Fashion photoshop techniques

[wizardremix]

Hi All,

I saw this pick on a Flickr forum by Sandy Phimester. He gives the lighting...white beautydish with 30 degree grid (which you can see) approximately 4 feet angled down at model, fill light at models feet pointed toward her waist, closed aperture. Any tips on how you can take flash from looking like a white ugly flash to what has been achieved where you still have a high contrast image with shinyish lips but the falloff and skin is almost grainy and delicate.



Here is a picture I took where I tried to use a similar lighting setup. Any advice on how I can modify what I've got to get to the above look? Any input, links to tutorials, plugin tips, etc. would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Hoogle]

well this is the difference between pro photographers, hobbyist and snappers You can kit yourself with the Latest Nikon D4 put $5000 glass on it and still not produce pro quality photos. And Unfortunately There is no right or wrong answer here Lighting is down to your style or the style you want to achieve. All of which takes a lot of learning and practise. You should be learning how to use 1 light first in my opinion that first light is the roots of your whole lighting setup. Them main light which is 1 of the hardest to master is Natural light. Once you produce nicely lit pictures then you can move onto modifiers ie bounce cards reflectors diffusers etc. once you get use to all that you can start producing subtle lighting effects just using natural light.

Ok so you understand light behavior and how to modify it for a look so now lets bring in a light wether it be speedlights, portable strobes or studio lights You can still produce really nice pictures with just 1 light. Zach Arias does a nice dvd available here http://zackarias.com/workshop/onelight-dvd/ He also expanded on this with Creative live and went more into the theory.

And then the rest comes down to experience and adding lights to make the effect your after
here are some good resources to learn
http://www.karltaylorphotography.com/learn-Fashion-and-Beauty-Photography.htm
http://strobist.blogspot.co.uk/2006/03/lighting-101.html
http://froknowsphoto.com/

Like I said though it is very hard to answer your question verbally you need to learn more from seeing other people or maybe doing a course physically.

 

[Tom Mann]

Hi Wiz - Here are my thought on your image, sort-kinda in reverse order of importance:

1. There's way too much ambient light rattling around in your photo. It's reducing the contrast ratio on her face and removing much of the desirable facial sculpturing / molding, especially on her left cheek (photo right). You need to either crank up your strobes to overpower ambient, or flag that side of her face.

2. Not only does all the light from the background reduce the visibility of the contours of her face, it immediately pulls the viewer's eyes away from the subject. You have to decide whether you want this to be a high key photo (ie, with the background completely blown out), or a normal photo. I'm pretty sure your answer would be, "normal". In that case, you really need to knock down the bright, high contrast, high saturation, slightly blurry background. It would have been much better to do this in-camera, but I tried to approximate this in post.

3. The subject needs to be at least a half stop (maybe more) brighter. Again, this should have been done in-camera, but I tried to show the importance of having her brighter by doing it in PS.

4. The first model has much better makeup for photography than the 2nd model.

5. Pay more attention to framing, cropping, and the angle of the camera. The bright white pillar on the LHS of the original image overpowers everything. I shouldn't have been in the frame. The tan pillar on the RHS, especially its footer isn't so bad, but it shouldn't have been in, either.

On the same general topic, the back of your camera is not perfectly vertical. This introduced a small amount of keystone / perspective distortion. My philosophy on this is you either want perfect, non-converging vertical lines, or you want to go nuts and have lots of intentional distortion, but you never want just a little bit of convergence because that looks like the type of accident typically made by an amateur, not a pro.

6. The lighting on your subject is cooler than on the subject in your example image. It has that typical blue flash look. I tried to warm it up a bit in post, but the real solution would have been for you to cc your strobe with a light straw or light amber bastard or similar warming gel.

7. Finally, there's something bizarre going on with the colors in your image (see circled areas in the attached annimated GIF). It looks like either old fashioned film curve crossing or some sort of weird digital cyan-magenta posterization. I've got to say that I have *never* seen an image come out of a modern DSLR looking like this. Has this image been processed in some way that could have introduced this effect before you posted it here.


BTW, you'll notice that I didn't comment on your lighting. This was intentional. You are obviously in the same general ball park as the shot you are emulating, but there were so many other diddly little problems that I simply couldn't see your lighting well enough to say anything definitive. If you had controlled the foreground / background ratio better, controlled all the ambient light bouncing around, and achieved a better exposure for the subject, etc., I would have been able to say something definitive about your lighting.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[Tom Mann]

Hoogle, have you heard anything back from the OP yet?

Tom