FASHIOAIRES GOTHIC Photo 1 BEFORE AND AFTER

In this series of Fashionaires - gothica I am going to lay out the before editing photos and after effects as well as the settings that were used in the photos. 

Original image

1/800th at 6.3

using a NIkon D3 with two Nikon SB-800 strobes. 

I used a fast shutter speed because the ambient light value in the restaurant was bright and cheerful and didn't work with the theme of what we were doing so speeding up your shutter speed controls the ambient light.... Little clue there for people that want to put that into there photo bag.

Things I liked about the image

1). the pose of the model

2).the look on her face

3).the lens flare

4).the overall composition

5).the ambient light coming from the light above the models head. 

 things I don't like about it:    

 1). overall to dark 

 2) increase the red tones.

3). hair in the face.

4) the reflection on the leg

5). Move the light fixture down so it was closer to the model

6). wanted to put light in the skull to the left

7) crop it

8) dirty sensor spot by the light

Final Image

The first thing I did was open it in Light room and increase the red tones and lift the over all exposure to where the light value was better on the models face.

I then brought it into photoshop. copied the layer and zoomed in and cleaned up the hair on the models face using the clone and healing brush as well as a plug in that I purchased from Mama Shans site.

She has a portrait packet that she sells that saves hours in skin cleaning. I find many programs over work the skin and this software works really well, and you can go as heavy or as light as you want, as it is worked on in a separate layer. In the portrait pack she sells it has many skin tones, lip glosses you name it she has it. They all work very well. She has many tutorials on YOUTUBE  as well. 

www.photoshopmama.net

I used my soft 100 brush on lighten to clean up the whites of the eyes. Again don't go to far, as it can look really over processed.

I then cleaned the spots on the legs with clone 

Then used the select tool and traced around the light copied and pasted where I wanted it. Many ways to do that, but that was the quickest for me, then took a soft eraser tool and lessened the opacity of the eraser and took the hard lines away to blend the wall.

Then I selected the light from the fixture on the wall with the selection tool and copied and pasted it, moved it down ontop of the skull. Control T on mac with allow you to rotate and warp the selection. 

 I zoomed in and erased the light on the skull area where there shouldn't be light. This was a new layer so I lowered the opacity till the light value was good.

then flattened all the layers. 

Made a new layer ~ filter~ sharpen~ unsharpen~ make a mask~ control i to reverse then paint back what part of the image I wanted sharpened. 

I hope in this blog I was able to explain a little of the photoshop tools that I use. 

Is there any tools you would like to more about? Or any of this process you would like in more detail?

In this photo series I have at least 6 more images that we will go through step by step. 

If you have any questions regarding this blog don't hesitate to leave a comment.