Photography Thailand Forum

[Marc Schultz]

Attached is a portrait I shot in my studio yesterday. Comments are welcome.

[David Procter]

Beautiful (maak maak). So clean - their stare is a little disconcerting and I almost have to look away.
When youre processing your portraits do you have a set of procedures you work through?
I'm shooting more in RAW now and tend to only change whitebalance in the RAW converter then do other adjustments when i've converted to JPEG or TIFF. I often see people's portraits and i wonder how they manage to get such sharpness.

[Marc Schultz]

Thank you for the kind words David and nice posts from you as well by the way.

As for the ideal digital post production workflow on portraits, I will defer that question to Kurt over in the Photoshop Corner and suggest you post the question there, but I can tell you briefly what I did on that image.

Basically I did a bit of color desaturation, some blended layer effects which add a bit of that high contrast look to the image (which may not even be noticeable without seeing the original image), a bit of cropping and cleanup of skin blemishes. Other than that, there is nothing really fancy about the post production of the image. The sharpness though comes from the last step by applying Unsharp Mask after I have downsized my image for web. On portraits, and I think Kurt will tell you the same, the key to it is to apply selective sharpening only to the eyes and mouth, which is what I did on this image. Another factor to consider is the type of camera and more importantly lenses you are using. The lenses can play a major role in how much sharpness and detail you will end up with.

When using Camera RAW I normally adjust as much as I can on the image before converting it as you normally get much better quality results from working on the RAW image data rather than after you have already converted it to TIF.

Hope this helps.

[David Procter]

thanks marc,
very helpful - I'll post a few of the (many) photoshop issues over in Kurt's corner.

[RimBlock]

Hi Marc,

Love the photos on the site including these.  Two very beautiful ladies shot well. 

One question, is the image cropped and is there any reason for chopping off the top of the taller ladies head and her right shoulder ?.  I am just curious as to the framing of the shot.

I have done this a number of times although it now seems a little less common.

I shall be travelling to Thailand this Friday and hope I will be able to come back with images half as good as yours.

Regards
RB

[Marc Schultz]

Hi RB and thank you.

Yes, the image was cropped slightly at the top. I think basically cropping of the tops of heads in portraits is OK as long as it looks deliberate. Although, cropping off part of the chin at the bottom of a composition is something I generally would not do, that is at least if I want to stay within the technical norms of photography. But I have even been known to crop parts of chins off as well. After all, rules are meant to be broken, right? :)

As to the reason why I cropped this image, it was simply to balance the composition of the two girls in the photo since one's head was higher than the other. I also think the cropping at the top helped to bring more balance to the image in a horizontal form, as despite one girl's head being partly cut off, the eyes of both girls remain on the same horizontal plane.

Incidentally, the Avatar picture you posted looks a bit crunched for some reason. If you would like to E-mail me your picture to forum@photographythailand.com I am happy to resize it for you and re-add it to your member account.

Best wishes with your travels to Thailand and welcome to the forum. You are our 100th member as you may have seen.

[RimBlock]

Wahoo.

Number 100  .

Thanks Mark.

If you can let me know the specs for the avatar pic then I will be able to do myself to save you the trouble.

I hoped the forum would take it as was (used elsewhere) but alas no.  Nevermind.  Easily fixed  .

Thanks
RB

[Marc Schultz]

There is a note about Avatar's here in the "How To Get Started" section of the Forum:

http://www.photographythailand.com/Forum/index.php?topic=17.0

See item #2

[RimBlock]

Excellent.

Now corrected.

Thanks Marc

RB

[kinginexile]

Comments are welcome
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the light is nicely set up and handled, Mark, really flattering the models (not that they need it, really....). The cut-off of the arms at the bottom is a bit odd, but understable given the horizontal framing. 

[agitlits]

Great photo, again. Marc - the quality of your photos never ceases to amaze me.

Alex