Oooooh, I get to be the first to say 'magnificent....dead on...etc...'
Awesome, Stuart. The first and last nail it, IMO. The color is obviously very good too...but not the vintage look that you're trying to achieve, I know. Stunning work again.
:smile: Thanks Joshua! Yeah.....only the first and third are part of the Hollywood series. The second is more of your typical modern, glam portrait with different lighting. Glad you liked them all though.
Stuart,
These are great! How much PP and what kind? Just one light? How big and how close to subject?
Woody, tnx! for making the arrangements!
Mike
Mike,
There is always a lot of PP done to my photo's. It's part of the process.....as important as the lighting or the actual photo. Photo's like these usually take close to an hour to edit and that's assuming I don't encounter any serious issues that I missed when the shot was taken.
There is quite a bit of eye work done here to remove redness from the whites and dodging to brighten the irises. Loralea wears contacts which creates two problems. First, contact wearers always seem to have more redness in the whites and secondly you can usually see a line around the edge of the contact which needs to be removed. I work these areas at 300% enlargement with a very small healing and/or clone tool.
I also used the Czechman01 Beautiful Skin technique which involves a lot of blemish and age-line removal with the healing and clone tools. Although very little was actually needed here because Loralea is one of those blessed individuals with amazing skin.
For less fortunate individuals this can take a tremendous amount of time as you have to get in there patiently and remove every blackhead, every acne scar etc.......But.....I have read that the stills retouching experts from this era frequently spent many, many hours doing this kind of work with lead retouching pencils.....sometimes to the point where the weight of the negative grew to be so heavy that they had to be handled very carefully to keep them from falling apart.
While it's not always something I want for my portraits the Blur Layer part of this tutorial is critical for getting that porcelain skin look that meticulous work of the retouchers achieved on these types of stills from the 30's and 40's....so that step was included in these.
One thing that is very important to remember when using Woody's tutorial is that if you take your time and do the healing/cloning stage carefully and correctly only a minimal blur layer of around 20% is needed to complete the look of flawless skin. If you are using more blur layer then you probably aren't doing the skin retouching thoroughly enough.
The B&W conversion was done with Fred Miranda's B&W Pro. I was using a much more expensive plug-in until Woody turned me on to the FM conversion. It is the best I have found and is perfect for recreating the tonality of the stills photo's from this era. At under $30.00 it's also inexpensive.
I also applied a 15% bump in contrast with the new Brightness/Contrast tool in CS3 Beta which works much, much better than the older CS2 version.
And finally I used a combination of USM and Smart Sharpen once the image has been sized for web. I use Smart Sharpen to.....huh...sharpen the image (my settings are low at 70%, .3, 0) and USM at 10%, 50, 0 to de-fog the image a bit.
The lighting for #1 and #3 was a single Alien Bee very high and camera right with a grid in place. It was position basically over and slightly in front of the model and then aimed down like a spot light. There was a large reflector camera left, but kept back far enough from the model so as to only open up the fill side slightly. The second shot was done with a large Alien Bee rectangular softbox about level with the model and in closer to soften the edge of the lighting/shadows with the reflector also brought in closer for less dramatic, more even lighting.
That's about it.
Thanks for thanking Woody....:smile: .....as you can see from this post I owe him for more than just his setting the model up for the shoot. I learned a good 90% of what I know about PP by looking over his shoulder while he works on his edits.
