Adam Sund Photo Blog Photography is the new black.

Tutorial 2 – the portrait

After numerous suggestions (one), I’ve decided to make a quick and hopefully understandable guide to how I’ve made this image of Nynne:

To start at the top, this is how the image came to be,

I used the following equipment:

1 piece of excellent model

My camera back then – a Canon 400d (xti rebel) and a 17-85 is usm lense.

A white backdrop

2 interfit 150w flash lamps – the cheapest money can buy in Denmark.

Here you can see my setup:

The image was shot with hard direct light, which means there was no softboxes, umbrellas or anything else to soften the light from my flashes – all I did was to turn them down as much as possible.

Ufortunately I don’t remember the exact exifs, but I’ve exposed the image so that the white backdrop seemed dark grey.

In its unedited form, the image looked like this.

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And now, for the photoshopping:

As always, I duplicate the main layer so that I always have the original to return to of things fuck up.

Another thing I always do Is make an empty layer on top – I’ll remain this to Clone, as this will be…. My clone layer – surprise!

When using the clone tool, remember to enable the option sample all layers.

Use a small soft brush to clone away small marked anomalies, pimples and stuff – flow 90-100%.

For larger areas of unclean or mis colored skin, use a larger soft brush and flow between 20 and 40% - experiment around with this yourself – there is no wrong way to do it.

Anyways, I use this to remove anything which would be really ugly printed big size.

After that I merge the clone layer with my original copy just below (Ctrl-E).

I duplicate this newly merged layer, so that I can work on it again.

Now add surface blur in a quite extensive degree. My numbers are 13 radius and 11 threshold.

After that I add Gaussian blur with 2.8 pxl. Remember such settings will always turn out different in different photos since they are referring to a fixed unit instead of percentage – use this knowledge when applying and using tutorials in general.

Now make a layer mask for this blurred out layer – fill it with black and paint back the blur effect with a soft white brush. Paint it back on the skin only – when you are satisfied, merge the two images.

Duplicate again.

Now add highpass to the top layer. (filter>other>highpass)

I’m not going into what this effect does since so many people have already done it way better than I would ever be able to. My pxl number is somewhat over 10.

Now, this layer has to be inverted (image>adjust>invert)

Set the blending mode to soft light.

Make a layer mask, fill with black and paint back the effect once again with a soft white brush.

Merge the two layers and duplicate.

Repeat the process with highpass, but this time raise the pxl to 3 times the last number and put the blending mode to overlay instead.

Once you’ve painted the effect back on this skin, you can continue to this:

A thing I like to do on many of my images (I’ve made is as an action), is to make 3 curve adjustment layers.

One I name Contrast – blending mode is set to overlay, and this layer now works as a contrast layer which you can always adjust – Notice the curve has NOT been changed in any manner.

The second layer is called “red reduction”, since I tone down the red color in the image. (At the top of the curves window, you can both adjust the combined RGB curve or the color channels separately)

The third will be my multiply curve with blending mode set to multiply – again, I’m not changing the curve, simply changing blending mode does the magic for me.

In this third and last curve layer, I fill the layer mask with black to make the effect invisible, and with a soft white brush and low flow I paint back the effect in the corners of the image to make that lovely vignette.

I also add a hue/saturation layer and lower the saturation about 40 clicks.

Finally I add my signature PWL layer (paint with light) – Well people have done it before me, but rest assured that you will always find such a layer in my psd files.

I fill this empty layer with grey (the color value is 127-128) and blendingmode is overlay, which makes the layer transparent.

At this point I can now point with black and white brushes to imitate dodge and burn, but in a non destructive way – yay control!

With a white brush and a flow not higher that 5% I paint up the highlights.

Here you can see my photoshop window:

If there are any questions, fire away in the comments below.

Tutorial 1