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Excellent image, excellent B&W treatment -- and no you did not spoil the brilliance!oh well.. lets add one of mine , hoping i didnt spoil the brilliance ..
RZ ProIID + Aptus54s + 50/4.5 (older one, not ULD)
This is great Sergei! I agree with Jack, the B&W conversion is excellent but the pose and composition is exceptional. Not sure what it is about the comp that works so well, maybe the negative space in the door against the model. Grabs your attention for sure.oh well.. lets add one of mine , hoping i didnt spoil the brilliance ..
RZ ProIID + Aptus54s + 50/4.5 (older one, not ULD)
It's a real balancing act Shelby. IMO, this one is getting a little over-processed looking compared to your usual stuff which has a really beautiful natural feel to them.whoa... such nice stuff here! Lovely!
One from me... an initial edit from a headshot session today (saxophonist). Still struggling with how to process these files for people, but getting better i think.
Aptus ii 6 - AFD III - 210/4 ULD
Cheers!
Shelby
Yeah... being away for dinner (and coming back to it) it looks overdone to me as well. One thing I'm learning with MF is that if you retouch thoroughly at larger sizes and then downsize quite a bit, the skin looks TOO smooth on the web.... too perfect.It's a real balancing act Shelby. IMO, this one is getting a little over-processed looking compared to your usual stuff which has a really beautiful natural feel to them.
The skin is a little too smooth and the eyes/lashes a little too crispy.
-Marc
That looks a bit more natural Shelby. What you may be fighting is the over-all coolness from the ambient ... evidenced in the hair above her forehead.Ok... one more with slightly different skin work. No sharpening after downsizing, and only cloning work on the skin... no smoothing. Everything else is either the effect of lighting, DoF, or (non-pro) makeup.
Was a little hamstrung with color, as her makeup was a bit orange in tone, but the rest of her skin isn't... so when her face was color balanced correctly, the rest of the scene wasn't.
I'll have to watch that from now on.
Cheers!
Shelby
I had been using ACR, but the files looked NOT so nice (especially skin)... same with LR. So these were from my first run with LC11. I intentionally kept them cool to keep her orange makeup at bay. I'm on an older machine, so I'm running an older version of leaf capture, but the files already look better as far as tonality... but the sharpening is something I've not figured out... so I turned it off. Then I just output full size tiffs, retouched in photoshop and then downsized. I'm thinking that even that part of my routine isn't working for headshots either.That looks a bit more natural Shelby. What you may be fighting is the over-all coolness from the ambient ... evidenced in the hair above her forehead.
Skin tone is definitely the priority along with the hair.
What RAW processor are you using? If I recall correctly, C1 has a skin tone selector.
Alternatively, when using LR, there is a PhotoTools Plug-In that has a similar skin tone selector, and a wonderful warm highlights tool ... and a very intelligent set of portrait tools including one that targets only the skin while leaving everything else alone ... all of which are user controlled and placed on a layer.
-Marc
Thanks Graham... much appreciated. I'll definitely give that crop some thought.Shelby,
I very much like the tonality of the shot - quite beautiful to my eyes. I'll defer to the pros here who have probably forgotten more than i know about portraits but I can't help thinking that the arm showing to the left of the knee is distracting and I know that I'd be tempted to crop that out personally.
I agree, Steve. That kind of work, especially with my family, is something dear to my heart and really flows pretty naturally for me. Most of my past work in portraiture/weddings has been lifestyle oriented and/or a bit "loose" stylistically...For me the less process snapshot had more "artistic/emotional" connection than the more highly process work(?) related images.
Steve
I like this one the most! Crisp and clean and no caffeine.Can you tell I'm really enjoying, but really struggling with this slower working method?
One more version... a more traditional b/w treatment of the shot above. Trying to retain skin texture as much as possible. Still not much I can due with the overly glopped-on mascara without spending hours reconstructing eyelashes. This is starting to get closer to my typical processing "look", i believe.
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Cheers!
Shelby