Post Production:

To continue the cinematic look that I got in camera I wanted to create a cinematic color grade. I wanted the overall color to be cyan/yellow to compliment the prominent reds and blues in the image. I neutralized and did a slight color grade in camera raw but I brought it into Photoshop to really make the color pop.



Raise your hand if you think I photographed this in the middle of a snowy field? Well... I'm going to let you in on a little secret... the location is totally fake. Because it was a snowy afternoon in Chicago, Andrea didn't feel comfortable driving his car anywhere. We ended up just pulling it out into the alley outside of his garage and shot there. So originally, outside that window was the side of a cream-colored house. Blah... I then went on to Google images and searched for a snowy scene that had the same gloomy feeling as the weather that day. I spent a decent amount of time color-matching the scene to the color originally outdoors so there wasn't a huge disconnect from the window to the highlights inside the car. I also wanted to keep the snow that was already on the window so I basically blended the cream-colored house to the background image. To keep it looking real I gave the background image a slight blur to mimic depth of field. Considering this was one of my first composites, I was pretty proud of how well it turned out. Finally, a little bit of dodge and burn, curves, and sharpening and it's complete!