Straight out of camera
The next course of action was to do a minor retouch to the face, a little clone tool here and there, nothing too extreme …..and a little dodge and burn! I also brightened the eyes up a little.
After that, I darkened the surrounding background with a curves adjustment, and added another dodge and burn. As I knew this was going to be an ultra stylised image, realism was not my goal. So I could push the dodge and burn to the extreme to get the painterly feel.
Having pre-thought about the image before I shot, I knew my virtual HUD was going to be red, so with curves I added a red colour tone to the face. I also added a red glow to the eye. I achieved this by painting with a red brush on a soft light blend mode, and painting it in on a blank layer.
Now for the fun part. The HUD. I downloaded the free hud template from a tutorial on youtube. For my cyberpunk series, which will feature many cool virtual displays like this I will more than likely build my own….but for now a template is quick and easy to test.
To add the HUD into the image I pulled it into my layers panel, then simply put it on a screen blend mode! Looking at references of Iron Man online, who uses a HUD like this, the interface seemed to curve around his face. So using the transform warp tool, I curved in the edges, and pulled out the centre.
Now for the badass red! Simply create a hu/saturation adjustment layer and pull the hue slider till you find a red colour you like…..or any colour you wish!
Trying to add some realism to the HUD, I though it would be good if there was a little digital haze/glow from the interface so I simply duplicated the layer and added some gaussian blur.
I really wanted to the HUD to POP with Vibrant red, so again I duplicated the original HUD on a screen blend mode.
To focus the attention on the centre of the image and blend in the images of the HUD to make it look more realistic, I used a curves adjustment layer to darken the edges.
Again I added another curves adjustment layer to refine the focus even more, added some slight sharpening to the face, and moved back into Lighttroom. Once in Lightroom I added some fine detail sharpening and Bobs your uncle, you have one badass ultimate selfie!
FINAL IMAGE!!!
