PAOLLA RAHMEIER BY JACQUES DEQUEKER // Photoshop Experimenting

Jacques Dequeker is a Brazilian fashion photographer, with work published in magazines including Vogue Brazil, Vogue Portugal, Marie Claire France, Glamour Paris and more. I wouldn't denote his work as a whole as fitting under the topic 'Fantastic and Strange' but I've decided to look into one of his Marie Claire shoots to seek inspiration which could be applied to fit the topic.

This shoot features prominent elements of 3D futurism, which is a really interesting topic to me. I love the way that the aesthetic of these pictures, despite being quite futuristic, have an 80s/90s retro, VHS edge to them. It's quite a juxtaposition of ideas. The way the colour channels have been manipulated to create this image creates a really interesting vibe. The original colour in the photos comes second to the green and red shadows and highlights.


I've decided to experiment on Photoshop with the Edward&Me photo recreations I did. I've decided to use those because they are really weird and fit well under the title 'Fantastic and Strange', I'm going to use the 3D effect to amplify the strangeness of the photos rather than create the strangeness from a seemingly blank canvas.

I first edited this photo which hadn't been too drastically manipulated. I upped the warmth and a couple of other factors like the highlights and lowered the shadows to create the base image. Then I duplicated the layer, went to edit/adjustments/colour channel mixer. With red as the selected output, I lowered the red to 0 and pressed accept. I then selected the top layer and did the same thing but this time lowering the green on the green output and the blue of the blue output, both to 0. After that, with the top layer selected I pressed cmd+t to enter free transform mode and rotated the top layer by 1.1 degrees (I experimented a bit with the rotation first to see what I liked best). Finally, I set the top layer's blending mode to screen where the bright cyan and red of the two layers seemed to have an equalising effect on one another, leaving the red and green edges and highlights to create a more subtle 3D effect.

<An example showing more of a rotation between the top and bottom layers, this creates an example more similar to the work of Dequeker.



With these images, I decided to make them all black and white so that they'd all match well with each other and create a series of sorts. I decided to go with the more subtle of the 3D effects but if I had more time I would have liked to experiment more with a stronger rotation.