Post processing

Rifqi

I got a question from Gabb (is that your name here on the new forum as well) on my flickr about the processing on the latest self portrait I posted in the PAD. I promised I would get to him once I had figured out what I actually did So, I edited a second portrait and made sure to note each step. Gabb suggested I should post it here in case anyone else was interested. Below is the portrait in question.



The programs I used to edit it was Lightroom 4 and Perfect Photo Suite 7. If you have photoshop then this guide might be of help as well: http://phlearn.com/dan-winters-style-photo-shoot. I used that as a starting point and then tried to translate the techniques from that to the programs I were using.

I didn't do much in Lightroom to start with, just added a bit of contrast and vibrance. I then started working on the background and the first thing I did was to use the focal point module to drop focus and get rid of the wrinkles from the grey bed sheet I used. If you're shooting on a proper seamless paper you should be able to skip this step. Next I brought it into perfect effects and added a texture (the one I used is called crumbled paper). I brought down the opacity to around 40 (I think).

The next thing I did was to slightly whiten and add detail to the eyes in perfect portrait. Here I also evened the skin tones slightly and got rid of a couple of blemishes. Other than that I left the skin intact.

Next I did a very minor tweak i perfect effects by using the cool shadow preset. I think the opacity was at 8 or 9 so it's hardly noticeable, I just like the subtle effect of cooler shadows.

The next effect I added is probably one of the more important ones and it's one called amazing detail (we're still in perfect effects here). I think it does a much better job of adding detail than, for example, clarity in Lightroom.

The final effect was a vignette, I used the subtle vignette preset.

Next up is a trip to perfect layers where I had prepared two additional layers that I created in Lightroom. For the first one I simply used the black and white blue channel preset that comes in Lightroom, didn't change anything. The second one was also from the blue channel but here I pulled down blacks, shadows and exposure until most of the image was more or less black, except for the highlights on the face.

I blended the first layer with normal mode until I got a saturation I liked (around 15 opacity I think). For the second layer I used screen mode and masked it so it only affected the skin parts (face and hand). What that did was to whiten the highlights in a nice way. Play around with the opacity until you get something that looks good, I ended up at around 30. These two steps are a very big part in all this.

If you're wondering why I used the blue channel preset instead of a plain b&w conversion, it's because it adds a bit extra contrast and tonality to the shadows.

Ok, we're done in Perfect Photo Suite, back to Lightroom. The final layer we did lightened the highlights quite a bit so I pulled them back down a bit. I also pulled up the shadows to get some more detail there. I added some clarity, though you can probably skip that, depending on what you're going for. I also pulled up the vibrancy quite a bit to bring back a bit of the punch in the colours that we lost before.

The most important part done in Lightroom was the tweaking of individual colour channels for hue and saturation. I pulled down saturation just a tad on the red and orange channels ( also pulled down blue quite a lot to lose the tint on the shirt). For hue I pulled the red and orange a bit more towards yellow and the yellows also got a small push toward green. I also tweaked the green channel to put a final touch on the background.

Crop and done.

I hope this can be of some help if anyone bothered reading the whole thing (sorry about the length). The last few weeks I've been trying to teach myself a bit more about post processing since I've always felt that it's one of my weakest areas, so I know what it's like to not get the results you want (I still very seldom do).

I haven't proof read this so I apologize in advance for any confusion caused

/Rifqi

Msmoto

Nice work, Rifqi...I would suggest you try softening the hand, darkening it some so as to be darker than the facial tones, and see what you think. Desaturating the whites of the eyes is helpful as well as adding high contrast to the edges of the eyelids. I like to emphasize the lips slightly via contrast and saturation. That is why everyone in the movies wears lipstick.

Keep up the good work.

Rifqi

Thanks msmoto. The hand is actually darkened already with a graduated filter coming in from the lower right corner. Perhaps it could do with some more work though.

Gab

Thanks a lot Rifqi.

bland

Thanks for the info Rifgi and awesome photo!