Digital Diversity

Learning how to expose photos in anything but automating modes can start to get confusing. When I got my first digital camera (Ixus 75) I didn’t know much about cameras in general, let alone metering modes and correct exposure.

When I upgraded to a superzoom (panasonic fz28) I switched to aperture priority mode. My main reason for this was that I could choose the aperture and change the ISO and exposure compensation to alter my shutter speed. This served me well and a lot of people use this method. I pretty much stayed clear of manual mode as it just sounded to fiddly to be of any use.

Since I got my DSLR (Canon 500D) I have started to think about this more. The only problem I would get with aperture priority was inconsistent exposure. What I mean by this is that say I was photographing my dog. As he runs passed different colour backgrounds this will in turn effect the exposure settings and lead to an over / underexposed shot. This would in turn have effected the shutter speed and can cause unwanted blur. I would also have to use exposure compensation and sometimes I may forget to change it back which would ruin the next shot. Another problem I had was that the exposure lock button never seems to lock the exposure for very long and getting the exposure back to what is was can be a pain.

To escape these problems I needed to step into the realm of manual mode.

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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.
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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.
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