First attempt at portraits

Coxy914 · 4 Nov 2008

Spend most of my time taking photo's of cars but took some of my other half on Sunday. Only recently started doing people and portraits and some friends have asked me to do the photography at their wedding next year so though I'd better get some practice.

any comments and critique and pointers into the right direction most welcome

EdBray · 4 Nov 2008

Personally I'm not keen on the grey effect, they lack any real whites. If you had processed these in a darkroom, I would suggest that you either check out your backouts or put a lower wattage lamp in your safelight. Look very muddy to me.

Increasing the contrast may help number one. Although I don't think the pose is the most attractive.

In Number 2 it looks like you have deliberatly gone out of your way to unflatter the model, shooting with the light below the model is not flattering, the crop does not help the picture and the only focus point really is the models cleavage. Shadows do not help.

Sorry to be so negative, but I can find nothing positive to say about these pictures.

Coxy914 · 4 Nov 2008

no problems, Thanks for the comments.

I did try increasing the exposure on photo no.1 but as soon as I did that it started bleaching the area around the nose and the hair. The hair wasn't too bad and if I had better photoshop skills I could have probably corrected the area around the nose.
Is there a way in photoshop the increase/decrease the exposure on a certain area?

EdBray · 5 Nov 2008

Off to work so not much time, but just increasing the brightness (a lot) in photoshop gives this:

zarozinia · 5 Nov 2008

I cant comment much on the portrait side of things as Im no expert, but I think one thing that might help is thinking about your backgrounds so they are not distracting. To me no 1 has a very distracting background, maybe you could use a plain wall or curtains or conveniently draped sheet to obtain a less distracting bg.

Not sure what you photoshop knowledge is like, but did you know that you can choose to alter only parts of an image, by using the selection tool you can roughly select the area you want to alter the contrast on, then feather it so it blends better - then make your alteration such as curves or contrast.
I will have a play to show you what I mean.

zarozinia · 5 Nov 2008

Here we go, I selected all the background, feathered by 30 and used the curves on it. I then selected it again and feathered by 100 and curves again which darkened the lady subtley to blend with the low light feeling. I know its very dark, but I personally like some images dark like this, and feel it adds to the sort of "seduction" aura of the image. I also removed the glare off her nose and lips using the healing brush tool.

fatbobsufc · 5 Nov 2008

If this is your first attempt at portraiture then well done. Agree with the comments about the second picture so let's just ignore that one for now. The first uses a very interesting composition and although the lighting style is a little unconventional in my IMO it does work. One of the hardest things to do in these situations is to 1. relax 2. get your model to relax and it looks like you have achieved both so well done.

One rule I alsways try to work by is to get the exposure/lighting/composition etc right in the camera, not in Photoshop. So if you are shooting a model with blonde hair don't blast the top of her head with light.

Coxy914 · 5 Nov 2008

fatbobsufc said:
If this is your first attempt at portraiture then well done. Agree with the comments about the second picture so let's just ignore that one for now. The first uses a very interesting composition and although the lighting style is a little unconventional in my IMO it does work. One of the hardest things to do in these situations is to 1. relax 2. get your model to relax and it looks like you have achieved both so well done.

One rule I alsways try to work by is to get the exposure/lighting/composition etc right in the camera, not in Photoshop. So if you are shooting a model with blonde hair don't blast the top of her head with light.

thanks for those comments and thanks to Zarozinia for the photoshop advice.
I'm not sure how to go about the curves and the feathering but I've managed to work out how to use the healing tool and cloning tool.

I did try to take this pictures with the flash coming from a low level so as not to reflect off the hair which has probably given an unconventional shadow appearance.

I did some against the plain wall in our room but they appeared too light and I was trying to go for a night time/dark background shot to emphasize the blonde hair.