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When you're trying to make "Love" there are a number of stages you need to follow, and each stage has its own set of problems. By following this tutorial, you should be able to make your own "Love" as good as possible. I have split the stages up and created a quick menu which will take you to the area that you are having problems with. If you've never tried making "Love" before, you should read the whole tutorial through, beginning to end.

"Where shall we do it?"

"Shall we leave the light on?"

"But I wanna use a red one!"

"I can't keep it up!"

"Where's it gone?!"

"It's all deformed and stuff!"

"It's too big!" or "It's too small!" (Pick whichever is relavent to you)

"It's a bit grey, isn't it?"

"Now it's gone a strange colour!"

"Is that it?!?"

Problem Numero Uno

"Where shall we do it?"

The most important thing to consider when setting up a shot like this is the surface. The shape of the surface will decide the shape of the shadow, so if you get this part wrong, you will never get the result you want. To get a heart shape, you need to choose a very thick book, because it is the curves of the pages that will create the curves of the heart. The flatter the book is, the flatter the top of the heart will be. It also needs to be a fairly wide book so that it fills the frame.

It's a good idea to experiment with different pages to see what details on the page work best with your composition. In my shot I decided to simply use a page about light (photocells, photography, etc). Because the challenge was "Shadows II", I thought it was quite relavent. I wanted the photo to fit the challenge as much as possible, and in as many ways as possible, to get maximum points from voters who vote down entries that don't meet the challenge. There is also a subtle "I Love Photography" theme in there - because I do :)

Problem Numero Deux

"Shall we leave the light on?"

In a challenge about shadows, it is important to get the lighting perfect. As you can see from the shot on the left, my set-up was nothing special. It is just a cheap desk lamp. My "studio" isn't exactly professional either. I just plonked the light and the book on my bed.

Just as a separate point, almost all of my set-up studio shots are shot with just this one basic desk lamp. It goes to show that you don't always need to spend a lot of money on lighting set-ups, although I'm sure it does help a bit ;)

Problem Numero... Three

"But I wanna use a red one!"

Have you ever heard of a blue heart? Well, maybe... but that would either mean it was starved of oxygen (kinda dead-like), or it was very cold - and let's face it, nobody likes a cold-hearted person.

The fact is, that I wanted a nice stereotypical red heart in my photo, but I didn't have a red filter, nor did I have the time or money to go out and buy one. I did however have a blue "daylight filter" from my mum's old Canon film SLR. This would be used for indoor shots to make them look more naturally coloured, counter-acting the orangeness of tungsten lighting. They are not needed in digital of course, because of White Balance settings.

I decided to use this blue filter, and then adjust the colour to red later in Photoshop. This may seem like cheating to some people, and to those people I apologise, but it would give me exactly the same end result as using a red one. It was just that I didn't have a red one.

Une Problemo (again)

"I can't keep it up!"

When trying to position the filter, you may run into difficulty keeping it in the right place. Mine, for example, kept falling over. Since filters are round, they also have a tendancy to roll away, darn things! There are a few different solutions to this problem:

• The easiest way to stop the filter falling over is to give up. I don't suggest this solution.

• Hold the filter up with a piece of cotton or fishing line, or better yet, get someone else to hold the filter up with a piece of cotton or fishing line. The problem here is lighting it so that the fishing line becomes invisible, since under DPChallenge's basic editing rules, no spot editing is allowed. I personally don't have any tips to help with lighting techniques to get rid of fishing lines, but if you ask in the forums, someone there is bound to know. This is really only a good method if you don't want the filter touching the surface.

• Stick the filter to the page. Obviously, don't use superglue, or it will ruin your book. You never know when you might want to read about the delights of photoconductivity cells on page 953 of The Macmillan Encyclopaedia! I used a small piece of Blu-Tak (plasticine will do) on the part of the filter that would be touching the book. Warm it up a bit first, because it's stickier when it's warm. You have to be careful that it doesn't show in the photo, so make it as small as possible.

Problemo Problemo Problemo!

"Where's it gone?!"

