Digital Diversity

I see so many professional portrait photography shots around these days. In magazines, on TV and even in peoples homes. People may think most of this is down to the camera taking amazing pictures but the reality is that it comes from a combination of heavy make up and post processing. If you have had a professional photo shoot you may have noticed you have to wear a huge amount of make up. You think you look silly but when the pictures come back you look great. Well its all about covering skin blemishes and smoothing the colour tones. Its all fixed later in post processing in programs like Photoshop.

This tutorial will run through the basic process of retouching portrait photo’s and show you some of the techniques that are used. You can use these on your normal snaps as well. The reason the Pro models wear a lot of make up is to make the post processing easier, so its a balance of the two. Less make up means more post processing.

There are many areas of portrait retouching so in this tutorial I will be concentrating on cleaning up and softening the skin and also whitening the teeth.

I don’t do any portrait photography my self so I once again have to refer to stock.xchange to get an image to use. Its a free stock image site which I find very useful. You will need to create an account but its a quick and painless process. You can find the image for this tutorial here http://www.sxc.hu/photo/1141475

Before you start I suggest you make sure you have already done the following tutorials:
• Layers and their masks
• Basic  photo processing
• Cloning and healing
As they will all be used here.
(more…)

There are 2 areas I want to cover here.

• My workflow from start to finish

• Do I really want to delete that shot?

What shots do you delete? Do you shoot Jpeg and keep them all? Do you shoot RAW, save just the keepers in RAW and Jpeg the rest? Do you keep all the RAWs? Do you delete all your out of focus and badly exposed shots but keep the rest?

We all have different ways of choosing what to delete and what to keep and sometimes it can be a hard decision. I have kept many pictures in the past that I will possibly never look at again. They just sit there on my hard drive taking up space. Only recently have I formed a solid set of rules for my self to abide to stop this happening. I have mentioned it before briefly but this is the work flow I tend to follow.
(more…)

This is going to be a fairly long one so I would make sure you have some supplies ready. Maybe a snack on stand by and your favourite method of getting your caffeine fix at the ready.

I want to cover several key areas:

RAW and Jpeg – whats the difference?

An introduction to Adobe Camera RAW (ACR)

Processing your images from RAW to final Jpeg

This should leave you understanding what a RAW file is and what advantages and disadvantages it gives you. The processing tutorial will also be more advanced than my previous article on basic photo processing.

RAW and Jpeg – Whats the difference?

If you have picked up and used a camera before you will have heard of a Jpeg. It’s the file type that the picture is saved as. It is a type of file that can compress an image reducing its file size so it uses less space on your hard drive. It does this by deleting data it thinks is not needed and then mathematically attempts to restore this data when the file is opened. You can also choose the level of compression. You can have a Jpeg that hardly compressed at all as well as one with huge compression. The difference is that a largely compressed file will lose quality. If you looked at a very high quality and a low quality Jpeg side by side there would be a large difference.
(more…)