Portrait - natural light/bounce/fill - edit

[cyber3d]

So, here is one. Took about 20 minutes in Photoshop CS5. Mostly clean up of skin, background color balance and saturation, shift in angle so eyes are horizontal, stray hair removal and then decided it would look better in monochrome. Pretty satisfied with the result. SHot with natural light from a side window on an overcast day with a gold striped reflector on the opposite side. Back window gave me catchlights.




>>click for larger image<<



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[Weird Girl]

I think you did an awesome job! Can I ask you to go through your process of removing the stray hairs? I need this done badly in some of my photos but am really intimidated by PS. I have PS4 but stick with Lightroom right now because I don't even know where to begin! Thanks!

[zona5101]

I really like your post work. Your conversion has a nice range of tones and is still has nice contrast. Well done.

[Ginger Pixie]

It is a nicely executed mono conversion...

But... I feel like you took some of the life away, compared to the 1st pic. The colours and light and the tilted head all breathe life into him. The second looks like a formal headshot.

Which may have been what you were after. I really like shot 1.

[MattJohnRobinson]

Originally Posted by Ginger Pixie

It is a nicely executed mono conversion...

But... I feel like you took some of the life away, compared to the 1st pic. The colours and light and the tilted head all breathe life into him. The second looks like a formal headshot.

Which may have been what you were after. I really like shot 1.

Great job on the edit definitely, but I agree with this exactly. Could do with the stray hair removal in the first one but I do like everything else about it.

[cyber3d]

There are several shots in the set. This is just one and the only black and white. Turned out well. Thanks for the compliments.

As far as hair removal. I started out by duplicating the base layer and named it bkg1.
From bkg1 I used the Quick Selection tool and grabbed the head, hair, and neck. Then I used Refine Edge on the selection. Because it is a Layer Mask, I could then use a erasing brush on the mask itself to clean up the stray hairs. There are other methods but that works well. I could have also simply cloned the final background to cover up the hairs.

The best thing I like about this image is the smooth tonal curve with just the right amount of detail in the range.