I had a chance to use my Manfrotto backdrop the other day.
It cost a bomb, so always happy to use it. The client was given a few options, going with green screen for options (cast portraits going into the productions programme with a picture frame style presentation).
I thought at the last minute that the Walnut side of my backdrop might also be an idea, so I pushed it through the stage door at rehearsals and got a “oh, that’s nice”, so Walnut it was.
I bought the Walnut and Pewter because it was the grey I wanted (very mild texture) and the Walnut appealed, but I was aware that both are cool in tone.
Not a huge photoshop user, I was going to painstakingly paint the background with the brush in Capture 1 and change it. Not a huge job for a small shoot, bit of a pain for 50+ subjects.
Then Lightroom and C1 bought in auto masking of subject and background and stuff got real.
This is the base colour, cool wood with blue-ish undertones and a slight vignette (exaggerated here for final edit). Excuse the wrinkled t-shirts of the subjects. I shot in mostly darkness, the other option was strong fluorescence, and they were sharing a couple of pro T’s to hide uniforms etc.
Reducing saturation is an easy fix, Still cool, but suits this subject.
Bringing out the texture, highlighting the background colours a little, but pushing the base olive (white balance shift and colour channels), gives me a much desired Olive tone version. With more depth of field, I could bring out more texture and colour.
Or I can go the other way and blur it out more for an almost medium format look.
Wanting to give the client some variety, I treated each subject as an individual on their merits. Same background, only white balance shifts applied to the background layer.
Texture requires a background replacement, beyond my skill set, but colour and therefore feel of the image is an easy fix.