Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Photoshop -- Making a Pretty Girl Prettier -- Charlotte Again

I realized earlier today that I had forgotten the lonely set of images I shot from the D70s using that lovely little 50mm f1.8 gem of a lens.

Shot wide open, that lens creates lovely backgrounds, but it also creates rather angular portraits that need more tweaking than the more compressed portraits shot with longer lenses. So I could not get away with simply using what I shot (not in my opinion anyway.)

Here is one of the best of that lot ...


The original has a bit of the raccoon eyes (deep shadows in the eye sockets) and her head is tilted slightly wrong, emphasizing her jaw too much. Her arms are not balanced much, which frankly twists her ... hmmm ... chest I suppose ... off kilter a bit. And her hair ... the angle is totally wrong, it simply does not work. She has incredible hair and here is looks like a reversed fan. Just not working.

This is, of course, my fault. I needed to look more closely at what I was seeing through the lens and to tweak the pose here and there until it looked right. But I didn't, and yet I like this image. I think it could be something more.

So ... I brought the whole image up towards high key using my favorite technique for that -- a layer with Gaussian blur and screen blend. I then tweaked the eyes and added makeup.
Jon says he hates the makeup I've been doing lately ... it looks fake to him. If any of the models from Barrett Palmer happen to read this, *please* let me know what you think. I need to know.
Anyway, I then added some extra spot light from the top right to emphasize the face and eyes and remove some of the shadows in there. And finally, I tweaked her quite a bit with the liquify [sic] brush ... fixing every one of the errors I made in not adjusting her pose.

This one I like ... a lot.

2 comments:

So sue me said...

The hair, face and er..implants are very nice, the skin glows nicely but J. may be right: I think the lip colour is a bit much for the dress, which is a very simple summer thing.

Totally subjective.

Kim Letkeman said...

Thanks Sue, that's a good point. I happen to like shades in that range, but then, I'm color blind :-) ... I'll try it with less emphasis on the uber-model look ...