Warhol Coke Cans

Scott — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 10:56:59 +0000

Its amazing how many times you can take a photo and in your minds eye compose what the final processing will deliver. This certainly wasn’t my initial idea but I quite like it.

The setup for this shot was rather easy.

Lens choice was my Canon 50mm f1.8 mkII.
Tripod for stability during manual focus
Vivitar 285 flash -1/16th power
2 White foam core boards for fill light
Table with black fabric draped over it
Clear plastic board under Coke can
Coke can (obvious I guess)
Remote trigger
Spray bottle

Camera was set to Manual with an aperture of f3.2 and a shutter speed of 1/400sec. I set the lens to manual and aimed for the sharpest focus on the words “Uplifting Refreshment”.

White foam core boards were used to bounce some of the light back onto the can to define the sides of the can.

Flash was set at 1/16th power with a home made snoot and grid. Flash was hand held during the shoot for 2 reasons. The main reason being I don’t have a light stand, and the other being I was wanting to try a few different angles.

Tripod was set so that the camera was slightly looking down at the can.

Can was placed on a clear plastic board and sprayed with a fine water mist. This will give the Coke can to a cool and refreshing look.

Here is a straight out of camera photo of using the above setup only without the water mist on the can or the clear plastic board.

Once I had the images captured it was time for the post processing in Adobe Photoshop CS2. After sorting through the hundred or so photos I had decided on one particular shot that had a good reflection on the plastic and no major over highlights from the flash.

Here is the post processing for this image.

Crop out the white foam core boards
Clone stamp tooled the clear plastic boards slight reflections in the background of the image and the other foreground reflections
Increased the Canvas size and stretched out the black on the sides of the can to fill in this area
Increased the saturation of the reds in the image
Increased the contrast
Adjusted the levels
Unsharpen Mask to around 102% @ 2.5 pixels radius

Then for the final Warhol image,

Duplicated the layer 4 times with the blend style on each layer set to Screen
Increased the Canvas size by 400% Width
Created a background layer with a black fill
Aligned the 4 Can layers vertically and distributed evenly
Then on each layer using the Image –> Adjustments –> Replace Color tool I made the individual colours
Flatten the image
Then to finish off the image I adjusted the Levels by moving the blacks down a little and then the greys down a little. This cleans up the background and gives the cans more attitude.

Any questions on the image please ask in the comments section below.

The Photo Journey » Coke

Warhol Coke Cans