Something outa... not much

[Bigcrustyape]

I had been meaning to do another shower shot for my 365 set and I wanted really defined water droplets. I kinda knew that my 'straight off camera' shot was always going to be pretty plain, but it was the expression and the way the water was falling that I was looking for in my original shot. So I set up my Canon 580EX on a stand about 2 metres up and flashed through a white diffused umbrella to hopefully really define that water against my face and body.

So this is my original shot:


As you can see, really flat and fairly lifeless, but I got the detail that I was looking for to use as a platform to do my retouch.

This is the retouched shot:


Ok, so in Adobe Lightroom I started by cropping the image to cut out all the clutter and balance the image a little better. I then dumped all the saturation so as to make it grayscale. From there I darkened the shadows a bit, darkened the midtones a little and lightened the highlights a touch. I then increased the contrast paying close attention to my face so as not to blow it out to nothing. Added a little vignetting to bring out the detail a little on the tops of my shoulders. From there I took it into photoshop. Cloned out a couple of random little bits of shower curtain from the background that was being distracting. Using the dodge tool set to highlights, I opened up my eyes a little as the definition in the eyeball was being lost. I then used the burn tool set to shadows and ran over the eyes to darken the lashes and detail in the eye. There were little bags under my eyes so with the clone tool set to about 10% I waved over them slowly to eliminate the unsightly bags.

Thats about it. I hope you like what I did with it. I welcome your comments and critique. Hit me with it!

[Tajemi]

Wow, I really like what you have done!! Very impressive

[lissykeeper]

This is wonderful. The expression is priceless. But i really like the definition and water you caught in your hair. The processing you did was spot on.