This was a photo I took of myself during a recent trip to Amsterdam. The hotel bathroom lighting was pretty harsh, but in an interesting way. I came in from the cold to warm up a bit before heading back out into the city and decided to take a couple shots while drying off. When I got home and pulled the photo up on my computer, I immediately thought of the SNL (Saturday Night Live) portraits which we've all seen. So, I went to work doing much more post-processing work than I normally undertake.
I used Aperture 3 to selectively desaturate my skin, leaving my lips just slightly pink, as I like the look. Anytime a lot of post-processing is involved, there isn't a set way that modifications need to be handled. Just start moving certain sliders, looking for that point when everything comes together. It helps to know what your ideal end-look is and what the most efficient way of achieving that look is, but I always diverge from any plans previously laid.
After desaturating the image, I imported it into Photoshop CS3 where I selected the background only and cleaned it up a bit, as there was a white towel hanging behind me in the original image and it was detracting from the end-look I had in mind. I cloned the towel out and then, still selectively working with the background, chose a lens filter which gave me the green look you see in the photo. I slightly modified the entire image using the Layers function in order to give my face an even more 'fake' look and did a quick sharpen to finish.
I usually make only slight adjustments to my shots for two reasons. First, I have too many shots to 'process' and spending this amount of time on very many would make it impossible to get through them all. And, once I've personally diverged too greatly from what came out of the camera, I feel that I'm no longer achieving what I want to achieve as a photographer. To those digital manipulators out there: more power to you. It's just not my cup of tea...usually...
11-09-2010, 02:10 AM
SNL Portrait
Linear Mode
