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If you’re reading this month’s N-Photo on a dark autumn’s night, next to a roaring fire and you come across this terrifying tutorial, you might just feel a creeping sense of foreboding as you remember that it’s the spookiest time of the year. But perhaps what you’ve mistaken for unease is actually a burning desire to do some photography. This seasonal project is sure to get those creative pumpkin juices flowing. All you need is a standard focal length lens, a willing participant and layer-based image-editing software.
The shoot itself is frightfully simple. Frame your image on a tripod, direct a lightsource onto your subject to create a shadow and fire the shutter. Then capture an identically framed and lit image, without the subject. Post is where the dark magic happens. You create a spooky shadow, which you then project onto the wall, using Adobe Photoshop to contort it into a believable position. A few layer masks, a bit of blur and an opacity change later and you’ve got a horrifying spectre shadow troubling your hapless subject.
Download the project file(s) to your Downloads folder
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