Have you ever wondered where your shadow is? Don't panic, you haven't suddenly turned into Peter Pan, you've probably just got too much ambiant light in your room. To get the best results and the strongest shadows, you need to use a single light source, which means cutting out all ambiant light from windows. The easiest way to do this is to wait until night time, or you could just close the curtains. It's a very simple thing, but a lot of people are so into taking their shots and setting up their lighting, that they forget about daylight. Compare the 2 shots below. Can you tell which one has the ambiant light? It is quite an obvious difference.

As you can see, cutting out ambiant light strengthens the shadow, and reduces the number of secondary shadows within the main one.

Next Problemo:

"It's all deformed and stuff!"

There could be a couple of different reasons why your heart looks the wrong shape. One is the shape of the book. The curve at each side of the book's spine needs to be roughly the same. On the example to the left, I pushed down on the right hand page, creating a flatter surface. This skews the heart and makes one side of it uneven.

If the light source isn't exactly central to the spine, then the pages need to be adjusted. The best way to do this is by eye, as only you know how you want the heart to look.

The advantage of using an old book with a broken spine, is that it gives you more control over the curves. A newer book would have the tendancy to spring back into its natural position, which may not be how you want it.

And the Problemo after that...

"It's too big!" or "It's too small!"

Another problem is getting the heart to not be too squashed or too streched. This is controlled by how near the lamp is to the filter. The closer and higher it is, the shorter the shadow will be, the same way that shadows at midday are always small and shadows in the morning or evening are always really long. The two photos below are examples to show the difference the position of the lamp can make.

More Problemos!

"It's a bit grey, isn't it?"

Leaving the camera on AWB (Automatic White Balance) will create photos as seen in all the examples so far. They look nice, but it does create a problem. The heart looks blue, but only because it is next to the yellow pages. If you go into the Hue/Saturation settings in Photoshop, and boost blue and cyan to the max Saturation, it shows that in fact the filter is just making everything grey, and it is not blue at all (as shown in the image below). This makes sense, as it is what the skylight filter was designed to do in the first place - neutralise tungsten light.

As you can see above, only one part of the image was effected by the saturation boost (circled in red), and that was the Blu-Tak I used to hold the filter in place! To correct this, a custom white balance needs to be set. I took a photo of the page in the same lighting as the final shot would use, and set this image as the custom white balance. With the 300D, this is done by going into any manual mode (P, Tv, Av, M, A-DEP), pressing the MENU button, then scrolling down to Custom WB, and pressing SET on the image you want to use as your "white". On other cameras, it is probably done in a similar way, but you should check your manual for more specific instructions.

Using the image on the left as my white balance setter, the photos taken afterwards look much more pleasing, as you can see below:

One Last Problem...o?

"Now it's gone a strange colour!"

We are nearing the end of this journey, weary travellers, but one more obstacle still stands before us.

When you go into the blue channel in Photoshop now, you should be able to change the colour of the filter. Move the slider up and down and watch the colours. Woooo psychedelic! Notice anything though? The colours only range from green to pink. No red! I'm no Photoshop expert, so I have no idea why this is, but in this case it's quite annoying. When changing the Master channel, it can go to red, but then if you have any other colour in the photo, that changes too. To overcome this little set-back, you just need to do the hue adjustment in 2 stages.

In the first stage, you have to go quite far over to the left with the slider, but you must also make sure that all the colour is in one channel. In the example above, I've made sure the heart is all green. If I moved the slider all the way over, instead of stopping at -100, the next stage wouldn't work. Sure, it would still look all green, but there would be certain shades which would have moved into the yellow channel. In the next stage, when you try to move the green channel over to red, you would get the effect pictured on the right.

To make absolutly sure that this doesnt happen in your final image, you have to try it a few times until you find the right position on the slider depending on the original colour of your photo. In my case, the green was the only colour on the photograph (after I changed the yellow channel to Lightness -100), so I could then just change the master channel.

After that, all I did was to crop, sharpen slightly, do a slight Brightness/Contrast alteration, and add a border. Yay, finished!

"Is that it?!?"

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