I'm seriously rusty on my Photoshop skills after doing barely any selfies during the summer that needed heavy retouching, I did most edits just in the Camera Raw. Now that I'm back in school and we have a course of studio photography and Photoshop, I need to brush up on my skills. It had been so long since I've done any proper retouching, that I had to find the instructional notes I wrote for one of my school mates last spring, lucky I saved those.
This picture is taken just with natural light, since I'm yet to master anything in the studio because I haven't had a chance to reserve it for myself to try things alone. I took this after school and tried to make a super light and bright and very un-Eve photo, so that I could say that I can do it, if I want to.
I shot this with a 85mm lens, almost wide open at f/1.6, and made sure it's just in the brink of being overexposed. It actually looks like it's way over because I like it dark, but the histogram shows that the only overblown parts are the window reflection on the eyes, and tiny bit on my lipline, both of which are fine. I have no idea how I nailed this focus, I suck at getting the focus right, and in a shot like this, it needs to be absolutely perfect because the focus is a matter of millimetres in this aperture and focal length.
To me this kind of picture lacks soul, it's too bright, too close, too neutral, there really is not much that the image tells you. I did an edit I call 'supernatural', meaning the face is heavily retouched, but I do it in a way that it's pretty much undetectable and skin still looks like skin and not porcelain. I'm pretty happy with my editing skills.
Once I had played around with the light image, I made a very heavy black and white image of it. I pulled down the red channel really heavily, way too much to look natural, but I think it gave the image a lot more character. The original image is really flat, being shot straight on, with soft natural light, but the whole mood changed drastically with a heavy black and white edit. Darkening the reds, and a bit of the yellows too, a lot more details came out, like some freckles, and all of a sudden there are some proper shadows too.
I think a light like this is super flattering to the skin and eyes, but it doesn't do anything to the bone structure. I prefer carving out the bones on ones face with light, and then just deal with the skin that takes the hit on those kind of pictures.
