed to create your own character composite entirely from scratch; starting with how to first of all come up with an idea, all the way through to putting everything together using Photoshop.

How do you come up with an idea?
This is one of those questions that I get asked a lot, so in this part of the class I cover the many ways and places you can find inspiration.

So once you have sort of an idea of what you want, the best thing you can do so as to guarantee the very best results is to decide what you want the final picture to look like. This helps BIG time when trying to explain what it is you’re looking to achieve to the eventual model you’ll be shooting.

Many times when I started I would be explaining verbally what I wanted but only to be greeted with a blank “what the heck are you talking about?” expression on the model’s face. Not their fault at all because there’s things we can do to REALLY help out here and this I also cover by talking through moodboards, Pinterest and then how I use Photoshop Touch to sketch everything out.

The difference it makes when you can show your model a ‘sketch’ is incredible!!!

Location Scouting
I don’t tend to use stock imagery for my backgrounds as I prefer to go out and photograph all the bits I want myself. Question is though…how do you know where to go? Well there’s so much available to us that means we can do all the research before heading out so that again we make the best use of our time and get exactly what we’re after.

This I show you and then once we’ve chosen a location, we head out to take all the photos we need to make our background plus cover etiquette when shooting on location, things to look out for and a few tips and tricks.

Working with Non Professional Models
We don’t always get to work with professional models and in fact most of the time we could end up shooting the guy or the girl from down the street. Not ideal if they don’t know how to act or what to do in front of the camera but all is not lost…there’s LOTS we can do to help our model totally nail what we’re looking for plus its here that you’ll see how using moodboards and sketches can make such a huge difference.

Of course after all the planning it’s time to get in the studio and start photographing our model in such a way that will work for our final picture but first of all go through the lighting and studio set up making sure to explain why certain lights, modifiers and backgrounds are used.

Putting it all together in Photoshop
The 2nd half of the class is where we dive into Photoshop and set about creating our final Character Composite. This is where all the planning and preparation pays off because rather than thinking “what shall I do to this?”…you’ll know straight away!

So there you go…you can check out my new Character Composite Class on Kelby Training here [Link]

Hope you like it.

Oh and of course, if you have any questions then please feel free to email me at glyn@www.glyndewis.com

Enjoy,
Glyn