With Liverpool playing Real Madrid tonight, I wanted to share before and after's of a recent PRO FOOTBALLER shoot with brothers, Joe & Alex. Two hardcore Liverpool supporters, and football fanatics.

These guys turned up to the shoot well prepared and ready with some poses which is great. The boys totally understood the kind of larger than life, super hero look and feel I go for with these portraits and nailed it!

As always, we spent time shooting several looks and poses to give options. I typically sway more towards shooting a single player for the PRO FOOTBALLER image, but can add more players if needed. I tend to find it's easier to still shoot the players individually, and then combine them into the one image, and that's exactly what we did here. I created a different wider background for this to give the two players more room around them, and added some more interesting and dramatic clouds. See the wider shot and then with clouds added....

Here are the boys cut out and positioned ready to drop into the background (before any colour corrections and retouching applied):

Then I positioned to the two players slightly to the left of the background, resized them a little to show some of the difference in height between the brothers, and then began working on them.

The boys parents were keen to keep relatively realistic, v's some of my other PRO FOOTBALLER images, and other work in general, so I didn't stray to far from the out of camera shots, in terms of effects. I adjusted the exposure a little to match the background, worked on blemishes, lights and darks in the skin, enhanced the eyes, desaturated a little and then focused on blending the players with the background.

Here is the shot at 90% completion. I always take my images to this point and then step away for a bit and then return and for the finishing touches, or to revisit any thing that's niggling me about the shot.

.....and here is the final image with some final colour changes, clarity and vignetting....:

I was really pleased with the results. Needless to say this has made it's way straight into my portfolio. You can see a bigger version of the image by clicking on the picture above.

Keep an eye out for these boys, as there were several good shots from the session, so it's quite possible, you'll be seeing more of them :)

Thanks for reading.

Stu