How often have you looked at another photographers work and thought to yourself, 'how do they do that?!?' I can't even count how many times I've seen an image and trying to think through how they finished it in post processing found myself drawing a complete blank! Well here's one little secret that makes a really huge difference! It's a plugin for photoshop called Portriature. Now the price tag is not cheap (around $200 if you only get Portraiture for CS) so this is something that you may not want to purchase until you really feel it's a must. There is a 30 day FREE trial, so thats a great way to play around with it and see what you think. Word of caution... You will get hooked. I'm not even joking. I tried the 30 day trial and was like, 'how did I ever do this with out it?' My next thought was, 'I can't go back, I just can't!' I know, I'm so dramatic right?! But seriously it saves me so much time in editing. So many steps that I was doing by hand I can now do with one click and still have complete control over the opacity or overall outcome. The night before my trial ended, I was up all night editing to finish up the 4 shoots I still had. Three days later, I couldn't take it and broke down and got it.
I'm no expert! And I haven't even had time to play with the FREE actions they offer to use with it (or even download them for that matter), but here are a few more before (SOOC) and afters. Just know that the afters have more steps than portraiture alone. The image and the top of the post has nothing besides the Portraiture filter followed by Lolly's Base Sharpen. If you already have/use Portraiture, I'd love for you to give us a comment with your own thoughts.
*Also remember that blogger does not do the coloring justice.
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I love this! You have to be careful about freckles though, I recently shot a senior where her face was mostly covered by a leaf, just her eyes were showing and her bangs covered her forehead. Anyway, she had three freckles under her eye, and this was the first image I edited from the shoot. Anyway, so I didn't realize they were freckles, they looked like make up smudges when I was really zoomed in. Anyway, I used the Pro Retouch from TRA and her freckles disappeared. She loved the pic, but said..."I'm not me without my freckles!" That is not a comment you want from a picture subject, right!? Of course I was able to redo the edits and make sure the freckles showed. Just mentioning because the first image you posted had freckles...
ReplyDeleteThank you for that reminder Rebecca! So true! I did this edit just for the Go{4}Pro and did much lighter for her real gallery! It's so great to learn from each other!
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