If you’re going to grunge up a photo of someone, make sure they’re not just smiling into the camera. They’ve either gotta be looking stone-cold cool, or they’ve gotta be doing something out of the ordinary. (Or altogether oblivious of the camera. That’s another strong approach.)

Try some candid shots (for some experimental shots, try walking around the city, shooting from the hip, catching interesting people who don’t know you’re grabbing their photo), and try getting some of your cooler-looking friends to just stare off into space, look pensive, act deranged. Take a lot of shots, and look for the ones that can really stand out in a grunge treatment.

Whatever you do, don’t let them just smile at you. That’s weird anyhow.

This is a nice introduction to Lightroom if you’re not using it or if you are but haven’t really fine-tuned a solid work flow yet. Phil Steele has come up with another strong tutorial worth checking out.

Personally, I can’t imagine getting by anymore without Lightroom. But there’s so much it can do, if you don’t have a solid, repeatable work flow mapped out, you could spend double or triple the amount of time in there than necessary, and come away with results half as strong as they might have been otherwise.

This is definitely worth checking out:
Phil Steele’s Lightroom Work Flow Tutorial

I love the work of Joey L., and I can’t help but admire what appears to be his universal (if extremely straightforward and rather simple) approach:

• Pick one thing, knock it out, flatten.
• Pick the next thing, knock it out, flatten.

Which is precisely why his work flow is what it is:

1. Duplicate the layer, do something to it, erase away what you don’t want, flatten.
2. Move on to the next thing and do it again.
3. And then the next thing and do it again.

There is an obvious simplicity to the entire conceptualization process. You don’t have to be mentally thinking about multiple layers, with various blending modes and masks, and how they are all interacting with one another. And because it is easier to keep straight in your head, it’s just flat out quicker. And what makes him especially quick is how fast he has become with his Brush/Eraser/Dodge/Burn tools, jumping back continually to the brush palette and up to the tool bar to change opacity on the fly as he works.

This is his process at each stage:

1. Duplicate the layer.
2. Do something to it (I talk about this below).
3. Erase what you don’t want.
4. Flatten.

His “do something to it” phase generally boils down to one or (often) a combination of things he does to the duplicate layer he just created. His main arsenal seems to involve the following:

• Change the blend mode (Multiply, Soft Light, etc.) or layer opacity.
• Run a layer adjustment (Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Shadows/Highlights, etc.).
• Make a selection (possibly with Quick Mask, possibly inverting it) and run an adjustment on the selection.
• Run a filter (one of the Blurs, Emboss, Lens Flare, etc.).
• Dodge and burn (with the Dodge & Burn tools).
• Slap a grunge layer on top, change its blending mode, etc.

Where his truest artistry comes from — apart from the photography itself and his insane quickness with that brush palette — is in his magnificent, painterly eye at making the changes he does make, which almost always involves what amounts to painting with light and shadow: Making something darker and then using the Brush/Eraser/Dodge/Burn tool to paint back the light where he wants it … Or making something brighter and painting back the dark where he wants that … And usually a combination of both.

There is much to be said for the simplicity of his work flow, especially when contrasted with the mind-blowing care and complexity of someone like Vincent Versace, who keeps massive, elaborately stacked layers, and even creates a “guide layer” to sketch out every set of changes he is going to make before actually applying a brush stroke.

I suppose there are advantages to both.

But Joey’s approach sure can be a hell of a lot of fun.

One element of his work flow I can’t help but change, though. (And I think he has changed his stance on this as well.) While I can see how there might be situations where duplicating a layer and using the Eraser Tool might be the fastest and easiest solution, I think that overall the advantage rests with adjustment layers and masks. For a few reasons:

• Masks are less pixel-destructive (which might impact print quality).
• Masks give you greater versatility (sometimes surprising things turn up by dragging layers into a different order, and until you flatten for real, you can always go back).
• Again on the versatility: With a mask, you can very easily jump in either direction: mask it all out and paint it back, or leave it all on and paint out what you don’t want (my left hand automatically goes to that X key to toggle between black and white).
• Working with masks is just GOOD for you — it is a skill that translates directly over into compositing.

So while I’m all for emulating his painterly approach and aspiring to his magnificent facility with the brush palette, I’m going to stick with layer masks and continue to leave my eraser tool in its box.

He just posted a great tutorial on how to use blending modes in quickly grunging-up a shot. What I like most about his tutorial is the way he weaves in brief asides explaining WHY he tweaks the grunge effects used in the image the way he does. His comments reveal that he is truly a photographer using Photoshop while always continuing to think like a photographer (as opposed to a Photoshop-addict caught up in the effect itself, without giving thought to the composition as a whole).

Take a few minutes to go through his tutorial at the link below. You have to opt-in to get access to it, but I’ve opted in myself and he’s not sending out a bunch of email or anything like that. So no worries there. This is definitely worth checking out:

http://grungephotoshop.com/burnmonkey

One thing is certain: if you already know how to fix red-eye and correct a color cast, there’s nothing there worth reading.

There were two books from some years back that pass nearest what I wish there were more of on the market. One was The Art of Photoshop, by Daniel Giordan, and the other was New Masters of Photoshop, published by Friends of Ed (and good luck getting a copy!).

Even in those two books (and I can dimly recall a couple of others with some passing merit), even in those the work itself was of mixed quality and the instruction overblown in some areas while wholly lacking in others.

What we need is a book written with the serious Photoshop artist in mind, where we can see great art unfold before us, and learn something of the creative process itself.

The nearest work I’ve seen presented on this scale is Vincent Versace’s exemplary Welcome to Oz. I’ve written a set of notes on his techniques, but while I am impressed with his professionalism and creative process, at the end of the day his purpose to create something that looks gorgeous but leaves you wondering if Photoshop even came into it. (It did, in a big way, but his intention is to make you wonder if it was Photoshop or brilliant camera work alone.) Since my interests are more on the side of brazen Photoshop work, his book only partly satisfies.

My hope is that through some of the interviews I conduct for this site, and some of the tutorials I am able to assemble, that I will perhaps be able to create a substitute, here online, for the book that I keep wishing I would find every time I enter the photography aisle at the bookstore.

Note: Photo above used by permission of Phil Steele (grunged to my satisfaction).