Headshots

MisterMcCruff

I spent yesterday evening doing a few acting/modelling headshots for my girlfriend Gaby and these are some of my favourites:







Canon 30D with 70-200 f4 L (Seems to be a great fashion/portrait lens but requires a fair amount of room on a cropped body)

Strobist info: I lent my 430EX and 100/r50mm rig to a friend of mine who wanted to have a bash at macro so I was limited to my fairly modestly powered Nikon SB24 fired at 1/16th power zoomed out to 35mm through a shoot-through brolly and using window light diffused with a white sheet for hair/fill.

I had to get Gabs to hold a reflector under her chin for a few of them too.

Post processing was mainly just a RAW conversion to Tiff and then my special high-pass blemish removal/skintone softening process that I use for most of my studio/portrait work.

Then, for the sake of variation, created a BW conversion for each of the final 11 shots using a monochrome channel mixer layer and boosting the contrast.

She's dead happy with them so I am too!
I'd love to know what you guys think.

Chris

Snowgirl

Lovely girl!
I really like #2 and #3 - catch lights in the eyes, nice shine to her hair and nice eye contact. Good job!

divamum

Beautiful girl, and some nice shots! Care to share your skin technique? The smoothing you've done is really, REALLY good - subtle and not plasticky, but very clean.

MisterMcCruff wrote:

I

Love the intensity of the expression.

I would crop this from the bottom - with most of the picture being pale skin and light background, the black at the front draws my eye away from her face (what aspect ratio do these need to be? As an actress, she'll need 8x10s anyway which I don't think these are....)

Also, in both this and number two you might consider cloning out the end of her left eyebrow where it flips up - it exactly mirrors her eyeliner which is kind of neat, but it also makes her look at bit vampirical/pan-like which, unless that is specifically something she wanted, you might want to fix up!

Also, those stray hairs to the right of her cheek are a little distracting to me.

Can you bump up the contrast on her lips a little? In colour, the pale lips look fine; in bw, I find I miss them a little bit.

This is my favorite of the three - colour looks good on this monitor (uncalibrated, however), and the skin work is gorgeous. I note that this has had more cropped from the bottom, and I do definitely prefer it - more attention on her, and less on the clothing. Lips are fine in colour (I personally am not a huge fan of the nude-lip colours in fashion right now, but that IS what's in fashion and thus it's entirely appropriate for her to go for that look - purely my own prejudice and nothing against the picture!!!) Really nice sparkling eyes in this one.

This one doesn't work for me - the hair is the dealbreaker, and totally takes my attention off her face. It doesn't have that "organised bedhead" look that is popular now, but just looks messy. You can probably clone some of the messy bits out, which would help. Same comments re the lips as the above bw.

This one might also work cropped from the bottom if you turn it 8x10. Some of the hair length will vanish, but it might work (hard to see without trying it)


Just my 2c and only one person's opinion, so take with the large grain of salt it deserves!!!

MisterMcCruff

Thank you so much for the CC Divamum, it's greatly appreciated.
Would you like me to PM you my skin technique?

divamum

MisterMcCruff wrote:

Thank you so much for the CC Divamum, it's greatly appreciated.
Would you like me to PM you my skin technique?

I'd love it!!! Thanks!

Hackbone

Nice job on lighting and post production. Just to nit nick the far eye is cut by the bridge of the nose and the nose goes thru the cheek outline on the first two. That is generally frowned upon. She should be thrilled with these. I like the third one alot but need to do just a little hair work.

Richard

MisterMcCruff wrote:

Would you like me to PM you my skin technique?

Why not post it here so that we all can benefit?

MisterMcCruff

Thanks for the comments everyone.
I'll try to bear that all in mind next time.
We got the 8x10 crops printed today and they look terrific on matte.

In terms of post on the skin, the process in CS3 is as follows:

-Select the face and any skin that needs smoothing and ctrl+j to add to a new layer.

-With new layer selected: Filter > Other > High Pass.
Move the slider until blemishes are red and smooth skin is grey (Usually about 8-12 pixels)

-Ctrl+U > reduce saturation to 0.

-Image > adjust > Brightness/contrast and increase contrast to full.

-Select > Colour range.
Move the slider until the blemishes are black and the rest of the face is white in the preview window.

-Delete High pass layer, select background layer and then Ctrl+j to create a skin mask layer.

-With new layer selected: Filter > Blur > Gaussian blur.
Move slider until the mask creates a uniform colour.

-Finally, simply erase any of the skin mask that doesn't look right/reduce layer opacity to suit.


The premise for the technique is to select good skin and blur it into a skin mask to cover the blemishes rather than just blurring the blemishes too.

I hope that all makes sense and is of use to some of you. If you do try it, please let me know how you get on and just give me a shout if you have any questions/comments/improvements

whiterice

Very nice! - #3 is my favorite. My only nit would be the loss of definition in the lips with your conversion to B&W, but that should be an easy fix.