Catie's portrait - Playing with Viveza

miesje

I'm new to Smugmug and was looking for some feedback on this portrait of a high school senior. This is the image as cleaned up slightly in Aperture 2.0

There has been a little bit of healing brush on some acne, but very little as her skin is quite good. The fill-in flash did produce a small hard catch light in her eyes, which I like, but it also put a bit of a sheen in her skin.

We have the trial version of Viveza, and this is a first attempt. The darkening of the background was straight out of the on-line tutorials at Nik Software.


It turns out that Viveza is better than heavy lipstick at increasing the intensity of the red of lips in a natural looking way. It also turns out that you can whiten eyes nicely by simply decreasing the color saturation and brightening just a little. Somewhere in this process, the hard catch lights lost some intensity.

The final adjustment was to remove some of the sheen from the fill-in flash. Viveza seems to be effective if you want a subtle change, but it doesn't replace pancake or Photoshop.

You can see the full size images on [URL="/http://www.folkertsfotografie.com/gallery/7816713_u7pea/1/506165544_SzFNg"]my Smugmug gallery[/URL] Any comments or suggestions would be appreciated.

Hackbone

I think you did a great job balancing flash and ambient light. The pose is acceptable and you've got a cute subject. The one thing I object to is your lighting is a little bit flat. Both sides of the face being lit equally. This tends to broaden out the face making it appear fatter than it is.

Carry around a ping pong ball and hold it up in different areas and observe the shading on the sphere. When you get a pleasing shadow to highlight area that is a great area to photograph. The lighting should be similar on the face.

miesje

Hackbone wrote:

I think you did a great job balancing flash and ambient light. The pose is acceptable and you've got a cute subject. The one thing I object to is your lighting is a little bit flat. Both sides of the face being lit equally. This tends to broaden out the face making it appear fatter than it is.

Carry around a ping pong ball and hold it up in different areas and observe the shading on the sphere. When you get a pleasing shadow to highlight area that is a great area to photograph. The lighting should be similar on the face.

Thank you for the constructive advice. The day had a fairly direct sun and we were shooting mid morning, so going into the direct sun was too harsh. So we shot in the shade of trees. I guess we could have moved to the edge of the tree's shadow so that the light would have been 'rounder' rather than so flat.