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 06/21/2005 07:07:00 PM · #1
Having noticed that my portfolio consists of a large amount of animals I've decided to try and broaden my portraiture skills (with real people). I will be taking and posting more in the coming two weeks.

Here's one I took early this evening



Any comments, or suggestions welcome

Thanks

Steve

06/21/2005 07:19:35 PM · #2
This is really nice, but one thing you might want to try to improve on it just a little, is to sharpen up the eyes a bit. In my opinion, the eyes are one of the most important parts of a portrait, especially a headshot, so they must be sharp. Try a little magnetic lasso on each eye and use a little unsharp mask (try 98,1, 0) or mess around with it until you like it, just be careful not to oversharpen them. At least that's how I do it, and it's probably all wrong, but it works for me. :-) Maybe someone has a better way to do it. Keep up the good work. :-)

Sorry, edited to change the numbers on the usm. The 4 should have been a 1. Makes a huge difference! :-)

Message edited by author 2005-06-21 20:08:25.
 06/21/2005 09:35:04 PM · #3
Steve,

It looks like the details under the subject's left eye may have been lost but I don't know whether that's through a little too much exposure or post-shot processing. I like the edit you applied but on my monitor it comes out just a hair too yellowish for me. The crop is a little tight in the thumbnail but once I viewed the regular size image I like the crop you chose due to the level of detail in the hair and ear on the right side of the photo (subject's left side). The shadow along the neckline is a little strong but not too much; I think lowering the light might have imparted a little more shadow to the subject's right side adn added more depth but who's to say.
I can see Jennifer's point about the focus. To me the sharpness seems centered on the nose jewelry with the eyes just the slightest bit behind the sharpest point. To test this I popped another USM onto the image with settings of 150, .4 and 4 respectively. The eyes gained what I thought was the sharpness I would have liked for them but the nosering picked up a halo effect. To counteract this I removed the USM (CTRL-ALT-Z to step back past the last action). I then copied the base layer to give me two layers that looked exactly alike. On the top layer I added a layer mask and used the paintbucket ("G" in PhotoShop) to paint the whole layer mask black. I then chose the paintbrush ("B" in PhotoShop) and set my color to white. I painted over the eyes so that the layer mask for the top layer looked solid black with two white spots corresponding to the location of the eyes. I then clicked on the layer image (rather than the mask - its the small copy of the picture to the left of the layer mask) and I applied the USM just as I had before but this time since I had a layer mask only the subject's eyes received the sharpening. This allowed the softer effect you had chosen on the lips and cheeks while keeping the lovely, rock-solid shaprness of the nose jewelry and it added a little more definition to the eyes.

Hope this helps,

Kev
 06/23/2005 05:28:12 AM · #4
Thanks very much for the comments, really appreciated.

So,cracking on with more attempts to try and get better at portrait photography

Here's a new one attempting to show a little bit of the character of the subject.



Comments and/or criticism welcome

Steve
 06/23/2005 06:29:32 AM · #5
Originally posted by Tallbloke:
Thanks very much for the comments, really appreciated.

So,cracking on with more attempts to try and get better at portrait photography

Here's a new one attempting to show a little bit of the character of the subject.



Comments and/or criticism welcome

Steve


That's an appealing portrait in most ways. Here's what isn't working well for me:

1. Light "shape" in BG behind subject's right shoulder is distracting and should be burned down.

2. Subject's tie is too bright and distracts. I keep tryin to see it as a chess piece in the foreground, LOL.

3. There's no sense of critical focus here, nothing seems quite sharp. But it's not soft enough to appear intentional.

4. Camera's POV is a little higher than optimum, we're looking down on him and as a rule we don't want that on headshots: eye level usually works better, even a tad lower than that sometimes.

Robt.

Message edited by author 2005-06-23 06:29:56.
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