Ecstasy of Espresso

I saw the idea sketch for this in my “notebook of ideas” while I was enjoying my own cup of cinnamon iced coffee and decided it was the perfect scene for me to work on at that moment. I’m a girl who loves her coffee! I tried to portray that in this piece but I’m not sure if I pulled it off or not. Still, it looks good to me so I’m posting it. I thought she needed some jewelry and then I tried to pick jewelry items that reminded me of coffee. The heart necklace looks like the top of a cappuccino design and the bubbles of her rings look like brewing espresso… to me anyway.

This scene was rendered with depth of field in Superfly. I used a rather simple light setup of one infinite light up above as my ceiling light and then a single area light coming from the direction of the scene’s windows. Oh, I almost forgot I added a soft highlighting light behind her to add some more dimension to her hair. There’s also a slight glow coming from the candle on the table. In postwork, I used two Photoshop actions to give the scene a coffee-like brown tone and then used some adjustment layers to edit the colors and contrast even further. I added a soft brown vignette effect as well. With a super soft brush I added a glow to the lamp then further blurred the glow and set the layer to screen and greatly lowered the opacity of that layer. Finally, I added the steam to the coffee cup using Rons Detailed Smoke brushes on a separate layer which I lowered the opacity of and also blurred so that it matched my depth of field effects. 

• Dream Hair Biscuits by Dream 9 Studios
• Amie Hair by Biscuits
• Coffee Shop by TruForm